Watch This Space Podcast

We continue with Season 7 for Watch This Space, where the focus is my upcoming Future of Work Expo in Ft. Lauderdale. Our sessions will cover a lot of timely topics that should be familiar to our regular listeners - but some new ones too - including privacy, identity, immersive tech, large language models, endpoint usage, evolving role of IT, collaboration trends, agent experience, organizational structures, and workspaces for FOW. To set the stage for all this, we took a broader view for FOW through our analog lens, raising fundamental concerns about the very nature of work as our world becomes more digital and more virtual, and as we work increasingly in isolation from each other.

This episode marks the start of Season 7 for Watch This Space, and as always, is our look-ahead into the coming year. With AI becoming ever-more pervasive, Chris and I focused on how IT and business leaders need to be thinking for 2024. Never before has a technology emerged so quickly with such far-reaching implications, and we examined not just the undeniable benefits of AI, but also what will be required from IT to effectively deploy it, along with maintaining trust with employees. With our deep roots in the analog world, the perspectives we offer may be unfamiliar for digital natives, but perhaps exactly what they need to hear.

Our discussion for this episode centered on Big Tech, triggered by the recent rollercoaster with OpenAI. Aside from exploring concerns and implications about Big Tech’s market power, we parsed out the different frames of reference between analog and digital generations about using AI, along with why we should expect some backlash in 2024. Wrapping up, Jon shared his thoughts on Verint’s analyst event, which will close out his travels for 2023.

Before getting to Jon’s travelogue of industry events, we reviewed how businesses are still facing challenges getting hybrid work right, and what vendors are doing to make the in-office experience more compelling, especially for meeting spaces. We noted how this theme will be further explored at Jon’s Future of Work Expo in February, where many of the leading vendors will be speaking. From there, Jon recounted highlights from his extensive October travels – UC Expo in London, NICE in Peru, Avaya in Dubai, Cisco WebexOne in Anaheim, and SCTC in Raleigh - including a SIPtones gig. Finally, we did a brief mention of Jeff Pulver’s VON Evolution event in NYC, where both of us were speaking, and we did a special edition WTS segment specific for the event.

During September, Chris and I both attended industry events in New York City, and we had lots to talk about. First up was the Cloud Communications Alliance Financial Summit, which I attended for the first time and spoke on the analyst panel session. We discussed how the current state of things – crowded and very competitive – is impacting valuations and growth opportunities. Bottom line – cloud providers need to expand beyond UCaaS into CCaaS and CPaaS, and be ready for what’s coming with AI. Chris recapped two events – CREtech and WORKTECH23, reviewing how today’s office spaces are adapting to bring workers back to the office. This is a key element for anybody’s future of work plans, and Chris also shared first-hand takeaways from tours to Cisco, Google and WestCap’s state-of-the-art facilities. Buckle-up, as we covered a lot of ground on this episode!

The same technologies that contact centers have now embraced to better understand the customer journey can also be used to determine which customers are the most valuable, as well as those they’d rather do without. Ineptitude isn’t the only reason customers are driven away by bad service, and we explore how bad service can also be by design. Jon and Chris raise some darker realities of how customer service is evolving, and how transformative technologies like AI can be a double-edged sword, depending on how well business priorities are aligned with trying to be customer-centric.

We usually cover multiple topics on Watch This Space, but my recent trip to China was so fascinating – and touched on so many tangents – that we didn’t talk about anything else. The main topic was my experience at the Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, with some sidebars to my broader impressions of going to China for the first time. Technology-wise, 5G is the big story here, and not many Westerners have seen what I got see, so if you want to know what’s coming in the wireless world, this is the episode for you.

While we intended to discuss a few current topics, our current episode ended up being mostly about June’s Avaya ENGAGE event. Given how interesting Avaya’s situation has become – what I now call Act III – our discussion also reflected on the broader state of technology, and how the pervasiveness of Big Tech should be of concern to all of us. Whether you want to see Avaya succeed or fail, I think you’ll find our take of interest, especially if you’re in the former camp.

Our May episode started with my takeaways from Five9’s analyst event in Porto, Portugal, with a parallel discussion about how they’re using AI to transform customer service, along with how broader generational changes are increasingly AI and tech-centric. Our analog lens pre-dates these changes, and we explored how digital transformation is taking automation to new levels. We don’t know where it’s heading, but there’s a big difference between automating tasks and processes, and automating thought and emotion. The singularity could be closer than Kurzweil predicted – 2045 – and we left off with the robotics of the mind for our listeners to ponder.

Our May episode took us to Boston and New York, where Jon recounted takeaways from Extreme Networks’ analyst event, and Chris did the same for Jeff Pulver’s VON reboot. Framing those highlights was a broader discussion about where AI is taking us, and what the new generation of tech entrepreneurs is bringing to a space where events like VON played a formative role. Jon also provided a reality check about how tech is driving today’s fan experience, and it has very little to do with watching the ballgame.