• Kimberly Storin, Zoom’s chief marketing and communications officer, was interviewed for Business Insider’s CMO Insider video series.
• Zoom’s ad campaign with former SNL star Bowen Yang was created by SNL’s Colin Jost and his production agency.
• Storin said Zoom’s AI Companion tool helps her turn her daily conversations into strategic insight.

When Kimberly Storin joined Zoom as chief marketing and communications officer in April 2025, she did her own research to learn what users thought of the brand. Storin said she discovered a strong affinity for Zoom compared to its competitors. Still, many of the platform’s features are not well known.

That insight inspired a campaign and commercial titled “Zoom Ahead,” created by Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost’s production company, and featuring former SNL cast member Bowen Yang. In the spot, Yang plays a tyrannical head of IT who is powerless to prevent employees from declaring their love of Zoom.

Zoom extended the theme of worker empowerment with an in-person activation: a Hard Stop Burger Shop pop-up in New York City on March 26-27. The idea was based on research the company conducted with Morning Consult that showed workers are skipping breaks or eating lunch at their desks.

In a video interview, Business Insider spoke with Storin about the strategy behind the campaign and why she’s such a fan of the company’s AI Companion tool.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The biggest challenge Zoom has is that ultimately, we are a ubiquitous brand. We have 99% brand awareness, which is a bit of a double-edged sword.

What people don’t realize is the breadth and depth of our portfolio. They don’t realize we have a customer support platform, a marketing platform with events and webinars, a recruiting platform, or a sales platform.

Before I started at Zoom, I talked to about 50 of the company’s customers. Those customers told me, over and over again, about their affinity for the platform.

Then I went down this rabbit hole of Reddit and social media, and I kept seeing this theme in the conversations I didn’t see with any of our competitors — it was really anchored in this preference for the Zoom platform, the simplicity, the ease of use, the fact that Zoom just works.

That was the genesis, the nugget that really inspired our campaign. We wanted to start a revolution.

I had a chief information officer ask me, “Are you trying to encourage shadow IT?” And I said, “No, we’re actually trying to do the opposite.” We’re trying to encourage people to come out of the shadows and share their love for the platform in the ways that they’re sharing it on Reddit, social media, and in our customer satisfaction scores — and we want them to tell you.

Colin Jost was able to find the right humorous tone for the ad

Humor is hard for a brand. And to get humor right really requires people who understand comedy, who understand how humor can play a role in communication, and who can explain something in a way that a straight-faced ad really can’t. And so, of course, we wanted to tap into the best of the best.

Colin Jost really reflects the cultural zeitgeist in a lot of ways. Every single week, he’s writing comedy that resonates and stands up to the news of the week. We felt that with Zoom being such a cultural brand and part of so many people’s cultural experience, having somebody who understands humor in that way would really help elevate us.

So we brought in Colin and his team from his agency called No Notes Productions. They helped us understand a lot of different ways that we could leverage humor and heart to bring this product to life. Some of it was outrageous. Some of it was formulaic in terms of leveraging a celebrity.

Where we ended up landing, and what ended up testing really well with our customers, was this idea that we call “Dead Poets Society” meets “Severance.” It just really worked.

The AI Companion helps connect daily conversations to strategy

I don’t know how many folks are familiar with our AI Companion, but that is absolutely my favorite tool. The reason I love it so much is because I believe that so much of the data and the information that matters to us as executives happens in those conversations.

Unlike a traditional LLM like ChatGPT or Claude, which is really focused on external data, the beauty of Zoom AI Companion is that you can pull in all your meetings.

At the click of a button, you can build an agent that effectively taps into all of the conversations that you’ve had and is able to leverage those conversations to help you build a strategy or to help you build messaging.

Now that we have automated gestures, I often give a thumbs up at very inappropriate times because I’m a very hand-gesturing person. Sometimes I’ll do a hand gesture, and the next thing you know, I’ve got a thumbs up flying across the screen. So that’s my typical go-to embarrassing moment.

• It was an ordinary morning at the school I was teaching at, until it wasn’t.
• Losing a student instantly shifted my perspective on parenting.
• Now, ordinary moments matter more, and I’m trying to pay attention to them.

It was an ordinary day. Until it wasn’t. The school day hadn’t even started yet.

Students were gathered in the auditorium the way they did every morning — the early arrivals waiting for the first bell. Some were half-asleep. Others were talking with friends, scrolling their phones, or finishing homework. It was the quiet, in-between time before the day officially began.

Then suddenly, everything changed. One of my students collapsed right in front of me.

For a moment, there was confusion. I was the first to reach her. Other teachers and staff rushed forward while the room filled with that strange, suspended silence that happens when people realize something is terribly wrong but don’t yet understand what’s happening.

Emergency responders arrived. Students were ushered out. Adults moved quickly, trying to manage the situation while shielding hundreds of teenagers from a moment no one should have to witness.

But eventually, the school day started anyway.

That’s one of the unspoken expectations of teaching: the day keeps moving. Classes begin. Lessons continue. Students still need structure, routine, and stability — even when the adults in the room are struggling to process what just happened.

In the days that followed, I stood in front of my classroom and did what teachers do. I taught lessons. I answered questions. I graded assignments.

From the outside, it probably looked like things had returned to normal. Inside, something had shifted.

Everything changed for me that day

Before that day, I carried the quiet assumption that many adults do — the belief that if you work hard, plan carefully, and follow the rules, life will mostly stay within the lines you’ve drawn.

Losing a student shattered that belief.

It forced me to confront a difficult truth, especially for parents, that’s hard to sit with: control is mostly an illusion. You can supervise, plan, protect, and prepare. You can do everything right. And still, life can change in an instant.

When I went home to my own children after that experience, I noticed the shift almost immediately. The ordinary moments felt different. Bedtime routines lasted a little longer. I lingered a little more when my kids wrapped their arms around me before running off to school. Conversations in the car suddenly felt more important than finishing one more chore when we got home.

Achievement started to look different

As teachers, we spend much of our professional lives measuring progress — grades, test scores, benchmarks, performance data. As parents, it’s easy to carry that same mindset home. We worry about whether our kids are ahead, behind, or doing enough to keep up.

But standing in a school auditorium after losing a student has a way of rearranging your priorities. I realized, rather suddenly, that the most important things aren’t measurable at all.

It’s the way your child tells you a long, rambling story about their day. The quick hug before they run out the door to play. The moments that feel small enough to rush past. Those are the moments that matter, and I’m paying more attention to them now.

The ordinary moments matter more

What many people don’t realize about teaching is that experiences like this don’t stay at school. Teachers carry them home. They sit quietly in the background of everyday life, shaping the way we see our own families.

For me, losing a student didn’t just change the way I see the classroom. It changed the way I see time, the way I parent, and the way I move through the world.

It reminded me that the ordinary moments we assume we’ll always have are often the most fragile — and the most important.

• The latest AI push at Meta is “AI Week,” where employees build things using Claude and other tools.
• Staff is spinning up interactive vibe coding guides, competing in hackathons, and watching demos.
• 2026 is the year AI will begin to “dramatically change the way we work,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.

At Meta, there’s no escaping AI.

The company has begun running intensive AI training weeks to encourage staff to experiment more with AI tools, according to Meta employees who spoke with Business Insider and public LinkedIn posts.

The weeks have involved a series of hackathons, demos, and other projects where Meta staff show off what they can build with AI, regardless of their job title or seniority. Some of the projects are built with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which the company has adopted widely internally.

This is part of Meta’s latest initiative to embrace AI across its workforce, which has included setting org targets for AI adoption and reorganizing some teams around AI-native “pods.” Similar pushes are taking place across corporate America as companies aim to become more efficient with AI. Google has told some employees their AI use will be considered in performance reviews, and JPMorgan has told software engineers it expects them to be harnessing AI to save time.

“It’s well-known that this is a priority and we’re focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work,” a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider.

Internally, these sessions have been given names such as “AI Transformation Week.” During the sessions, some employees were given demos on how agents and other tools could work across their laptops and phones, an employee who attended some sessions told Business Insider.

Some of these AI weeks took place in March. One Meta employee told Business Insider that some teams held their own AI weeks at the end of last year, during which staff used vibe coding to create something valuable with no strict output requirements.

At one hackathon during Meta’s AI Transformation Week, attendees sat through demos of its own internal AI tools, Claude Code, and others, according to a LinkedIn post from an employee. AI agents are a big focus, with the aim of having employees guide autonomous systems that can handle everything from coding to compiling reports.

Design is also part of the effort. One Meta product manager touted building an interactive vibe-coding guide for designing products at Meta using Claude Code, according to her website.

Pods and goals

While some employees were brushing up on AI this week, Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs, the division overseeing its virtual reality projects, and other orgs. The company has spent billions on hiring top AI talent and building out infrastructure. However, it has yet to launch its long-awaited frontier model, internally codenamed Avocado.

While that has given Meta the perception of being behind in the AI race, a top Wall Street analyst said earlier this month that the company’s aggressive internal AI transformation could, in fact, give it “insurmountable” cost and performance advantages.

Meta has been making other changes in an effort to be what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as “AI native.” In a division of Reality Labs, the organization overseeing Meta’s virtual reality projects, employees were rebranded with titles like “AI builder” and were organized into AI-native “pods,” Business Insider previously reported.

The company has also set specific goals for adopting AI tools that vary across teams, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider.

On Tuesday, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said he would take leadership over the company’s efforts to adopt AI for internal use, an initiative known internally as “AI for Work,” according to a copy of the post seen by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“These tools hold the promise of giving each employee so much more power to accomplish their work,” Bosworth said in a post on X.

• The GOP’s House Freedom Caucus is pushing back against a Senate deal to fund DHS and pay TSA workers.
• The Senate voted to move forward on a DHS funding bill that excludes funding for immigration operations.
• Now, TSA worker pay remains uncertain as the House GOP says no ICE funding is a no-go.

The era of American travel chaos might not come to a close anytime soon, as a potential deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security — and Transportation Security Administration workers’ paychecks — appears to be falling apart.

Republican members of the House’s Freedom Caucus are signaling they won’t move forward with a proposal to fund DHS, potentially lengthening a shutdown that began on February 14.

Early Friday morning, the Senate voted to move forward with a proposal to end the partial shutdown that’s currently preventing TSA workers from getting paid. The Senate-approved proposal excludes funding for immigration operations and came as Congress prepared to depart on a scheduled recess Friday evening. For that legislation to become law — and get TSA workers paid — it needs to be passed by the House.

“Could the Senate be any more lazy than to send to us a bill that doesn’t do the job and then leave town?” Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas and member of the House Freedom Caucus, said at a press conference. “So we’re going to stand up and say no to that. We’re going to send back a bill that’s responsible to the American people.”

It’s another setback in a partial shutdown that’s left TSA workers with two missing paychecks and American travelers stuck in hourslong lines at airports across the country. Hundreds of TSA workers have quit, and thousands have called out as they go without pay.

President Donald Trump has taken direct action to ease those paycheck woes, signing an executive order on Friday that directs the Secretary of Homeland Security “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown.” Trump’s executive order said that he has determined that “current circumstances constitute an emergency situation” that compromises the country’s security.

House Freedom Caucus members have said they want to add ICE and Border Patrol funding back into a spending package, measures that the Senate-passed package omitted. House Republicans have also eyed a 60-day stopgap funding measure, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said would be “dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it.”

This is a developing story, check back for updates.

Do you wake up from that same nightmare in a cold sweat, worried about whether you’re going to be replaced at work by the breakdancing restaurant robot? Do you fear getting a calendar invite from your manager, with an HR rep added and — for some reason — Sam Altman?

No? Just me? Well, we might have some help for those fears: a quiz!

It is reasonable — healthy, even — to feel anxiety about what the near future will look like as AI increasingly shapes more of our lives. Underneath conversations about AI — whether they’re hopeful, skeptical, or fearful — is one big question: Is my job going to be replaced by AI?

We vibe-coded a simple quiz, loosely based on a database covering what skills and tasks are needed in hundreds of jobs maintained by the US Department of Labor, that will help you figure out how AI-proof your job is — and what you can do to help mitigate your risk.

Click here for our full methodology.

Here’s the quiz:

For example, I, Katie, am a journalist (a role that doesn’t require formal credentials) who doesn’t manage anyone, and I scored a 68 on the quiz. That puts me in the yellow risk zone. My editor, who does manage people, got a 66. The higher the number, the more your job is potentially exposed to AI. Much to consider.

• I didn’t plan to have a big family, but it became the center of my life.
• I raised my kids mostly on my own after my husband left our family.
• Now that they’re grown and scattered, I miss the chaos of our daily life.

I didn’t plan to have 5 children. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get married.

I envisioned a life modeled after my childhood heroine, Mary Richards, the fictional associate producer at WJM-TV, played by Mary Tyler Moore. Yes, I was the girl who stayed in her dorm room on Saturday nights to watch each episode. That served me well because I did work for several years in television and eventually landed in Hollywood.

That’s where I met my husband, a recently resettled Cambodian refugee who worked with me on translating a film. We got married a year later, and I got pregnant just about immediately.

Of my 5 children, all but 2 were surprises

I was not expecting to be expecting so quickly. But pregnancy did not upend our plans to move cross-country and resettle in Boston.

I was six months along when we drove the 3,000 miles from California to Massachusetts. My enduring memory of the journey happened on our third day in the restroom of a McDonald’s in Texas on Prom Night. These cute teens were touching up their makeup when I entered and immediately vomited into a sink. Instead of acting horrified, they were sweet and sympathetic to my condition. I’ll never forget that.

Three months later, I gave birth to my first son, and it was love at first sight. When he was 2, we started talking about having another child. I was unaware that I was already pregnant. When my period didn’t stop, I found out I’d lost that baby that I didn’t even know existed. Within a few months, I was pregnant again and at week 12 lost that pregnancy as well.

Undeterred, we tried one more time and conceived our second son, the only one of our four biological children who was planned.

It was easy to get pregnant

I got pregnant again and delivered my third son just a year later.

I loved these three boys, but I really wanted a daughter, too. We adopted a baby girl who came to us at 6 months through the foster care system, and then I thought we were done.

I gave away all the baby clothes and equipment and settled into raising four kids. My husband had a different idea: leaving our family to create a new one. Wracked with guilt for abandoning us, he returned, and I got pregnant again. I was 42 and reeling from the emotional roller coaster of my broken marriage.

It took the full nine months to come to terms with having another child. I can still recall the look of disbelief on my oldest son’s face when we told him he’d have another sibling.

My kids made it easy to parent them

When my youngest was 8 months old, my husband left for good. I told the kids that even if he asked to return, I would not welcome him back.

During much of our time together, I felt like a married single mother. Now I was one in earnest, but I relished the role and loved managing our big household. I credit my children with making the job easier.

They were a united front, supporting each other and me. Those with driver’s licenses would ferry the younger ones to their various activities. The more mature boys would cook, clean, and even do laundry. It was a blissful existence despite the circumstances until they started leaving for college.

Now that they’re adults, I miss the chaos

Two enrolled in schools within five miles of home, and two chose campuses in California. With fewer visits home, I sold our house and moved west, too, knowing the youngest would eventually be resettled in California.

I envisioned replicating our large family gatherings with my adult kids, but that’s not happening nearly as often as I’d like. Although four of them are now on the West Coast, only one lives nearby. My son, who’s the father of my two grandchildren, is in New York.

Since the pandemic, the whole family has only gathered together once for my youngest son’s wedding. Although I meet up with them and their partners in their personal pods whenever I can, we don’t bring the whole tribe together often enough.

I miss the energy, the noise, and the intensity. I loved the constant activity. I even loved the mess.

That’s all gone now, which is why I tell young couples contemplating having large families that this day will come for them, too. While they may enjoy the controlled chaos of raising a lot of children, one day those kids will disperse, and it won’t be simple to maintain the bonds we work so hard to forge when they’re young.

Sometimes I think that if I had only one child, this time of life would be easier, but that’s not true. I love the whole lot of them and can’t imagine life without this crowd.