Zoom's President of Product and Engineering Velchamy Sankarlingam said India has become one of the company's most critical markets, fueled by strong AI adoption, a large talent base, and the presence of multinationals that use the country to test new product features. Sankarlingam's interview with PTI on July 31, 2026, underscores Zoom's strategy to deepen its product footprint in India through local data centers, language support, and an AI-first contact center platform.
India as a product development test bed
"India, we consider as one of the most critical markets… One (reason) is India by itself, it's a huge market, lot of talent, lot of innovation. All the educational institutions are top notch. Plus, also lot of the US and European countries have a huge presence in India as well," Sankarlingam said. He added that Zoom has "pretty much every team represented in India" and expects to learn from deployments there. The country's linguistic diversity - with multiple dialects - provides a unique environment for testing AI-driven features at scale.
Infrastructure and local product expansion
Zoom operates two technology centers in India: a Bengaluru hub focused on R&D and engineering, launched in 2020, and a Chennai center for Zoom Contact Center development, opened in 2022. The company also runs data centers in Mumbai and Hyderabad. In 2025, Zoom expanded its Zoom Phone service to six telecom circles, including Delhi-NCR, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, after receiving a license from the Department of Telecommunications. The contact center offering, a CCaaS solution, supports voice, video, virtual agents, social media, email, and messaging apps.
Real-world use: Lenskart's remote eye tests
Sankarlingam pointed to Lenskart, the eyewear retail chain, which faced uneven distribution of optometrists across regions. The company adopted Zoom Contact Center to let optometrists conduct remote eye tests over video. The deployment shows how product teams can solve operational bottlenecks by embedding video and AI into customer workflows, rather than treating communication as a standalone tool.
AI-first strategy and language localization
Zoom already supports Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and several other Indian languages, and Sankarlingam said expanding AI support for all local languages is a priority. "If you're in India and if the data needs to reside in India, we can actually support that," he said, adding that Zoom works closely with regulators and policymakers. The company's Zoom Contact Center is built as an AI-first platform, a design choice that reflects the broader shift in product development toward intelligent, automated customer interactions. For product teams, the move toward AI-powered contact centers illustrates how AI for Product Development is reshaping user experience and operational efficiency.
Zoom's product philosophy: conversation to completion
Eric Yuan, Zoom's founder and CEO, marked the company's 15th anniversary this month. In a blog post, he wrote: "The question is no longer whether AI will transform work. It's whether we'll continue to build it in a way that makes work not only easier, but more human and enjoyable." Sankarlingam described Zoom's focus as moving from "conversation to completion," with tools like ZoomMate and potential vertical-specific features still evolving. He said the goal is to make Zoom "the platform for action as well."
Why this matters for product development professionals
India's role as a test bed for Zoom's AI features gives product managers a live case study in scaling AI across diverse languages, regulatory environments, and user behaviors. The Lenskart example demonstrates that successful product integrations solve specific distribution or service gaps, not just add technology. Product managers looking to build similar AI-first strategies can explore the AI Learning Path for Product Managers to develop skills in AI integration, roadmap planning, and user-centered design. The lesson: local market conditions, when treated as product requirements rather than constraints, can drive innovation that benefits global products.
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