Why you should be excited about getting an AI clone, according to Zoom’s CEO

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants to change the workplace with eventually enabling digital twins to handle your emails and attend your meetings.

Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan is ready for a world where your AI clone handles your busy work — and he painted a picture of a life that sounds pretty relaxing.

In an interview with The Verge released Monday, Yuan said he hates his calendar, reads emails every morning, and finds a five-day workweek filled with meetings “boring.”

That’s why he wants people to have their own personal AI “digital twin” to attend meetings and write emails for them so that they can “go to the beach” instead, he said. Yuan added that AI clones could help shorten the workweek to three or four days.

“You do not have to have five or six Zoom calls daily,” Yuan said. “You can leverage the AI to do that.”

In Yuan’s vision, your AI twin could also do other everyday tasks across Zoom Workplace, like messaging, phone calls, emails, coding, creative tasks, manager tasks, and project management, Yuan said in the interview.

He said delegating this work to your AI clone would allow people to have more time for in-person interactions, both at work and outside of work.

“Why not spend more time with your family,” Yuan said. “Why not focus on more creative things, giving you back your time, giving back to the community and society to help others, right?”

While Yuan couched this vision as still being a ways away, he said Zoom started investing in generative AI before ChatGPT came out and sped up its advancement in the space after seeing it take off. Zoom has already introduced some AI features for its workplace platform Zoom Workplace, like AI Companion, which provides meeting summaries.

The CEO said Zoom’s digital twin technology would likely start as a voice assistant but could eventually become more immersive, making a virtual version of yourself available in virtual environments like those in the Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.

Eventually, the goal would be a 3D version of yourself that can mimic you to the point where “you can’t know if it’s a real person or just a 3D version.”

Yuan also described how you theoretically have multiple versions of your digital twin based on different needs. For example, one version may be a sales expert, and another may be an engineer.

Yuan said the technology isn’t there yet for two main reasons. First, the underlying AI models, or LLMs, that such a product would rely upon aren’t advanced enough. Second, he said that such a customized AI clone would require a customized LLM that’s based on all the data and context around each individual person. But Yuan said he expects AI technology to be capable of this in the next few years.

So, if workers’ AI twins are handling a lot of the grunt work and enjoying the beach, what work does that leave them to do? Zoom’s CEO said that AI could help with 90% of work but wouldn’t replace in-person interactions.

“We still need to have in-person interaction. That is very important,” Yuan said. “Say you and I are sitting together in a local Starbucks and having a very intimate conversation — AI cannot do that, either.”

However, the avatars would make room for more in-person interactions outside of work rather than at the workplace.

In terms of in-person work, Yuan said new employees may want to start in the office for some real-life interactions, but overall, he doesn’t see people wanting to get together more often in real life once those connections are made. He said getting together once or twice a year is “good enough.”