Zoom Is Going to Be Training Its AI on Your Recorded Video Calls

Key takeaways

• A controversial update to Zoom’s terms and conditions gives the company permission to pick up content from video calls
• The details of the update now face consumer backlash
• Zoom is defending the policy, saying it doesn’t steal ownership of user content

Zoom changed one part of its terms of service in March to give itself all “right, title, and interest” to user call data.” The reason? To train its AI.

Things blew up this week when a Stack Diary article reported on the changes to the company’s terms of service and brought attention to the fine print. Will backlash to the policy slow down Zoom’s AI developments or hurt the company’s bottom line? We’ll explore that below.

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Why is Zoom’s policy making headlines?

Stack Diary highlighted two particular sections of Zoom’s terms as potentially problematic. The first gives “consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data” for “any purpose.”

The second section in question says users “agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” to use their data for things like “product and service development.”

The broad language here is raising concerns over data privacy, even though Zoom may truly intend to provide a better product by accessing this data and insists that the policy is opt-in.

A Zoom spokesperson elaborated in a statement: “Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features, and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes.”

What’s the business impact?

Here’s the thing: Zoom’s AI tools are really useful for its users, and Zoom needs to do something to grow its business. In a blog post responding to the uproar, Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim explained that two popular AI-driven features are the Zoom IQ Meeting Summary, which provides automated meeting summaries, and automated spam scans of webinar invitations.

Through July, Zoom shares were up less than 10% compared with the market’s 19% surge. After an astounding pandemic-induced high, Zoom’s stock had fallen 83% in May 2022. The following February, Zoom announced it would layoff 1,300 employees.

Of course, Zoom also can’t really afford to lose its customer base over a privacy scandal either.

The bottom line

Second-quarter earnings for Zoom are due August 21 and predictions look flat. Right now, analysts are saying Zoom is a hold. Looking ahead, we’ll see how Zoom navigates these new privacy issues, and also whether it successfully innovates in the AI space to gain a competitive edge.

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