Zoom boss Eric Yuan played a proactive role in the race between artificial intelligence and humansby creating its own AI avatar, which now attends boring financial meetings instead.
As a result, Yuan’s avatar is now appears at the beginning of quarterly earnings calls and reads the report to investors, while later the real Zoom boss joins the conversation.
Yuan says that he created his digital persona through Zoom Clips, a tool in Zoom that allows you to record and share videos in a convenient and asynchronous way. Therefore, it seems that this is not so much a direct way to simplify something in work, but rather an original product advertisement.
«I’m proud to be one of the first CEOs to use an avatar during an earnings call», — Yuan (or rather his avatar) said via TechCrunch. «This is just one example of how Zoom is pushing the boundaries of communication and collaboration. At the same time, we know that trust and security are important. We take AI-generated content seriously and have implemented robust security measures to prevent misuse, protect users’ identities, and ensure responsible use of avatars».
Yuan himself has long argued that «digital doubles» will eventually be able to perform up to 90% of office tasks, but he has not been an innovator in the direction of «digitalizing himself». Even earlier, his avatar for meetings introduced CEO of Klarna, a Swedish fintech company that provides online financial services (payments for online stores, etc.), Sebastian Semyatkovsky — in an 83-second video with a report on the financial results of the first quarter of 2025.
Klarna itself has very ambitious plans for AI and has already announced a partial staff reduction in favor of the technology. However, it should be noted that this optimism hides financial problems, as the company had twice as much financial loss in the last quarter as a year ago. Therefore, artificial intelligence is a lifeline rather than a trend.
Among others AI innovations in the companyA chatbot for customer service based on OpenAI, which replaced about 700 positions and can save up to $40 million annually, as well as Midjourney and DALL-E tools instead of marketing costs. At the same time, 87% of Klarna employees use artificial intelligence on a daily basis.
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