Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, has predicted that in future, people will be able to feel their hands being shaken and even smell coffee in their virtual space during the video meetings.
Speaking at the Web Summit tech conference, Yuan said he believe a physical aspect to virtual meetings could be brought using the artificial intelligence.
He also said that many workers might not come back full-time to office after the pandemic is gone.
He argued that video conferencing would stay here, stating that the pandemic had proven that it “works,” even though the value of Zoom’s share value fell after the initial announcement of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. He said for office workers, coming in for two days a week could become the norm.
“The world will become a hybrid [workplace], and I think that’s a world we have to embrace,” he said.
However, he said that even he had experienced “zoom fatigue” after attending 19 video conferences in one day. “Yeah, that was pretty much,” he said.
Mr Yuan said he ended every day with a 15-minute period of meditation in which he contemplated what he would do differently when he started the day again.
He described Zoom’s phenomenal growth in 2020 – the firm would have have hosted three trillion minutes of meetings by the end of the year – as something he had never foreseen.
