Zoom’s Q1 earnings tell a partner-led growth story
Eric S. Yuan, CEO:
“…a lot of new customers, they want to deploy CCaaS. They would like to leverage channel partners.
You look at our top 10 deals, 10 out of 10 are channel driven. Our channel partners, they know how to pitch our story. How to sell to our enterprise customers.”
These aren’t greenfield wins. In 8 of those 10 top contact center deals, Zoom displaced a legacy CCaaS vendor. Partners are running competitive rip-and-replace at scale.
Million-dollar-plus deals hit one of the strongest levels Zoom has ever recorded — in a Q1.
AI is now embedded in the enterprise deal structure
Zoom’s AI Companion paid monthly active users grew 184% YoY. And 9 of the top 10 contact center deals included paid AI.
The pattern keeps showing up across SaaS earnings this quarter: AI features drive larger contracts and more partner involvement, because deployment complexity rises with them.
Zoom is responding by deploying forward-deployed engineers inside enterprise accounts to accelerate AI adoption — the same approach used by Google Cloud, Open AI, Anthropic and others. When your AI product needs that level of hands-on support, the door opens wider for SIs and advisory partners.
Zoom’s biggest external AI bet: $1.27B in Anthropic
Zoom has been quietly investing in Anthropic since 2023. During Q1, Zoom added another $46M to its Anthropic preferred stock, bringing total carrying value to $1.27B.
On top of that, $99.7M went into other private AI companies in the quarter.
Zoom is building AI capabilities and ecosystem through investments, not only internal R&D or vendor relationships.
Zoom itself isn’t locking into a single model.
Their federated architecture dynamically routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and Zoom’s own models. For tech partnership leaders, that’s a playbook on how top companies avoid vendor dependency.
One more signal: Zoom just hired Russell Dicker as its new CPO — a familiar hyperscaler story:
“Russell brings more than 25 years of product leadership experience across Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, including leading Microsoft Teams’ product and data science teams.”
3 lessons for alliance leaders:
When one of the fastest-growing product lines is 100% partner-led at the top end of the market, it shows what can scale through partners.
AI is making enterprise deals larger and more complex, which pulls partners deeper into both the sale and the deployment
Multi-model AI architectures create more partnership surface area and reduce single-vendor risk for everyone in the ecosystem
Is your partner motion keeping pace with your fastest-growing product line?
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