“Everyone is on a learning journey to harness AI”: APAC Zoom channel leads on monetising AI

Mike Johnson and Jacob Pereira discuss how they’re on a mission to help their local partners to cash in on AI.

Zoom is on a mission to take advantage of AI and its capabilities to help its partners make more revenue.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Mike Johnson, head of channel ANZ and Jacob Pereira, head of APAC partners at Zoom discuss how they are helping local partners make money from their AI-based products.

Johnson said, “Everyone is on a learning journey to harness AI.’

He added, “To be able to monetise AI, customers want to do that. Partners want to help customers do that. Partners are working out, how do they support that? And that's an ongoing evolution.”

With the introduction of AI in contact centres, it has reduced workloads and simplified tasks.

"Contact centres certainly used to be fairly simple solutions, but lots of boxes. You've got analytics, you've got workforce management, routing, different boxes, but it was fairly segmented,” Johnson said.

“But that's all clashed into one, and AI has now got the power to do a lot of those pieces.”

Johnson noted that AI has come as a “big change” for the vendor.

“But ultimately, what customers need and want from a solution is something that drives change and drives efficiencies for them,” he said.

“We've been helping partners work out how they do that and how they deliver that in this market over the last year, and how to monetise AI. I'd say we're still very early on that journey, and everyone's trying to work that piece out.”

At Zoom, they offer AI tools for paid subscribers, which Pereira explained is helping their users understand how to use the new tools.

“They start utilising it, they start seeing things like meeting summaries pop up. They get curious about what are the things that they can ask the AI companion and so on,” he said.

For the partner, Zoom has built its services certification targeted for phone and contact centre and where they are monetising AI is predominantly in the agentic space.

“We have AI studio, we have the capability that's a paid service, and everything that partner is able to drive in terms of services consulting is where they need to get the accreditation and competencies for services,” he explained.

“It’s an additional revenue growth opportunity for them in services aspect, and they're also able to then focus on where customer stickiness is.”

2026 focus

For 2026, Pereira foresees that the majority of Zoom’s net new business will be coming through the partner ecosystem.

“[They are] breaking new ground, given that they've got the relationships, they now have the tools, and the enablement. One of the changes I've made in the last four years is we really have doubled down on investing in enablement by country and within region,” he said.

“We've got both face to face as well as virtual webinars, constantly updating our partners on that.

“For me, what I see [in 2026] as an outcome is more countries that will be led by a channel-first approach when it comes to phone and contact centre as well as driving our new business growth.”

With the previous program going into the new program, Zoom is giving them better insights, Pereira explained.

“Whether it’s dashboards, in terms of improving of breaking new business, like new bookings, or even managing the customer renewals through a customer success competency.

“We've launched that so that they get a better understanding of how to manage a SaaS model.”

The company works with direct and in-direct sales, but for the ANZ market, wants all new logos to be obtained through the channel ecosystem, Johnson noted.

He said that was a “deliberate” choice.

“We've chosen as a global organisation to reduce our PSO focus so professional services in order that we want our partners to get accredited to train up and deliver professional services around the globe for and on our behalf,” he said.

“Australia is such a partner driven market as I'm sure you know, and we want to invest in building those relationships and partner with everything that we go to market.”