Cloud Meeting and Team Collaboration Market, Forecast to 2029

AI Emerges as the Catalyst for Renewed Growth in a Mature Market

After experiencing a slowdown in 2023, the cloud meetings and team collaboration market returned to moderate growth in 2024. Revenue in 2024 reached $15.39 billion, growing at 5.1 percent YoY. The market is forecasted to reach $21.62 billion by 2029 at a 5-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.0 percent.

Meetings and messaging remain foundational elements of communication platforms and represent a robust opportunity throughout the forecast period. Key growth vectors include AI-powered features, enhanced ease of use, greater engagement, and advanced analytics. The strong emergence of AI and automation is creating seismic shifts in the value of meetings and messaging, changing how users interact with these tools while creating new revenue opportunities for technology providers.

Video and chat have morphed from stand-alone products to integral components of an end-to-end UC stack. Evolving from traditional communication tools into a comprehensive platform where work itself lives, meeting and messaging apps have transformed into persistent collaboration environments that integrate conversations, data, third-party systems, and AI, enabling teams to make informed decisions and work more effectively.

Customer organizations and market participants, including technology vendors, service providers, channel partners, resellers, and IT/telecom decision-makers, among others, will find value in leveraging the findings of this study to develop sustainable growth strategies that tap into the growing wave of meetings and chat adoption across organizations of all sizes.

Scope of Analysis

This research covers the market for cloud-based meetings and team collaboration (also referred to as messaging or team chat). Due to the convergence of meeting and team collaboration apps, this research combines the two technologies into a single segment. Revenue in this report includes sales of

• Stand-alone cloud meeting services for individual use over desktop and mobile devices.
• Cloud meeting room services that are optimized to enhance the experience in physical meeting rooms and shared spaces.
• Integrated meetings/team collaboration services, which offer meeting and team chat capabilities over a unified platform.
• Webinar services when offered by cloud meeting providers.
• Meetings and team collaboration that are a part of UCaaS solutions. Because UCaaS licenses include multiple workloads, this report attributes a percentage of the total revenue from UCaaS to meetings and team chat.
• Revenue figures represent sales of cloud meetings and team collaboration licenses offered by the original service providers and do not include sales of third-party solutions or reseller sales.
• The following solutions are excluded from this report:
• On-premises, single-tenant, or dedicated private cloud services
• Stand-alone PSTN and VOIP audio conferencing services
• Consumer-grade video meeting/messaging services (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat, DingTalk)
• The methodology for this report involves triangulation of data sources across:
• Interviews with vendors and channel partners
• The customer surveys and interviews
• Analysis of secondary data (annual reports, third-party research, etc.)

The Impact of the Top 3 Strategic Imperatives on the Cloud Meeting and Team Collaboration Market

Transformative Megatrends

Why:

• The pace of structural changes impacting the cloud meetings and team collaboration market - from the rise in hybrid work to an explosion in AI capabilities - is accelerating.
• Significant shifts in recent years have expedited technology convergence, with providers repositioning their portfolios for diverse use cases and growth.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) is catalyzing the next wave of disruptive innovation in intelligent, secure meeting and chat experiences.

Analyst Perspective:

• Online meetings and team chat solutions proved their worth in recent years and are now table stakes for modern work.
• Leading providers have aligned with the market demand for technology consolidation of standalone meeting and chat apps into an integral end-to-end platform for unified communications-as-a-service (UcaS).
• Providers must strengthen core competencies and deliver a complete collaboration portfolio to enable growth.

Competitive Intensity

Why:

• The meetings and messaging market is crowded and populated by several large, established vendors and a long tail of smaller regional providers.
• Increased competition forces vendors to differentiate through innovative features and pricing but these features are easily replicated.
• Growing market maturity is putting pressure on top-line growth for all providers.

Analyst Perspective:

• Customer satisfaction is paramount. Vendors must prioritize customer needs, provide excellent support, and build strong customer relationships.
• Providers must help address new collaboration workflows and an accelerated methodological shift from technology to 'outcomes.'
• Many vendors have formed strategic alliances for integrations with third-party apps and services, which significantly increases their competitive edge.

Disruptive Technologies

Why:

• A single platform for multiple communication modalities - meetings, messaging, calling, webinars - is providing greater customer value. This convergence breaks down silos and enhances performance, management, usability, and security.
• As the overarching technology, AI is driving much of the innovation in meetings and team collaboration software, making them more automated, efficient, and engaging.

Analyst Perspective:

• Many AI capabilities (e.g., speaker tracking/framing, enhanced audio and video clarity, speaker attribution, transcription, translation, meeting summaries, and insights) are already table stakes.
• The market is on the cusp of delivering greater personalization and more impactful business value enabled by AI.
• Education about the risks (e.g., security and compliance) and rewards (e.g., efficiencies and cost savings) of AI is a work in progress.

Competitive Landscape

• The market for business meetings and chat platforms is highly mature and competitive. There has been significant market consolidation, with more on the way. This has led to aggressive pricing strategies and a lack of feature differentiation across platforms.
• Notable players like BlueJeans, Amazon Chime, and Workplace by Meta have exited the market. The market consolidation is a result of increased competition and dominance of the top three platforms - Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet.
• The top five providers - Microsoft, Zoom, Google, Cisco, and Slack - held 81.4% revenue market share in 2024 with a long tail of smaller providers, many of whom have regional presence only.
• Microsoft Teams is the leading platform for meetings and chat, followed by Zoom and Google Meet. These leading vendors have greater market power, influencing pricing, feature sets, and industry standards for the rest of the industry.
• Product differentiators are diminishing. Vendors that effectively address customer pain points and prioritize easy-to-use, comprehensive, scalable, and manageable solutions are winning. Going forward, AI platforms are emerging as key growth vectors and significant differentiators in the market. Vendors must assist customers in navigating new event workflows and embracing a rapid shift from technology to outcomes.
• Leading UC platforms offer comprehensive capabilities that integrate cloud calling, meetings, messaging, room video, webinars, events, and contact centers. This holistic approach helps streamline workflows and improve productivity, which is crucial for remote and hybrid work environments. Stand-alone vendors face the challenge of being perceived as redundant or overly niche when compared to all-in-one solutions from providers like Microsoft and Zoom.

Competitive Landscape

• Customer organizations are looking to simplify vendor management, reduce costs, and improve user experiences by consolidating tools, which means vendors that cannot evolve into broader platforms may lose relevance. The shift toward consolidation often favors vendors with established ecosystems and the ability to offer seamless transitions, putting smaller or specialized players at a disadvantage.
• Companies are prioritizing platforms that offer superior user experiences and reliable performance. Issues with service reliability or limited features can lead to a decline in user adoption.
• As the economic landscape remains volatile and unpredictable, businesses are looking for cost-effective solutions that provide maximum value. Platforms that offer scalable pricing models and robust features are gaining customer preference.

Key Competitors

• Adobe
• Amazon Chime*
• Avaya
• Cisco
• Dialpad
• Enghouse Systems
• Google
• Goto
• Microsoft
• Pexip
• Pgi
• Ringcentral
• Roam
• Synergy Sky
• Trueconf
• Zoho
• Zoom
• Bitrix24
• Chanty
• Cisco
• Flock
• Global Relay
• Google
• Mattermost
• Microsoft
• Ringcentral
• Rocket.Chat
• Ryver
• Slack
• Symphony Communications
• Meta**
• Zoho
• Zoom

Growth Drivers

• AI-powered features and services enable providers to significantly enhance customer value to drive increased adoption, while boosting revenue growth from higher ARPU.
• The prevalence of hybrid work and the need for tools that enable seamless collaboration across locations have made meetings and team chat essential.
• The ability to seamlessly integrate with other business applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) is creating a robust ecosystem of third-party integrations, expanding functionality, and increasing the value proposition for customers.
• Organizations increasingly value solutions that consolidate multiple functions, reducing costs associated with disparate tools.
• Bespoke or highly customized meetings and events create new opportunities for providers to grow managed services.
• The potential to address frontline workers and vertical-specific workflows, combined with advancements in mobile UCaaS, wearables, IoT, CPaas, and APIs, is expanding the addressable market beyond knowledge workers to 1.5 billion frontline workers globally.

Growth Restraints

• In a highly mature and competitive market, providers struggle to maintain revenue growth, profitability, and customer loyalty, leading to pressure on pricing and revenue growth.
• Many collaboration tools operate in silos. Lack of interoperability across collaboration platforms create barriers for organizations that use multiple solutions, resulting in decreased productivity and increased training costs.
• Customer concerns about privacy, security, governance, and compliance coupled with lack of proof points on the true business impact challenge more rapid adoption of AI.
• With increasing scrutiny of data protection and privacy regulations, organizations are becoming more cautious about the collaboration tools they adopt.
• Economic downturns can lead to reduced IT budgets, causing organizations to delay or scale back investments in new collaboration technologies.
• The effectiveness of collaboration tools depends on user proficiency. Insufficient training can lead to underutilization, reducing the anticipated productivity benefits.