How Zoom Scales a 500,000-Member Support Community with AI

When Alexis Brown launched the Zoom Community during the pandemic, the goal was to give Zoom customers a place to connect, share knowledge, and find answers without having to contact support for every question.

More than five years later, that vision has grown into a global support community of more than 500,000 members. As the community expanded, Alexis, Zoom’s Head of Digital Web Experience and Community, saw an opportunity to build on that success by bringing AI-powered capabilities into the member experience and streamlining the work behind the scenes.

In early 2026, Zoom migrated its community to Gainsight Customer Communities, pairing the platform transition with a refreshed visual experience and new AI capabilities. The result? A growing community, less manual moderation, and new ways to help customers find answers.

With Gainsight, Zoom:

• Migrated a public support community of more than 400,000 members while refreshing its visual experience to align with Zoom’s rebrand.
• Automated the handling of 92% of spam posts during the AI moderator’s first 90 days.
• Freed a three-person moderation team to focus more time on customer questions and meaningful community engagement.
• Introduced AI-generated search summaries, which were engaged in approximately 11,000 community searches in September 2026.
• Grew beyond 500,000 members while continuing to see increases in community traffic.

Alexis Brown has spent nearly 15 years building and scaling online communities, including experience with Khoros, Jive, Salesforce, and Higher Logic Vanilla Forums. When she joined Zoom during the pandemic, the company’s customer base was growing rapidly, and her manager, Jeff Harling, was developing a self-service strategy to help meet rising support needs.

Alexis launched the Zoom Community just three months after joining the company. Over the next four and a half years, it grew to more than 400,000 members, becoming an important destination for customer questions, peer-to-peer support, and shared knowledge.

As the community matured, Alexis began evaluating how its technology could evolve to support its next phase of growth. With Zoom’s community platform contract approaching renewal, she saw an opportunity to reassess the available solutions and prioritize capabilities that would make the biggest difference for both customers and her team.

AI was a particularly important consideration. Because Zoom’s public community allows users to participate with a free Zoom account, keeping the space welcoming and useful requires ongoing moderation. Automated spam attacks could generate hundreds or even thousands of inappropriate or nonsensical posts overnight, leaving moderators with significant manual cleanup.

For Alexis, the opportunity was about more than managing spam. She wanted to give her team more time to focus on what mattered most: helping customers and fostering meaningful conversations.

Zoom conducted a formal evaluation of several vendors, weighing the capabilities of each platform against the community’s needs and long-term strategy. AI-powered moderation and search were among the key factors in the decision to move to Gainsight Customer Communities.

“AI moderation was a huge selling point for me. I had star eyes when I saw some of the robust functionality that Gainsight has, and it’s obviously continued to be invested in.”

Alexis also approached the migration as an opportunity to improve the member experience. Zoom had recently completed a company-wide rebrand, and the community’s visual identity had not yet caught up. Rather than treating the platform transition as a standalone technical project, she paired it with a full visual refresh.

That meant members could experience a more cohesive, modern-looking community while benefiting from the underlying platform enhancements.

The migration took place in January 2026, following approximately three months of planning and implementation. Zoom’s systems engineering and IT teams supported the technical work, including single sign-on, the domain transition, and customized pages, while Alexis and her team coordinated the community experience, priorities, and launch readiness.

Once the new platform was live, AI-powered moderation became a key part of the team’s workflow.

• Proactive moderation: New posts are evaluated against Zoom’s code of conduct and community guidelines.
• Automated spam handling: Posts identified as inappropriate can be routed to moderation queues or spam and trash, reducing the amount of manual review required.
• More time for meaningful engagement: With routine moderation increasingly automated, the three-person team can dedicate more attention to genuine customer questions, valuable discussions, and community participation.

The team also began leveraging AI-generated search summaries to help members discover relevant information and get to useful answers more efficiently.

The impact of AI moderation was clear during the first 90 days after launch: the moderator handled 92% of spam posts. For a small team supporting a community of hundreds of thousands of members, that automation made a meaningful difference.

“With AI moderation, my team has way more time to prioritize the posts that are real and provide value.”

The migration also supported the community’s continued growth. In summer 2026, Zoom surpassed 500,000 community members, extending the momentum built over more than five years. Meanwhile, AI-generated summaries became another tool for helping customers navigate the community’s extensive library of discussions and solutions, with approximately 11,000 searches engaging a summary in September alone.

For Alexis, however, the community’s value extends beyond membership and platform metrics. One of the most important measures is its contribution to customer self-service.

When a community member shares a solution that helps others resolve a problem, that answer can continue delivering value long after the original question has been answered. Alexis evaluates the impact by looking at views on accepted solutions and the support costs those interactions may help avoid.

“One answer, written once, serves everyone who searches for it. At that scale, you easily get millions of dollars in cost savings from the wealth of solution views that you have on a community post.”

The community’s contributors are central to that success. Zoom’s 100-plus community champions include customers, partners, and employees who share expertise and help others succeed. Its Super Champions represent the program’s most active contributors, receiving special recognition, opportunities to engage with Zoom product leaders, roadmap previews, and other exclusive experiences.

Alexis sees these relationships as essential to the community’s long-term impact. Technology can make information easier to discover and routine tasks more efficient, but the people behind the answers remain just as important.

It all comes back to where Alexis thinks Community belongs. “I will die on the hill that any community should live within customer support.”

For Zoom, the community complements traditional support channels by giving customers another way to get help, learn from their peers, and share their own expertise. Whether someone chooses to interact with the Zoom Virtual Agent chatbot, browse the knowledge base, submit a ticket, call support, or search the community, the goal is the same: help them find the answers they need. Many still choose the community, because, as Alexis puts it, “the human experience is still very much needed.”

And as AI creates new opportunities to scale that experience, Alexis remains focused on keeping the human element at its center.