When I first looked at Zoom Slides, my immediate reaction wasn’t “Zoom built a PowerPoint competitor.”
Instead, I saw another step in a journey I’ve been writing about for nearly twenty years.
Back in January, while previewing the sessions I’d be moderating at ITExpo, I wrote that the future of Unified Communications wasn’t simply UC anymore—it was UC combined with AI, where communications become the starting point for productivity, not the end point. That post, Navigating the Future of Telecommunications: A Deep Dive into IT Expo 2024’s Most Anticipated Panels, laid out how AI was becoming inseparable from communications rather than another feature bolted onto the side.
Zoom Slides is exactly that philosophy brought to life.
Rather than thinking of it as another presentation application, think of it as the presentation layer for conversations that have already happened. Instead of building a deck before the meeting, Zoom wants the meeting itself to become the source material. AI listens, summarizes, organizes and produces something useful afterward.
That’s a very different philosophy than Microsoft’s traditional document-first approach.
I’ve argued for years that communications isn’t about the call, the meeting or the message. It’s about what happens next.
Voice was never the product. Presence wasn’t the product. Video wasn’t the product.
The outcome is the product.
That idea has been consistent throughout VoIPWatch’s history.
In 2018, when Dialpad acquired TalkIQ, I wrote that VoiceAI would become as ubiquitous as collaboration. At the time that seemed forward-looking, but today it feels almost inevitable.
The day before, writing about 8×8’s acquisition of MarianaIQ, I suggested AI would become the next battleground for conferencing, contact centers and business communications—not because AI was replacing communications, but because it would enhance every interaction.
Zoom Slides is simply another manifestation of that trend.
The companies that will win over the next decade won’t merely add features. They’ll eliminate work.
Building presentations remains one of the most repetitive knowledge-worker tasks inside organizations. Every week, someone takes meeting notes, organizes them, formats slides, aligns branding and prepares content for the next meeting.
Zoom wants AI to do that instead. The meeting becomes structured organizational knowledge instead of disposable conversation.
Long before AI entered the conversation, I was already writing about communications moving into the cloud.
Back in 2010, discussing BroadSoft’s cloud direction, I noted that more communications functionality belonged in cloud services instead of residing on local systems. Looking back, that wasn’t just about hosted PBXs. It was about where intelligence would eventually live.
Today’s AI assistants simply complete that migration as the intelligence now lives alongside the communications platform.
Even earlier, during Cisco’s push around TelePresence, I observed that communications vendors weren’t just trying to connect people anymore. They were trying to improve how people shared experiences and information. TelePresence wasn’t really about video. It was about changing how work happened.
Zoom is pursuing that same vision, albeit with very different technology.
The real competition for Zoom Slides isn’t Microsoft PowerPoint.
It’s wasted time.
Zoom already owns the meeting. It already knows who attended. It knows what documents were shared. It knows what decisions were made. It knows what action items emerged.
Creating a presentation is no longer a creative exercise from a blank page. It’s simply organizing organizational memory. That’s a much stronger strategic position than asking users to start with an empty slide.
For me, Zoom Slides isn’t really a presentation product.
It’s another indication that communications platforms have evolved into productivity platforms.
Voice became VoIP. VoIP became Unified Communications. Unified Communications became collaboration. Collaboration is now becoming AI-powered workflow.
That’s not a sudden change. It’s the natural evolution of a path many of us have been watching—and writing about—for the better part of two decades.