2025 Outlook - January 2025 Episode Transcription

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·       Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Transcription: 2025 Outlook - January 2025 Episode

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. Hi, Jon. Always great to talk to you again. Things are still busy, winding down at the end of the year?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, same here, Chris. Same here. What I will say is we are heading into a new month, new year, and new season. This will debut our season #8 for Watch This Space, and as they say, we keep rolling along here.

Chris Fine

Yes, and we both hope that everybody had a happy and healthy holiday season and New Year. That you got to relax or spend time with family or go away or whatever you chose to do that wasn't just the same as all the rest of the year. Right, Jon?

Refresh Update for Watch This Space

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that's what makes it special. It's good to have a break, of course, and recharge. I certainly am seeing a lot of positive signs ahead for 25, certainly on the tech front, which is never dull, and change that's always going on in our lives. I'll start with the podcast and then I'll mention something about me and then you've got some change coming up too at your end. The first thing I would say is if you're listening to this by now, you have undoubtedly noticed a new look for the podcast. This marks the debut of some visual changes to what we do with the podcast, even though it's just listen only. I've added some nice visuals for each episode, which I think will make it a little more engaging, and there's going to be more to come over the next few months.

I'm trying to mix things up a little bit to give the podcast more visibility, be easier to consume, that kind of thing. We don't do this for a living, folks, but it's a good time to make some updates, especially as we go into our new eighth season. So, on my front, Chris, change, yeah, it's always good. I've had gone through a slew of home repairs in the past few months that I'm glad to be finally done with and don't have to worry too much about stuff like that, at least for now. Otherwise, all is good, but you've got some changes coming too, right?

Chris Fine

Yes, I'm busy going through all my collections of endless types of trivia and technology and sorting them out and getting ready to downsize in the new year, move out of the suburbs, move into the city. We're pretty excited about it. It's a giant project, but it'll be nice to have a simpler housing situation. But I have to sort through a lot of stuff. And that's what I'm doing right now. Decide what to keep, you know, do you need a hundred of something, right? Like, do I need a hundred of a certain type of switch? Just 'cause they're classic components and they're not made anymore; do I have to have a whole bag of them? I don't know. But take that and multiply that by a large number of things. That's what I'm doing, but the change will be good. We're looking forward to it.

Digital Natives Will Never be Hoarders and the Joys of Analog

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Well, as I said in the opening, generational change is part of what we look at with future of work and some real interesting parallels there. As analog people, you and I are not unusual in that we accumulate a lot of things over time. And with our passion hobbies of music and electronics, etcetera, you accumulate a lot of stuff that is probably of no use or interest to anybody but us. And I think it's pretty different from the digital generation that as we know, the streaming mentality, why would you own something when you can just stream it? And they tend to be minimalistic by nature. They're not collectors and hoarders from what I can tell, at least yet. As you know, because everything is digital now it's a very different world. They may well not have this problem, although they're probably going to inherit from us once we go, whatever we still have, right?

Chris Fine

I think 1-800-GOT-JUNK is gonna have a field day when we go, 'cause they're just gonna point at everything and say, make it disappear, as the commercial goes. But I'm bringing my core vinyl and my stereo and things I can't part with. The difficulty is things that are bulky that I just can't bear to throw away, and I'm trying to find a buyer for or to donate them to a museum. So, I may have to stuff them into my storage just for a period of time, which I don't want to do, but we'll see. Every day is a decision or 10 or 100 decisions, but you know what it is.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, gee, well, that reel-to-reel tape recorder and collection sure takes up a lot of room, right?

Chris Fine

That's staying with me.

Jon Arnold

You showed me at your house, you have a collection of radio broadcasts from, what was it, Cuba in the 40s or something? That's really eclectic.

Chris Fine

Well, I have a collection of transcription discs, which are 16-inch records that they used to use to broadcast radio shows because you could get enough on a side. Because if you remember, most records back then were 78s and they had three minutes on a side. These are really valuable, but I don't know, I'm going to contact the Library of Congress because there's just no way these are going to be thrown away. They're going to go to a worthy place. There's off-the-air recordings of Winston Churchill and Roosevelt from World War II and homemade acetates of various things. And I just am totally keeping that, even if I have to put it in storage. But there's also other stuff that is less eclectic, so we'll see.

Jon Arnold

Well, as George Costanza said, proudly pointing to his bald head, “these are the remains of a once great civilization”.

Chris Fine

I guess you could put it that way. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Jon Arnold

Well, we think it's still great, honestly. So there.

Chris Fine

Yes, yes.

Jon Arnold

I have my cassettes and I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon.

Chris Fine

I have those too. Am going to sell them and probably reduce that collection, but I'm not getting rid of all of them. I am getting rid of most of the DVDs because I digitize them. They're all on a server, and that's how they're going to be delivered in the future household.

Jon Arnold

We have to live in a digital world now. I have a pretty well-curated super eight movie collection from when I used to make movies as a kid. And I have a lot of footage from vintage concerts from the 70s that are pretty damn good. But there's no sound. So, they're of no use to anybody, but people who just want to look at stuff. But they're pretty good. And in fact, I'm working with someone here for a very famous concert in the blues world here in the 70s. And I have some footage. And he's got people with the audio, so we're going to get together and see if we can do something with it. So, there's a retirement project.

Chris Fine

I was going to say, you know, there's been a lot of work done where somebody's got the video and somebody's got the audio from an old concert because there were a lot of tapers and engineers and amateurs that would try to tape concerts back in the day.

Jon Arnold

And so, match them up underground recordings, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, you just got to match them up. That'd be great. It's easier to do now with digital technology.

Jon Arnold

We can find the people who have the source material. Oh, this is exciting. And yes, the analog world, folks, for some of us is still alive and well, but we have to go digital now, Chris. Let's get on track with today's episode. We're going to start kind of where we left off last episode, where we talked about some 2024 takeaways. We hope you enjoyed those, folks. But we also tried something different - we did a short story review and should probably do another one of these days. We talked about this novella With Folded Hands that you turned me on to. I thought that made for an interesting segment, and now you've got a little follow on for us on that.

Another Book Review – The Maniac by Benjamin Laboutin

Chris Fine

I do. Last month, the book club that I'm in read a really good book called The Maniac by Benjamin Laboutin. And it's really a book in two parts. The first part of the book is about Jon von Neumann, who for if anybody doesn't know, he was a brilliant physicist and mathematician, probably one of the smartest scientific and mathematical minds of the 20th century, and did many things, but among them was pioneering work in the foundations of AI, a lot of work on what constitutes thinking, and how a computer could think. That was extremely influential, and pretty much any kind of computer today owes something to Jon von Neumann.

The second part, so the first part of the book kind of laid the foundations of what von Neumann said about AI before there was AI. Then the second part was about the story of how AI came to dominate the chess world and then the world of Go. If you remember a few years ago, an AI system designed by Google actually defeated the world champion of Go, a guy named Lee Sedol. And Go is the world's most complicated game. It's just not even in the same universe as chess, and chess is complicated enough. But anyway, remember at the end of our discussion of With Folded Hands, one of the things that was said was that what's the point if this AI, if these humanoids have mastered everything so much, I feel hopeless. Why should I play the violin? I'm sitting here with folded hands.

Imagine this, I'm reading this book, and then toward the end of the book, after the champion was defeated in Go, he said “I used to have this sense of pride”, he said a couple of weeks later after losing his third game against Handel when he was interviewed on a popular talk show that recapped his entire career. After this man lost to the AI, he also started losing against regular people, though whatever it was out of him.

“I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then, artificial intelligence put the final nail in my coffin. It doesn't matter how much, it's simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn't matter how much you try. I don't see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it's totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed. It's a devastating force. AlphaGo, which was the name of the AI that beat him, did not beat me. It crushed me. After that, I continued playing, but I'd already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I've realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

How about that? That was taken from real life in what you would call perhaps an early episode of the type of AI dominance that With Folded Hands was ultimately about.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I love it. And you're right, Chris, it's scary and it's deflating, that's for sure. We've had these conversations and there'll be more, as you say, the dominance factor is there. I remember when that whole AI thing was happening around Go, that one thing they found is that once AI could beat a human based on how it was trained by humans, the next level was how AI trained itself. That took it to an even higher level beyond what humans could do. When the AI is training the AI, we have no role in it anymore. Our points of reference don't even come into the picture.

This becomes kind of like a Tower of Babel thing. We're just taking it higher and higher to the creator, so to speak, that there's nothing really to stop it. And this is the point that I take away from all this is that when AI can be autonomous and do everything, you know, teach itself and teach it in ways that humans cannot, we can't compete with that. And that's when it stopped. We have to stop calling it artificial intelligence. What I've always been saying is it will soon become known as advanced intelligence, at which point humans have lost, that we are going to be superseded, surpassed by it. And there's a whole realm of, I know, sci-fi that writes about all of this and the singularity and this concept of centaur in the workplace, etcetera. This is all going to happen in our lifetime, whether we like it or not, I think.

Chris Fine

Well, you're right. You just made a very good point that the whole section of the book about happenings with chess and Go made, which was the way that the AI really beat this guy who was just a historically great champion of Go, was it made a move that probably no one would ever train it to make. It was a move that really started him down the path of losing and he just kept on losing because this was a move that had never historically been made and Go as you know, is thousands of years old. It's a really old game. Like when you think about chess, it's the same way where you have all the classic games and you learn all the moves and the openings and you know, the how you do the offense and the defense and everything.

I'm not an expert but essentially Go was the same. It was a really long tradition of go, and the machine, the people who programmed the AI essentially said, forget all of that. Like you went through your first iteration of learning everything and studying all the human games that were ever played. But now your objective is just to win without breaking the rules. And that's where that's how the AI threw Lee Sedol off the pedestal because he just never expected that move to be made. And the minute that move was made, he was in trouble.

To your point, that once this takes hold to a certain level in any area, it's almost innovative, right? It's going to take an approach that's really just about accomplishing the goal. So, it's going to take a similar approach to what innovative people always take, which is, I know the rules, I respect the rules, I know the past, I respect the past, but if I have to go in a different direction, I will, right?

Jon Arnold

That's human nature.

Chris Fine

Yeah, but it’s not just us though anymore, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

Anyway, I just wanted to read that little follow up because it jumped out at me when I was reading the book. It's like, wow, we just had this conversation about that, about the Jack Williamson story from the late 40s. I'm reading this book and this just, I couldn't believe this passage was in there. And that was why he said he retired.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. So, for posterity, maybe just say one more time the name of the book and the author.

Chris Fine

It is called The Maniac, and it's by Benjamin Labatut, I think his last name is L-A-B-A-T-U-T. And the amazing thing is he doesn't normally write in English. This was his first book written in English, and the language is absolutely stunning. And when you read the book, you almost think, if you weren't bound by all the conventions of the English language and writing, but you knew what all the rules were, what kind of a book would you write? And this is it, it's very innovative, so definitely recommend it.

Our Watch This Space 2025 Outlook

Jon Arnold

Love it. Okay, we gotta do more of these. Let's talk about 2025.

Chris Fine

Yes, we need to do that.

Jon Arnold

Let's spend a few minutes anyways on this. Yes, folks, we don't have stuff that well scripted out here, but we hope you enjoy the dialogue. I think we're just trying to be very authentic, sharing the way we see the world unfolding. Why don't you lead in, Chris, and talk a bit about your top ideas that you see as big themes for 25?

Chris Fine

I think the theme of 2025 is more stability in terms of understanding the role of the office, and the sort of the solidification and steady state of hybrid work. I think you're starting to see office space being redesigned in a real post-pandemic way, and that will continue. I see the trend of organizations not trying to refurb old space past a certain point. and moving to really new buildings in urban markets like New York. I see that continuing. In fact, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that said that one of the big real estate operators in New York City is just doing great because they made a bet on all these new buildings. That's where the kind of top tier tenants are moving to because you can configure the space in a really up-to-date way.

And I think the trend there in terms of internal architecture is almost more hospitality-like than any kind of traditional office. The lighting is more subdued, the space is more comforting and welcoming, more oriented toward collaborative work, but also quiet work if you need it. Less cacophonous, less traffic passing by everywhere, more separation of spaces. Things like that, more different shaped and configured spaces. Make it a place where people understand its role and how that role is additive in a hybrid environment. That's where I see it with work. Then the other trend is obviously the continuing growth of AI. And at that point, I'm going to turn it over to you to get started with that one.

Jon Arnold

The comment you made before getting to the AI, Chris, made me think when you talk about a hospitality-themed approach. Again, you just talked about what the author from The Maniac was doing here, with a pretty innovative take on AI. The idea here that sometimes the innovation comes from outside and, the way you look at the problem set. So, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the major hotel chains start getting involved, because they know how to make a great space look and work, just like they do with restaurant design, this kind of thing. And if we ask the Herman Millers of the world who do offices - and they're really, really good at it - that's the world they come from.

This strikes me as a bit of an opportunity to come from the outside and say, how do we rethink all of this? I've been saying for a long time that I think there's a big opportunity for the Zooms and Ciscos and the Microsoft Rooms people of the world who could be branding those experiences in these business centers you can go to rent space. It's kind of like these third spaces for doing work because it can be a great place to showcase through technology.

And I think here, rebooting the workplace is a great opportunity to re-engage your workers. It's like when you go to those hotels, what they're really pushing now is for you to want the Marriott or the Hilton experience in your home. Like they have lines of merchandise that they sell. If you want to buy the bedding, have that Westin sleep experience in your home. They're trying to extend that experience because the hospitality brand is really warm and fuzzy. It would just be a logical extension to me to see the workplace take on some of those elements.

Chris Fine

Yes. And Miller Knoll, which is now Herman Miller, a combination of Miller and Knoll, has a lot of innovative research work going on about how to redesign furnishings and fixtures for this new generation of workplace. And you also have a new generation of designers and architects coming in whose aesthetic really, I think, was formed by a combination of not liking the trend toward the open offices with the long table, which was your kind of classic pre-pandemic office with the bright lights, and everybody's wearing headphones and sitting there at long tables working.

A dislike for that, having come up in it, and then a fascination with a new way to think about the design of the workplace. And that's all tied in with the technology too, which makes it ridiculously easier than it was once upon a time to have an all wireless office with all the bandwidth you need, video everywhere, collaboration spaces, electronic signage, you know, a lot of AI behind the scenes trying to make all this stuff work better. So, I think there's a new generation coming up in workplace thinking and design that's really exciting. Right.

Jon Arnold

I think so, yeah. And you know what? Last year at Future of Work Expo, we did have a designer, one of the speakers for one of the panels about workspaces. She was good, and a very important part of the equation. If the pendulum starts swinging back to that office experience, we could be not that far off from, I hate to say it but maybe shifting more towards a more corporate paternalism model where maybe they will start hosting daycare centers, make them pet friendly. So many people who live alone, right, have pets, you know, to bring your cat or your dog to work and have a safe space for that. I could see those things happening, which have nothing to do with tech, right? But catering to, as you said, you know, the millennials, the Gen Z mentality about how they view work and what that environment needs to be to work for them.

Chris Fine

I think it's already here. Some innovative companies like Google, they'll buy into the real estate in a whole neighborhood. And even if an apartment building a couple of blocks away from the office isn't officially a Google building, they'll be one of the investors. They'll bring in real estate investors who are super interested because of the Google facility that's around there. I've seen that happen with various neighborhoods in New York City. You could always kind of say, is this great or not? You know, is this not so good? But I do think just because of the reality of economics and the current state of, you know, unaffordability of housing and many other things, there is going to be some effort to try to get involved in the work-life balance.

Now, you know, we have to put in our big caveat about that, because that's a certain kind of company and a certain kind of worker, which does not constitute a lot of people, right? But I do think that you may see that happen more in the industrial manufacturing as well, where they want to attract and keep the right people, the people they want. If they have to invest more in the area or the city or whatever or the infrastructure or whatever they're going to do it. Right.

Jon Arnold

Okay, let's slide over to AI. I'm just going to have a few brief comments because we can go on and on. So, to watch for 2025, I'll just do two or three big ideas. One is, we're going to hear more about small language models. Large language models, LLMs, have kind of become part of the lingua franca in a very short period of time. Anyone who's talking about AI, that has to be part of your vocabulary. That's just the way it is. The reality is, this space - and we've mentioned this before - it's pretty much dominated by the hyperscalers, right? Amazon, Google, Azure for Microsoft. These companies are so dominant because of the cost to build these models. You know, small players can't do this very easily.

 In our world of communications tech, so many companies are building their AI solutions based on these LLMs. We’re already seeing a kind of homogenization of this capability that it's almost becoming table stakes that LLMs are kind of driving so much of you know, the development of AI applications. It's hard to differentiate, right? So, and I think companies are realizing this, aside from the ongoing cost of investing in these tools and not getting the return they would hope for, they need to feel that they can compete more effectively using these tools. This is going to put more attention on the other end of this spectrum, which would be small language models.

The idea there is, of course, to build your AI applications around the language that you use every day in your company, in your region, in your language, in your vertical, right? Stuff that's very specific to the business that you're in. That allows you to create much more precise forms of language, just like we, if you're a well-read person, you're going to have a more precise vocabulary than someone who doesn't read a lot. This is a more effective way to get anything done. So, I think companies are going to start to see the need to do this. There's more sustainability, there's more benefit from having all this, than having just LLM off the shelf kind of capabilities that everybody else has.

Chris Fine

You mean very, very well trained on a smaller data set?

Jon Arnold

Yes. More relevant, and more precise to your universe, right? Your local world. You start getting into things like even like local dialects and slang and all that kind of thing. Those are the real subtleties that really localize who you are. I could see all kinds of businesses saying, yes, we need more of that. So, I think that's one trend to watch for 2025 for AI.

The other one that I’ve mentioned before is the continued cost that companies are bearing to get in the AI game is really, where are the returns? There's going to be more pushback on that. I think that's going to put more pressure on the vendors to help educate their customers and maybe provide more tools that will help them measure the impact of AI on business outcomes or processes or forms of automation, that kind of thing. I talked last year about how I think there'll be pushback on AI this year. That's the kind of economic pushback, and I do think that's going to become more real going into this year. I'll pause on those two now, Chris, for your take.

Chris Fine

I agree with all of it, Jon. I see what I see happening more and more, and it's just the AI getting to be more part of the daily fabric, right? That it becomes a very standard tool, becomes a very standard way of looking at things. I think it's gone through the same stage a lot of technology goes through, where it's kind of a feature, right? Like it's an add-on, but not integrated into the fabric of everything, right? And then that's where you get why, where's the payback? Where's the ROI, right? Because it's kind of an adjunct.

But where I think it's going, and I think there's good and bad aspects of this, is it becomes just more built into everything. It's already built in. Like if you do a search, the first thing that's gonna come back to you is AI generated. So, it just becomes more a natural part of everything. Don't think that's entirely great. I have my mixed feelings about it, but I think the payoff really starts coming when it's just incorporated into the core of things, you know, rather than add it on. The analogy that I would give is when you, let's say when TV went to HD, right?  So, you suddenly have a lot more resolution in the picture. You have a lot more capability of multichannel sound. But for a period of time, you had programming that was kind of designed for the old system. So, the HD was a great add-on. It made it look better, but it was old to begin with.

And like if you played a VCR tape on an HD TV. It took a couple of years to where it just became the norm that movies and TV shows were shot in really high resolution and with all the multi-channel sound and everything else. Only then could it really take advantage of the capabilities of the system. I think we're starting to see going into 2025 that's what's happening with AI as they start from it rather than adding it on. Do you agree? Do you see that too?

Will AI Peak Soon, Like a Shooting Star?

Jon Arnold

I do. And if anything, I may start even thinking now about 2026. As fast as AI has come onto the scene, I can't think of anything that's happened this fast. When you think about how smartphone adoption and the adoption of social media sites like TikTok and Instagram, those are big hockey stick things that happened in much less time than previous tech innovations. And I think AI has outdone them all in terms of going from just a science fiction project to something that has become almost indispensable and ubiquitous in like not even two years. And as you say, once it becomes baked into everything, I just wonder, as fast as it has come into our everyday lives, certainly in the workplace, I just wonder, are we going to hit peak AI very early because it's happened so fast?

Maybe kind of like a shooting star, it peaks really early, and then we don't think about it too much anymore, so to speak. Then I'm just wondering, well, so what's the next thing going to be if AI has kind of conquered everything it's supposed to do? You just think of all the innovations that come along. I can't think of anything bigger right now, honestly, but it just makes me wonder if AI runs its course in a way very sooner than later, just because that's the nature of the technology. I just wonder, will there be something else that isn't on anybody's radar right now that we'll be talking about like this next year? I don't know. But it makes me think about it.

Chris Fine

I think there's a lot to go. I mean, yes, there's some of this first phase that was kind of a fad, lots of predictions that are taking longer to fulfill. But that's not uncommon with this kind of technology breakthrough. I'm thinking about things like genomics, right? Where, you know, where that's gone from where it started, you know, and the Internet and social media and a lot of other things. But you're right. There's always gonna be a certain level of hype, but it's probably the biggest watch this space there is, I guess would be the way I'd describe it.

When you were making that point, I was thinking I saw an interview not too long ago with Eric Schmidt of Google and Sun Microsystems fame. And he made a really interesting point because he said the next step in AI is where, really similar to what we said about Go, where the AI makes more of a determination of how it's going to tackle the problem, not just going and doing it faster based on kind of how the human being that's telling it to solve the problem kind of suggests to solve the problem. And one of the areas that Eric Schmidt commented on this was medical research, where in the past, AI was used as a big pattern matcher to go through a huge amount of research and see if it can find correlations for, let's say, a condition that isn't getting a lot of research money, but needs to be researched.

What we said was that the AI will become more like a researcher itself. So, if you aim it at a condition, it will find out what the symptoms of the condition, the history of the condition, and then will go ingest this vast amount of potentially seemingly unrelated research that may result in a treatment for the condition. And I thought that was an interesting thing because it's a different approach and it reminded me a little bit of how the Go program ended up winning.

Jon Arnold

Just to add to that, Chris, that's how I view this AI thing as well, that as interesting as it is in our world of workplace, communications, tech, I've always felt that this is actually one of the, I don't know, more boring, less interesting problem sets for AI. In terms of a bigger picture, I do think we will start seeing these kinds of breakthroughs in those broader areas of life sciences, climate change, education, urban planning, these kinds of things. I also think the capability is there, Chris, to identify and discover new problems, diseases, illnesses, genetic markers that we haven't discovered yet at all that might add a new chapter to the whole kind of world of what's possible with medicine and extending health and all of these kind of things and predicting diseases and conditions.

To me, it's very exciting that way. And when you start thinking globally, that's where I think the AI story becomes, to me, more interesting and more noble in some ways than I think than what we deal with every day, looking at contact centers and workplace productivity. They're important, but they're not nearly as important as some of these bigger issues that AI could be serving us very well for.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong with AI?

Chris Fine

Well, this starts to get into nightmare territory too. And it makes me think of another short story A Logic Named Joe that we have to cover at some point. That's about a world that's very similar to the Internet. Again, it was written in the late 40s, maybe 1950, where knowledge is stored in central repositories and computers on the edges use it to help solve problems. And one of these devices gets made slightly out of spec and its mission changes. Instead of just finding an answer to what's asked, let me be proactive and say, well, here, have you thought about this? And what's really the answer? That causes the machine to burn through all the rules that the system has about what you can and can't answer.

There's a little vignette when somebody says, well, how do I kill my spouse? And the computer comes back and says, well, are they blonde or brunette? And he says, you know, blonde. And they said, there's a poison in this kind of hair shampoo that nobody knows, but it actually only kills blonde people of a certain age. And you put a little bit of that in their food, and nobody will ever figure out what happened to them.

That's what proactive AI has the threat of doing, and you don't want that to happen. But it could also use the same kind of system if they'd asked that machine, say, what is the cure for Lyme disease? Or something like that, they would find it. They ask how to rob a bank, and the machine figures out how to get in without ever being detected and it just goes on and on and havoc ensues, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

You just have to hope that doesn't all happen, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. AI ethics and morality. I think these are going to be the courses people go to university for soon, because this is what we're going to need. One of my favorite Groucho quotes, I'm sure you know it too, he says as he's trying to establish his credentials – “These are my principals. If you don't like them, well, I have others.”

Chris Fine

Exactly. We're getting a little giddy here.

Jon Arnold

That's almost 100 years ago, folks, but it's just as true today. Okay, so we’ve got to work our way out of this episode, and I want to do that with just a final nod to Future of Work Expo coming up February 11th through 13th. We've got a great program coming, and I have to at least acknowledge that TMC, the host of that show, is a sponsor of our podcast here. Also, many of the themes on this podcast are similar to what we're going to be talking about at the show.

I hope you will come and join us in Fort Lauderdale. We'll certainly follow it on my blog and my LinkedIn posts. The event itself has a website of its own, and you can read all about the program at www.futureofworkexpo.com. And you and I did a video interview that is very likely out by now, Chris, about the event. And I've got a series of them running on TMC's video site. So, we're doing lots of things to kind of let the world know about it. And we hope to see you in Florida.

Chris Fine

Well, I know it's going to be a great event, Jon. Absolutely.

Jon Arnold

Thank you. Yeah.

Chris Fine

I hope everybody manages to attend.

Jon Arnold

Yes. we want people there. So, lots of time. You can come. We won't turn you away.

Chris Fine

Yes, it's really a good program.

Jon Arnold

Thank you. Thank you. Yes, we've got a good collection of speakers. We always do. But check out the site if you want to see what's there because we've been adding speakers all the time. And on that note, it is time to go. We're at the end of time for today, so I want to thank you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed being here with us as we continue exploring the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access all of our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, we'd love you to leave a review or have a rating posted. And certainly, if you have ideas for other topics in the future, we'd love to hear from you on that as well. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks for listening to Watch This Space. Jon, always a pleasure to be with you. I again, hope you had a good holiday. Good luck in the new year and stay tuned for next month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Google, Herman Miller

AI Overload - February 2025 Episode Transcription

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·       Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Transcription: AI Overload

Jon Arnold

Hey, welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, everyone. Hi, Jon. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. How are things going with you?

Jon Arnold

Well, they're okay. I've been away most of the month through January, or at least out of commission for most of the month of January. And as you can probably tell from my voice, yes, I've been, I'm at the tail end of a pretty crappy head cold, chest cold, and I will go today as long as my voice will let me. So, Chris, for those in the know of technology, all the wonderful things that AI can do, is there any app in your toolkit that can scrub this out and make my voice sound normal?

Chris Fine

I haven't found one yet. It may be out there. I usually hear about the latest things from the kids or whatever, yeah. I'll have to ask them. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an app out there to try to remind you to take your medicine or whatever, right? But I don't think there's one that could reach in and actually make you better. I'm sorry you've been suffering, but hopefully it's getting better.

Jon Arnold

Well, it could be good use of deep fake type of technology, I suppose, to, you know, synthesize my voice somehow or make it sound like somebody else's. But that's not where we want to go. How are you doing?

Chris Fine

Yeah. Yeah. I've been busy about to about to move. My whole abode is just a mess and I can't find anything. And it's just startling when you realize how much stuff you have, how much you've accumulated. Other than that, things are moving along. Everything's more or less on schedule and doing the work out there in the industry with the smart building, smart workplace stuff. So I can't complain.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, good, Well, the joys of podcasting, folks, yes, you cannot see how disruptive Chris's world must look right now. And you can't see what it looks like for me to have the end pieces of a cold. I'm not at my best, but I will try to sound my best and we will get through this episode. We're in our eighth season, if you don't know that, folks, and we continue along here. And never short of storylines to talk about. I think we have a few themes to get through today, Chris. One, I think, very topical and one just more about the general flow of what happens in our work lives. So I will push this back to you, and then we will get these conversations going.

Chris Fine

Okay. Well, I think we were going to talk a little bit about DeepSeek, but I had a comment on your remark about Deepfake. I've been watching a series on Netflix called Churchill at War, which is actually very good. One of the things they've done is that they have added excerpts from his six-volume excellent series, The History of World War II, which is a lot to read, but if you're into that period of history, it's an amazing resource.

They have him reading it in his voice, but it's not really him, so they're adding effectively Churchill recordings that never existed and it does a pretty good job. That was just another instance where you're watching something that should be fairly well-known production type work. Or if somebody was imitating him, it would be common to have a human being, an actor imitating Churchill's voice, which of course many do. But this is actually a machine, so I thought that was interesting.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. What a great can of worms, folks. You know, what comes to mind right away is the Anthony Bourdain film, right? That was all synthetically created from, you know, using samples from his real voice to create the narrative for the film, you know, but it was all AI based stuff. Even when you're being transparent about it, like when they do these posthumous voiceovers with artists, what was it, Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, right, doing these quote unquote duets, right? And there's been others like that as well, right, where they can just use the voice and somehow either it's the real voice or the artificially created one and meld it in with current things. And before you know it, you really can't tell the difference. And frankly, for the fans, do they really care?

Chris Fine

Well, I think that Nat and Natalie were a little different because those were tracks that he made that she could, she could duet with.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

But that was him.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that's the real, that's an example of the real. But then when you get the fake stuff, but it's all AI generated, you make it sound like, oh, the person's right there in the room with you. And, but as I say, did the fans really care?

Chris Fine

I doubt it. What do you think?

Jon Arnold

I agree. Like, I agree that you give the people what they want, so to speak. And, but you heard Paul McCartney rail against this stuff recently too, right? With the, even like the songwriters these days have no control over their creation. Right? It's just, it's the streaming services take over everything. And you're just like one small cog in that whole kind of ecosystem. Whereas, you know, the music traditional music publishing model ensured that the creators, you know, got their fair cut.

Chris Fine

Yeah, there was another interesting music related nugget. There's an interesting article, if anybody's able to get the New Yorker online or by Apple News or however you do, or if you subscribe, there's a little article in there about Spotify. Because there's a new book about the history of Spotify. And, you know, I'm a Spotify subscriber so no knock on Spotify but I will say it's kind of interesting to learn about how the Spotify playlists fill themselves out and apparently the way they do is that there is a sub group of artists who nobody really knows but who produce all of this kind of innocuous listen in the background kind of music for Spotify, and they make a fortune, some of them.

For example, if you sign up for a playlist called like Soothing Piano, there's going to be a portion that's actual, you know, traditional music that was recorded for whatever reason, but happens to fall into the category of soothing piano, right? Like, let's say there's a Chopin Nocturne that was recorded because it was an album of Chopin, but it happens to be soothing. So they put that in, but then they start going, you can run these things all day, and people do. It starts to go into this kind of quasi synthetic content that was manufactured just for this.

What's going on right now is there's a whole new bunch of people who want to get into this field who are essentially generating all this with AI. It's not really music in the traditional sense, but it's sort of modern-day music for Spotify. They are real people. But now there's another generation coming, which where it's all AI generated. I thought that was interesting, too.

Jon Arnold

Oh, for sure. This is a whole other episode, folks. But, you know, this is a generational thing, right? As we say in the intro, our analog world - our radar is very good about stuff like this, and we have lots of defense mechanisms to push back against it. But for the digital generation, especially five, ten years on from now, where this is all they're going to have ever known, who's the wiser? And so for us, we just see the bar is getting lower and lower for the kind of things that we thought highly of in our day. The world ecosystem for those things is different now, and you really wonder if any of it could be recreated again ever at all.

There was another one of those flashbacks in the paper today about the, it was a Band-Aid in ‘85. They talked about, you know, doing these mega productions, we are the world, to raise money for famine in Africa and things like this. And getting all of those pop stars together in one room and to create something new and something that the fans would love was a pretty good, honest effort. I would just really wonder, could that even happen today?

Chris Fine

Oh, I think it could. I just don't think they'd actually get together.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

If you look, there's a YouTube channel, for example, called Playing for Change, which is actually very good. It's all work done in the spirit of, you know, against hunger and other good causes in the world. And they have many famous musicians who participate in that. But they also have a more or less consistent pool of musicians around the world that they can pull to become part of whatever the song is. They just take the money they make off YouTube and give it to the charities. You're not going to get everybody in the studio with Quincy Jones, you know, RIP. But you might very well see an even easier way to produce these if people do get behind it would be my point of view.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, would love to see something like that. It takes you back to, you know, Concert for Bangladesh. I think that's the ground zero for all of this stuff. And I think we've talked about this too, having watched that movie recently a couple of times. It’s more innocent times, but the genuine effort that went into that for a true cause and the way people rallied to support it and put on a show that has never happened before, right? That was a really groundbreaking thing and just took just one guy to do it, just like with Bob Geldof to make it happen. But, you know, that was probably the best example of the power of music for social good that I can ever think of.

Chris Fine

Certainly one of the ground breakers. But you know what? If we wax nostalgic here, no pun intended, we're going to lose this entire podcast.

Jon Arnold

All right, let's get right into the present.

Chris Fine

All right, since we know we have to cover this, why don't we get an update on how Future of Work is going? Your conference, it's coming up.

Jon Arnold

Okay.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Future of Work Expo Preview

Jon Arnold

All right. That's very current. By the time folks listen to this podcast, you'll be making your final travel plans for Fort Lauderdale. So, Future of Work Expo is in Fort Lauderdale, February 12th to 13th, which is a Tuesday and Wednesday are the days for our sessions. We've been talking about this off and on here, of course, for quite some time. It's an annual event, so it just happens once on the calendar. And if you don't know, you can see from the thumb banner we use for this podcast that there's a logo on there for TMC.

TMCnet is a media sponsor for our podcast, and they are the kind of the big tent under which the Future of Work Expo takes place. Their mothership show is called IT Expo. It's been running for 20 plus years. It's probably one of the most established tech shows around and they have a very loyal base. It’s in South Florida, and they run a series of sub-events connected to the IT Expo, and my Future of Work is one of those. So, I've been kind of embedded in that ecosystem for quite some time.

As you know, Chris, we've been doing this for a while, and we've got a pretty loyal following, both of attendees and people who compose our speaker roster. Several of our regulars will gladly come back and be part of the experience, which is largely defined by a series of panel sessions that run those two days where we have moderated discussions. So, no presentations, no slideware, and we talk about various aspects of what the future work concept is kind of getting behind.

I realize it's a fairly broad generic term for better or worse, but we've been tracking the space, you and I for years, Chris, both at that event and here, of course, here on our podcast. It's one of the pillars of what we try to talk about. And yeah, so the state of Future of Work, 2025 edition, a lot of similar themes to what we've done in the past, but you can't get away from the predominance of how AI is kind of, I wouldn't say like an anvil falling on top of everything, but it really has that feeling if you're not talking about AI, then you're not talking about future of work.

Chris Fine

Certainly any aspect of the future of work, you have to factor that in, right?

Jon Arnold

Oh, totally, yeah. Again, this is one of those for better or worse ideas because people can't seem to embrace AI fast enough, again, for better or worse. But the idea here is that the promise that it brings for not just automation and efficiency, but this bigger term of knowledge management is becoming a big deal in the workplace now. And of course, by workplace, we're largely talking about, office-based environment, knowledge worker kind of thing. But really, it does apply in a lot of ways to, the remote settings, the mobile workforce, people who work, in campuses and retail and hospitality who aren't in an office or at a desk.

But the common thread for all of those environments is that AI is finally being able to not just generate, but capture and process vast amounts of data that we never really could do anything with before. And what I mean by that, Chris, as you know, is that text has long been a digital medium. Voice in some ways has been a digital medium, but it has never been really captured. And video is kind of catching up. But when you have all the different ways that we communicate, when they can all be in a digital framework where all the inputs can be captured, now you create the tsunami of information. It's really just raw data, but the content of our conversations like we're doing right now, Chris, It's just words, it's just sentences and ideas, but AI now has the ability to attack that, so to speak, process it, treat what we would think of as unstructured information, unstructured data, and pull relevant things out of that apply to whatever the inquiry is about, right?

In other words, if you are, let's say you're a frontline worker and you're, maybe you might be a clinician and you're about to see a patient, and you don't know who this patient, you want to get a kind of a quick primer on their whole healthcare history, their family history. Well, AI can help kind of pinpoint nuggets of data from across these spectrums that it's able to capture and give you a pretty good snapshot that makes it a much more informed conversation. I think anybody in any line of work can see the benefit of that. Now, there's risks and downsides, but I'll stop at that point now, Chris, because to me, that's the essence of where AI really comes into reshaping future of work.

Taking a Closer Look at AI

Chris Fine

I agree with you, actually. Let's just say for a moment that you just looked at AI as a technology, as a tool, right? And you said, what would be the next generation impact of AI versus like the last generation? So, one of the one of the greatest breakthroughs of the last generation of work-related technology was the ability to organize and manage and derive insights from vast amounts of structured information. When you started to get relational databases in the 1970s and 80s. Companies like Oracle, you know, it was gigantic to this day. Going back to IBM, you know, Sybase and then Microsoft SQL, SQL Server and all of that. Plus tools like Excel, where as long as you had a structure to the data, you know, that's like a front-end programming language that could take input from all these repositories of data.

That went further into statistical processing and everything. But the big sort of thing that hung out there as an unsolved problem was unstructured data. And this was a huge issue even in my days as an IT person, right? What do you do with unstructured information? If you can apply a tool like AI to really manage and harvest from unstructured information, that really is a big leap. If you neglect the social and economic implications of AI and you just look at it as an office tool, it's a big, gigantic impact. It's unstructured information and being able to draw conclusions from vast wells of information that nobody with traditional tools could ever plumb. That's kind of how I see it anyway.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. So if we say, okay, I trust what AI is doing here - and I'm not even in a position to question the provenance of how it did what it did or how it drew its conclusions. If you accept it, like with humans, when we communicate, there's an implicit level of trust that I know something about you and I can believe what you're saying, or I take it with a grain of salt. That's our human judgment at play.

Well, we don't really have that with AI yet. If we implicitly trust what's there, you're kind of assuming that AI is, as you say, as a technology tool, that it's objective, it's colorblind, all that kind of stuff. But as we know, at the heart of it, garbage in, garbage out, AI only produces outputs based on inputs that humans create for it. At least now. It's going to change down the road, but when we start building in our own implicit biases, maybe covert or overt, whatever, they've worked their way into the data. That's when you start getting into all kinds of issues. You just name it. Any cultural vector you could think of creates problems. Also, of course, determining what's truthful or not and what are your sources to determine that.

There's a lot of gray there, that if you take AI at face value, you're not going to get past, or you won't even realize that it's being actually more selective than you think. The other side of the coin that we have to keep in mind is that as the humans who are still supposedly in charge, we haven't yielded everything to AI yet. But you can see how this can become a very comfortable relationship where, geez, look how easy it is to get things done now, where you might ultimately have to compromise a few things in terms of how truthful or accurate or representative those inputs really are.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and it makes it more difficult because it's hard to know all the assumptions. I was thinking of an analogy in the structured world. Let's say you're trying to do an evaluation of something on a spreadsheet, and you want to come up with what the thing is worth right now. Like, what are you going to pay for it? What's the range? And there's a lot of assumptions that go into that. If you're a disciplined analyst of this, you would go back and study the model really carefully. And hopefully it would have been created in a way, and let's say Excel, where you would be able to see what those assumptions were fairly easily.

And if it wasn't obvious, then whoever made the model for you, and if you're the decision maker, you're going to send them back and say, you have to lay out for me all the assumptions in this model, right? What's the discount rate? Just what's the cap rate? What's, you know, I could go on and on with the gibberish. My point about AI is it's really hard to understand because there's so much unstructured information and so much inference going on. You know, how do you flag where the assumptions are, right? Like, are you just going to rely on the output and just say, hey, that's biased? Or are you? How do you do an audit on it, I guess is what I'm saying. Does that make sense?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Gatekeepers, guardrails, all of this stuff. There's so much to be determined or things that haven't been factored into the future of work equation yet. These are all threads that we're going to try to talk about on the sessions. An important aspect of that too, when we talk about, well, what does the future work look like with AI? Of course, certain things go to a logical conclusion that if you can automate tasks and if you can use Agentic AI to have one or possibly many virtual assistants under your control that you send out there as bots to do your bidding, then there may be less and less. work for you to do.

So, there is a risk of automating yourself out of a job, which is always a possibility with this stuff. And of course, management is always going to favor that which reduces costs of their overall operation. For them, the charm of AI is very much about cost reduction, automation, as opposed to enriching the workforce's skill set. We can get down that path a little bit later. I think the main idea here is that the AI piece, we have to look at it more holistically about where it will be a positive impact on future of work.

Of course, if AI is going to be the centerpiece of so much of what we're going to be doing, what are the skill sets, right, that workers are missing, that they're going to need? They're going to have to become more AI savvy because ultimately, a big part of their jobs are going to shift to becoming more like orchestrators of AI tools to manage their workflows as opposed to doing the things that we've normally done on our jobs about thinking and decision making and sharing and mentoring and, you know, working in teams.

The very essence of work is going to become kind of filtered through a lot of these AI capabilities, but the workers themselves are going to need different skill sets, as will their managers. And frankly, as will the C-suite decision makers who are backing AI big time - they have to understand the ripple effect that this is going to have on the workforce itself. Unless, of course, their plan is to ultimately replace everybody. But I don't think that's a very realistic scenario.

The Adaptive Nature of AI

Chris Fine 

Don't you think that's going to happen, though? I mean, again, I'm kind of looking at precedent. And of course, precedent can always be broken. But you know, a lot of people ended up having to learn the last generation of tools. That wasn't all an automation of manual processes. There were old breakthroughs in what they were able to do just with whatever capabilities were of the system site. I think that does come. The question is, where's the displacement? As any new technology does, but where does it happen? You just don't know in advance. You don't know what the impact on the day-to-day work content and future of the workforce. But I guess the only thing that we could argue right now is that it is going to be significant, don't you think?

Jon Arnold

I do, yeah. I just think it's the scale of the speed at which it's happening. I'm glad you brought up earlier iterations of technology. When the PC came around in the early 80s and we started to learn about things like, you know, WordPerfect and the PowerPoint type programs and Excel type of programs, they were all these new capabilities, Lotus, right, that we never had before. Well, we didn't have the skills. We didn't have any background in these things. It was all new. So I think everybody kind of learned on the fly. I think to this day, it's fair to say that most people who use these tools only are familiar with or use a small fraction of the capabilities because we don't get tech literacy taught as a subject in school.

When we enter the workforce, we're missing the skills that we ultimately were going to need to be successful, we kind of have to learn them on the fly. But with AI, I don't know if that's going to be good enough. I don't think people are going to have the luxury of 5, 10, 15 years to kind of figure out AI as they go. I think they were able to do that with PC, and learned to get enough of a skill set to be effective in their jobs. But the technology has always remained far ahead of the limited use that we have for these tools.

Chris Fine

One difference about AI, though, is that you can easily see how it would very readily adapt to the user. If you have a PC or Excel or Word or whatever, they get progressively easier to use on different generations, subject to the limits of the paradigms around their design and the capabilities of the systems, but they don't treat one user differently from another, if you get what I'm saying, right? PowerPoint's not going to care if, and I know, you know, Microsoft might argue that they're really trying to make this different and have it be more aware of the user and the user's capabilities. But fundamentally, it's a program that runs a certain thing. It does a certain thing.

But you could argue that as AI advances, just as you or I would do if we were facing off against a colleague at work who-- and our colleagues are all different. They have different perspectives. They have different levels of skill, sets of skills, backgrounds, training, objectives, agendas, job responsibilities. I think the AI gets better and better at determining who it's dealing with. I'm not sure that's entirely a great thing, but I think that when you talk about learning and training, I think that more than past generations of technology, AI will just adapt to who it's dealing with. You get what I'm saying there?

Jon Arnold

For sure. As we will have to adapt to it, because I think one of the big things that makes AI different is this ability to learn and improve continuously, which we did not have in the workforce before. As I've always said, the thing with AI is when you train it, it never makes the same mistake a second time. It will keep getting better and better, and as you say, become more user-friendly as we go. That also means as its knowledge base expands, it's going to be harder and harder for the workers to actually contribute something new to what AI doesn't already do. This kind of touches a bit on like what we talked about last episode, Chris, with The Maniac.

Chris Fine

Yes, The Maniac. Yeah.

Jon Arnold

Right. It's the same thing. Like, what's the point if all I'm going to be doing is training my successor? And that raises the issue, of course, a lot of false positives that you do just to derail it because it's going to take your job away in six months. That's all getting kind of bleak. The main point I think for our listeners is that with AI, there's a lot of sides to this. It's not even a coin. It's almost like a hexagon or something. It has multiple sides and they're all different and we don't really understand it very well yet. Nobody really does, but it's becoming more and more the center point of all the future of work kind of initiatives.

When we talk through our program, whether it's about cybersecurity, job skills that we're going to be needing, the impact of AI on the role of IT, right? These kinds of things, how we're going to be collaborating in the future, how workspaces are evolving, right? These are all tangents that are all these multiple sides of that AI hexagon or whatever you want to call it, but they're all different and they're all going to flow through AI. So that's kind of the gist of what we're going to be doing at the event. So sign up, folks. Come on and join us. We have a few speaking spots left, not many, but yeah, it'll be a continuation of what we've been doing for quite a while.

Chris Fine

Well, it sounds like a wonderful program, and I hate to miss it. It's the one time that I am. It's all related to the move. But if I were able to be there, I would certainly be there and would urge anyone else to try to attend as well. Now, do you want to talk briefly about DeepSeek, because that was kind of interesting what happened this week with the suddenly available, seemingly very cheaply produced Chinese AI. What did you think?

Jon Arnold

Well, that was the big, that was the newsworthy item I thought we were going to start earlier when we talked about future of work. But it's all connected because it's a very good example of what we were just talking about with this whole new universe with AI - how things come quickly and their impact is at a much greater scale than we've ever seen before, it sure obviously took all the big tech stocks down a few pegs, just really out of fear. I think that all of a sudden, if their cost models become obsolete overnight, well, they've got a big problem on their hands.

You really have to, I think, look at this at a couple of levels. I don't think we're, either of us are data scientists enough to deconstruct what they're actually doing in terms of how valid it really is. But the point is that at face value, and we talked about this ahead of the podcast today, what we're really talking about here is, like with any other technology innovation, if you can find not just a better way to do things, but if you can do it on orders of magnitude less cost, you're going to win.

That's the scare that this brought into the whole thing. Not just the way that the Open AIs of the world talk on the scale that they feel is necessary for AI to bring value, that everything they talk about is in the billions or 10s or hundreds of billions of dollars. And you can also see where the current administration is going with betting heavily on AI on the scale that they're talking. It's clearly a big kind of invested belief system that this model is going to be the best way to do things. And if you undermine that in any way with something that's credible, then that is extremely disruptive, as we saw in the past few days, right?

Chris Fine

I think people will sort out how legit and how capable all of these things are. But I feel like from market disruption point of view, it sends a signal that you're entering the next generation of the technology, which essentially exploits or leverages the work done by the very expensive first generation. So If you think about, and we were talking about this before, you know, the internet and PCs and everything else we have today didn't spring out of whole cloth just from the investment made to create the companies that most capitalized on it, like the second generation of companies or third generation.

This was all built on work that was done at government taxpayer expense and some big companies like IBM, which again, had a huge involvement with the government, really from the end of World War II up through, say, the 80s. There was an enormous investment in creating all the foundations of what we now use. And that first generation of companies, a lot of them didn't keep innovating, and ultimately faced the innovator's dilemma. They didn't transition into the second generation of success. But then there was that second generation that was able effectively for free to leverage all that vast amount of knowledge and expertise and innovation that had come out of that big investment. And so I think when people look at this, maybe they say, maybe it's not these guys, maybe it is, but there's been this huge investment in sorting and filtering and adding AI and tagging and everything involved as vast repositories of data.

Now, who comes along and can just grab that, leverage it, that investment? And then how long do the original high-level investments pay off? You see what I mean? Like, if you take the example of communications networks, the Bell System, all of the work that was done on that, when did it stop making sense to support that from an investment point of view? And when did the payoff start to decrease? Because more and more of the value was being poached off by the successor companies that were leveraging all that work. It's the natural flow of things. And so I feel like that was one of the signals here.

Is DeepSeek Innovation or Disruption?

Jon Arnold

For sure. It's a bit like the difference between innovation and invention because DeepSeek is not creating something new, but they're finding arguably a better way, but more importantly, a much more cost-effective way of doing these things. And that's the big one, because when I look at AI as an analyst, one of the things I constantly talk about is that the cost is borne by the enterprises who are investing in these tools. I would say almost blindly that they're spending huge amounts of money on these LLMs.

We've talked about this before, but they're arguably not getting a great return on this yet because the ongoing cost of supporting these models and feeding them and fine-tuning them is ongoing and it gets more expensive all the time. The hyperscalers do very well with this because they have the kind of underlying raw data capability to do all this. But the enterprises are paying for these services, and it's up to them to generate the value from it. And if they are not getting what they feel is an acceptable ROI of some kind, this experiment with AI could lose traction, could lose financial support, and then you have a different problem because now it's not this open-ended thing that just the more you spend, the more you get.

That high cost first generation model has a lifespan. It's not sustainable that way unless the benefits are fantastically great, but we're not seeing that yet. So, if you could do it at a fraction of a cost, you're going to get the attention of the enterprise decision makers very quickly because they don't, it's not their mission to subsidize these first generation players in the hope that they're going to get the net result, because they won't. They have no reason to continue, as you say, if the decreasing returns start to become apparent, why would you keep investing in that model when I can do it for a fraction of the cost? Now I will have some compromises along the way. So those are decisions that have to kind of be part of it. And that's kind of the way we look at it with our analyst mindsets, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, it's one of the things that's interestingly different about watching this play out as opposed to earlier comparables was even the high-cost AIs are so widely available, because of the subscription model and the use of the internet and cloud-based operations, right? If you think about the earlier analogy of computers and you think, one of the reasons that PCs were developed originally was because people wanted a computer in their home or to be able to get their hands on one, you could really invest a finite amount of money and start using a computer. There were the enthusiasts at the beginning, but then businesses. But it was true that, you know, and it was really expensive to get your hand on the prior generation of technology, just even as a user.

Now what I'm wondering is if there is a step function down in cost, like what further innovation does that enable? You know, how similar is it to what happened with PCs? Because you can get your hands on generative AI now pretty cheaply as an end user. You see what I mean? The fact that I could run this new thing on a Raspberry Pie, which there's a very interesting YouTube about, doesn't mean that, is it going to unleash a whole new flood of innovation because it's so much cheaper? I mean, usually that's what happens and it'll be interesting to see.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. So one of the cautions, of course, is China. The timing of it, of course, seems very suspect because it's coming at a time when the US is making clear their AI ambitions and commitment to it all. There's a certainly a geopolitical angle to this, which you can't underestimate. And it may be the subsidies that they might have gotten at home to do this might be far, far greater than we were led to believe. So maybe it's not as easy as they make it look. An interesting example I heard on the radio the other day, where they did an open AI inquiry about getting chips out of Taiwan. And is this going to be a problem for the US? The AI, the Gen AI results came back very fairly even-handed, fairly accurately.

When the same query was done with DeepSeek, the answer came back, it became a political monologue about how China does not recognize Taiwan and how it's not a sovereign state. It's always been part of the Chinese mainland, so we don't know what you're talking about. That's the kind of bias that can be built into a model like this, which can maybe, undermine a whole lot of the excitement that we've just been hearing. And maybe you're, you know, you kind of get what you pay for.

Chris Fine

We will see. The somewhat ironic part to note is I mentioned the experiment of running this on a little tiny Raspberry Pi computer, right? So it's pretty slow when it just runs on a Pi, the DeepSeek. But the guy who did the video was one of my favorite YouTube channels. He said, well, I can speed it up. I can attach a graphics processing unit to it. So he basically took a little adapter and hooked up a board that, you know, of the type that you put in a PC, a GPU, you know, a graphics accelerator. So of course, who makes all the chips in that? Nvidia, the company that came under all the attack with DeepSeek, right? So maybe it's not quite as, you know, obvious as it may have been that day on the market, you know?

Jon Arnold

So at worst, it's a wake-up call. You noted earlier as well, which we should leave a good note on for this is that as with any other technology, the Moore's law effect takes place at some point. Invariably, the cost curves in this LLM world are going to only get lower and lower, right? It's not going to be a constant level of high investment. The potential competitive cost advantage that DeepSeek maybe represents might be a very short-lived thing, because you got to go where the customers are. And right now, the customers are all with the hyperscalers. And eventually, it's in their interest for those cost curves to come down to keep it sustainable over time.

I don't think there's any industry where you can have a sustainable competitive advantage based on price. I don't think that's really possible. But there's always room for things to be cheaper as long as the quality isn't sacrificed. And I think that's the big change, the big kind of dividing line here with this is that I think with the OpenAI type of models there's probably a higher confidence in what you're getting than with something like this, a company no one's ever heard of from, you know, from a not a friendly partner to the US. So, it's complicated, but the wake-up call is there for sure.

Chris Fine

Absolutely. And on that note, having as usual, run longer than we thought we were going to run, are we wrapping up?

Jon Arnold

Let me run that by AI. Let's see what DeepSeek says about that. Should we end now? And the answer is, you should have ended 10 minutes ago.

Chris Fine

You guys are rambling on. I could have said that in like half the words.

Jon Arnold

That's right.

Chris Fine

Time to get lunch.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Let AI re-edit this down for you and you'll get the 200-word version, folks.

Chris Fine

You know what I think we need? I think we need something called Gong.ai, which is like the Gong Show. It listens to everything we're saying, and when we get repetitive and taking too long to say everything, it brings the gong, don't you think?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that could work.

Chris Fine

I think that's coming, by the way. It may not actually be the gong, but I'm waiting for more tools. There's already starting to appear in tools like Zoom and Teams and Webex, etcetera, where they let you rehearse a presentation and they gong you, or they suggest better ways to say whatever you're saying. I'm waiting for that.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, all right. Well, Chuck Barris was not on the wrong track, folks.

Chris Fine

Gong.ai, right? Exactly.

Jon Arnold

Different from Gong.io. That's a different company. On that note, folks, we're going to round it out now. And I mean now, and because my voice is going too. So, we're at the end of time. Thanks all for listening today, and we hope you enjoyed our podcast and that you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes at www.watchthespace.tech or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And, if you like what you're hearing, we'd love a review, a rating, suggestions for upcoming topics, etcetera. With that, I am done. Jon Arnold here, handing off to my partner.

Chris Fine

Chris Fine here. Thanks again for bearing with us and listening to us for this episode. Jon, thank you very much, as always, for the co-hosting. We will be back next month with another edition of Watch This Space.

Companies named:

DeepSeek, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI

Future of Work Expo Review - March 2025 Episode Transcription

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·       Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Transcription: Future of Work Expo Review

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent tech analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another Watch This Space. Hi, Jon. Great to be with you again. I actually realized that I found the scrap of paper that had my little intro script there. I'm really lucky. I kind of knew where it was after the big move this month, you know?

Jon Arnold

You moved out and up. 38 stories up, right?

Chris Fine

Moved into the city, yeah. The empty nesters.

Jon Arnold

Wow, well, this is something we're all looking forward to at some point, folks. It's going from the big house to a smaller space is a whole other thing. But the upside is you're moving from a sleepy suburb to midtown Manhattan. It's pretty exciting.

Future of Work Expo Recap

Chris Fine

Yeah, thanks. It's good. But I got my office set up finally. You know, most of the boxes are unpacked, so that's good. But anyway, big news in Jon Arnold land, right? Because you just came back from your showcase Future of Work, which I was very sorry to miss this here, but hope I get invited back because I know it's always a terrific program. So, I think today you really ought to be the focus because we're dying to hear what you the takeaways from this. So, kick it off.

Jon Arnold

Well, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. And yeah, right off the top, of course, yeah, your move had to happen. So unfortunately, it wasn't going to be able to work for you to get there. So next year is next year, and you will definitely be settled by then. Unless, of course, you choose to move again. But I don’t see that.

Chris Fine

I can't face it, Jon. I can't. I literally can't think about that. And besides, even so, I'm not going to miss two in a row.

Jon Arnold

No, there you go. Your vinyl wouldn't be happy. It doesn't travel well, right?

Chris Fine

It sure is heavy, I'll tell you that.

Jon Arnold

Oh, digital folks, you have no idea what we're talking about. But yes, we love our vinyl, but boy, a milk crate does weigh a lot. Yes, it's a lot of schlepping.

Chris Fine

Yes, well, what are you going to do?

Jon Arnold

Exactly. What are you going to do? Life goes on.

Chris Fine

I want to have at least my core vinyl with me, wherever it is.

Jon Arnold

Wherever it is, because it's still the best. Anyways, yes, we digress a lot here.

Chris Fine

Yes, I know we can't. There's a lot to cover here. So, let's not digress anymore.

Jon Arnold

Okay. All right. So here we are. The Future of Work Expo event is an annual show, and it runs in February, usually the second week. And if you don't know by now, it's part of the IT Expo, which is run by the folks at TMC, Technology Marketing Corp, led by Rich Tehrani and his team. And I've been doing things with them for 20, 25 years. So very familiar group and very loyal group. It's mostly the same people. And they continue to run their IT Expo big tent Show. It's going strong as ever. And within that kind of milieu, they support these sub-events, these specialty events. And mine is one of them, called Future of Work Expo, where I partner with TMC to put the program together and bring an audience to the floor and to the show.

It's a pretty stable format, Chris, you've been with me on this for quite a while now. And I think we have a good setup to the way we do it. The format for this particular show is moderated panel sessions. For this year, we concentrated all the tracks into a two-day period, the Tuesday and the Wednesday. And then the Thursday was, we had also opportunities to present on the show floor. They have these theaters that are set up there, and I did my keynote talk on the show floor on the Thursday. So, I got to do that one two times.

The kind of draw for this event, for those who've never been - and there's a reason why I'm saying that in a second, is really, Chris, there's two reasons. One is because it's a big tech show and it's mostly a trade show. So, it's a lot about the buyers and the sellers generating traffic on the show floor, show, you know, the vendors showing what they have and the customers and partners coming to see what's on tap. And around that, yes, there are all the programs of the content and mine being one of them. It's a pretty good mix. I'd rather we had more time to do sessions, but that's how they run their show. And you know, the second draw for folks like us, Chris, is it's Florida in February. I mean, why wouldn't you want to be in Florida?

Chris Fine

It's always good. It's nice, nice weather, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, right. It it's You know, I wouldn't want to do this show there in August, but this time of year, yeah. And of course, the week I go is the week we get hit with a giant blizzard in Toronto, which we haven't had this kind of snow in at least 10 years. And it's old school snow, folks. You don't want a piece of it, but it took me six hours to shovel up my house when I got home, so I paid for it later.

Chris Fine

Oh, man. But you're all good now.

Jon Arnold

All good. And you don't care. You don't have to shovel anymore. So, you're up in the sky and different world, right?

Chris Fine

No, that's a bit harsh. I do care. I don't want you to hurt yourself.

Jon Arnold

No, not me, but you don't have to worry about snow shoveling.

Chris Fine

Not as much, certainly. Yes.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Well, good.

Chris Fine

I put in my ears, Jon. I put in my ears shoveling.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Folks, we don't do everything forever. Sometimes change is necessary and generally always good. Okay, so that's the backdrop to the show. And maybe before I go on a little bit more about what we actually did there, maybe you could maybe add some color to what you have kind of seen over the past few years in terms of the kind of audience that we have and the vibe?

Chris Fine

Yeah, well, I'm happy to. Jon, he's a relatively modest fellow, but he does put together a great program. with lots of good speakers who come to give various perspectives over a couple of days and the venue is pretty comfortable. The format of the of the panels is really good because you get a lot of extemporaneous discussion. It's not you don't get killed with slides. And it isn't all a vendor fest either. Jon always gets perspectives that are not just people trying to sell things, although the vendors do come and they do a good job. Jon keeps it pretty tight about no real selling. You have to talk more about the concepts that you're involved with and sort of the markets that you address.

And I would say the other thing about the show, which I always enjoy, is that there's really a lot of shows if you're interested. For example, I always focus on IoT, so there's a good IoT program there. It's pretty well moderated and organized. Similarly, there are vendors out on the show floor that are in that space, sensors, etc. So, I find it to be pretty a pretty worthwhile event. And if you're interested in the future of work and different perspectives on that and some of the technologies around that, I would say Jon's program is good to go to and I always enjoy participating in it.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, very good, and thanks for the good words. It's always good to hear. As you say, Chris, being an analyst, you know, that's my stock and trade of having the relationships with a lot of the vendors and they seem to be more than happy to come and say their piece. Absolutely, you know, I think the secret sauce is bringing in these, as I say, other voices that you wouldn't normally see at tech events. Certainly, drawing from the academic community, sometimes a government agency coming out to speak, and also, you know, consultants, people with specialized expertise. So, we try to keep that blend going. Also, companies that are not in the core area of what we do, they might be kind of peripheral businesses to communications technology, so it makes for a pretty rich mix of companies that we know and companies that we don't know. That way, as you say, we keep it, not totally vendor neutral, but certainly not vendor heavy. And there's plenty of room there for new ideas.

To be fair, a couple of things on this. Yes, we had some pretty, household name type of companies with speakers on panels. For example, we had companies like Nice, Zoom, HP, Cognigy, Verint, Mitel, Jabra, and I'm sure a few others will come to mind as we go along, Chris, but certainly leaders in the industry getting some of their people to come out and speak. CDW was another good one. and others from communities that we wouldn't be as familiar with.

Anyway, it's a good mix, a good healthy mix of people. I should also mention when I started off talking about the TMC relationship and how they run this show in support of our future work event, as you know, our podcast here has a heavy focus on future of work. So, to kind of support and align all of that.

We do have, I should mention, that TMC is also a media sponsor of this podcast. This is kind of a way for us to put a spotlight on them and they in turn socialize this podcast in their broader ecosystem of readers. It's kind of a good trade there and keeps our podcast to the regular reach that we generate organically, but also to theirs. That works out well.

I'll get your take on this in a sec too, Chris, is what does future of work mean now in 2025, right? This is the eighth year I've been chairing this event with developing the programming, and a lot of the core themes, Chris, as they're fairly steady, like we talk a lot about things like cybersecurity, the role of IT, the role of the challenges around hybrid work, how workspaces are evolving. These types of themes are fairly common, but what's working more its way into the program now, of course, is AI-related topics. So, the newer areas this year were about the impact that AI is having on various parts of an organization related to work.

That's going to lead us to a bit of a discussion of the keynote that I had where I presented some trends based on industry data. And one of the reliable partners that we talk about here a lot is Leesman. I did cite some of their data in my own keynote, and I'll get to that in a moment. But I just wanted to maybe step back and maybe you can add a little bit too about what Leesman brings to the conversation.

The Leesman Index and the State of Hybrid Work

Chris Fine

Well, Leesman, their basic franchise is a very large database of what you might call worker and management satisfaction data, studies conducted because they're hired by companies to conduct studies of the quality of the workplace and the quality of work and, you know, how people feel about where they work. And they have, last I talked to them, well over a million data points going back years and relatively statistically consistent studies they come out every quarter or so with some new data, and it's always really interesting because if they tell you for example that occupancy rates are X it's pretty reliable because it's based on a lot of input data and their data analysis is pretty good. We talked about a study they did it for one of my clients a year and a half or two years ago, and it turned out that a lot of what they said ended up being true. So, they're a good source of data, Leesman Index.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I reiterated at the event that this is not our data, and we're not pretending it is our data, but Leesman has been very supportive of what we do. And not only are they giving us blessings to cite some of their data, but I even spoke to, was in touch with the author of their current hybrid future report or future of hybrid work, I think it's called. Anyway, so the author, the lead author of the research there, Peggy Roth, we had some dialogue about this. In fact, she provided a quote that I included in my presentation to kind of reflect her overall view of the research. So, it's not just me interpreting their data, but it's actually, you know, coming from them as well. That's just a little bit more credibility, I think, for the research.

This is really important stuff to talk about because when we think about future of work, ultimately it's, yes, it's about people, it's about us, employees, what's the experience like? But also, in the context of this event, the IT Expo is a technology conference. So, Chris, we certainly bring that technology lens to all of this and say, okay, well, what technologies do we need and what role can they play to make this new world of work work?

So, the data that they present and a few other sources that I cited, tells the story at face value. Then we kind of add our own perspective to that to say you know, this is what the trends are telling us. One of the really notable things that I did cite in their research is when you look at the reasons people come to the office and you look at the reasons why workers work at home, interestingly, Chris, the factors are fairly similar, but they just occur in different order of kind of like ranking of being mentioned. You know, things like work-life balance, comes into play. The fact that hybrid work is being mandated. In other words, they don't have a choice, but that seems to be one of the main reasons for each work setting.

Other things have to do with managing their time, social interactions. It's just interesting that the themes aren't that different, but the kind of the priorities of them are. What this means is for organizations and business leaders who are kind of trying to solve this hybrid work dilemma, I have to realize that, you know, there's different sets of needs and expectations for home work and office work. And you got to kind of manage not just the happy ground in between, but there's just a lot of factors. That's another thing that came out of the research. There's a whole laundry list of things, so it's not like you got to get one thing right. That's why, as we've always talked here, hybrid work is really hard to do because there's many factors that go into making that balance work, right?

Chris Fine

Right.

Jon Arnold

What it comes down to is two big themes, and one is the need for social interaction to make it work. Obviously, that's a real driver for going to the office to be in person, but when you're at home, to address that need for social interaction, this is where the technology comes into play a lot more, right? You've got to have the right tools and not just having a meetings platform like Teams or Zoom or Webex, whatever, but also, you've got to have the right hardware around you. You've got to have the right pieces, physical pieces that make that experience good.

So, this isn't really new. The pandemic kind of forced us to learn how to do this stuff. But the data from other sources, aside from these one that I cited in my talk, points to this about the importance of technology to make a better work environment. I talked about a CBRE survey, Chris, and I know you can weigh in on this as well for corporate real estate.

They talked about the importance of what technologies they need in their offices to draw people back to the office. And far and away, the biggest consideration was video conferencing technology. So, if you're going to invest money in retrofitting your office, yes, it's got to have whatever that kind of friendly environment that makes it more social for people to come in. But you've got to have the right toys in that meeting room or those meeting rooms and huddle spaces, etcetera, that make those meeting experiences really, really good.

That was an important piece I found in the research and also the need for things like touchless experiences. And that did definitely follow from the pandemic of not, handling anything physically. But they want to have more and more things that are touch-based and sensor-based, right, to monitor things like, you know, temperature, air quality, lighting. In short, you're right, smart office. Not too many people, I think, have smart homes per se, so it's not like they're going from one smart space to another. But if the office can have really kind of cool smart space features, that's another draw that can bring people back to the office, right?

Chris Fine

Yes, yes. And on the office management side, did you guys talk about occupancy analytics? Because that is a huge topic right now.

Jon Arnold

Yes, it was all about monitoring the usage of the spaces to see what, as you say, to optimize the types of spaces, how they're being used. That guides their decisions about how much real estate space they need to function properly. Another really fascinating piece that came out of this was not only is the physical environment of the office space itself important, but so is everything around the office environment.

This CBRE research pointed to the importance of things like, well, if you're going to draw people from their homes to come to an office environment, you've got to have amenities around that office that help them with their work-life balance. Obviously, you want to have restaurants and local shopping and things for, when they go out for lunch, there's got to be nice places to go. Daycare centers for young kids, it's nearby. On the commute side, you’ve got to have access to good public transit. You’ve got to have charging stations for EVs, things you wouldn't normally think about as a future work kind of driver.

It's the stuff around that physical environment that kind of factors into the bigger picture of, well, if future work is going to be office based, it's got to be more than just the physical space. In other words, when you're making decisions, if you're leaving your expensive grade A space downtown and say, okay, we got to do it differently now, don't just make your decision based on getting the cheapest rent, right? Or getting it into a location that might be kind of in the middle of nowhere. That's just not going to cut it, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah. I mean, I would say that what I'm seeing is the opposite, at least in the major urban markets is companies are looking to grab really premium space, right? Because then they abandon the older, not quite as advanced, not quite as cool to be in kind of space. You've got these areas of the cities that have really been developed in recent years where they're attracting the tenants and the companies are kind of starting with a blank slate in the new space and they're saying, you know, whom can I hire and what can technology can I use to make this really sort of next gen and attract people? We do see that out there.

I would say more than renovating older space to do the same thing, if that if that makes any sense. That actually surprised me. I thought coming out of the pandemic, we would see more just renovation of space, because that's a time-honored way to upgrade things, right, without a big move. But I think a lot of a lot of especially sort of Fortune 500 type of companies said, why don't we just think more out of the box? We can either find or build a new headquarters that really is the way we want it, rather than just upgrade the existing space. There's a lot of change happening and a lot of upgrades, which are an opportunity for, you know, an open ceiling that you can put different technology in that you wouldn't do to necessarily if you were just kind of doing an incremental upgrade. You see what I mean?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, yeah. Opportunities up and down the whole ecosystem, right? It's an opportunity for municipal governments that are trying to attract investment to their area, right? They could be a partner in developing these kinds of new modern spaces that check a lot of these boxes that I was referring to here and just getting it right. As we've always been saying, to get people out of their homes, you got to give them a better experience that they can't get at home. I think there’s a lot of latitude here for out of the box, to look for different ways and do it on their terms, right? Talk to employees. What do they want, right? Then you'll hear, well, I've got the two-year-old kid, I need daycare to make this work. Okay, well, you got to find a way to, you know, make that part of the equation.

So yes, technology is a big part of the story, but these other things are a part of it too, of course. Catering to that work life balance. We can go on and on about the research, but we need you to have a reason to come next year too, folks, so I'll move on.

I did want to say when I did my opening keynote at the event in our presentation space, I'd be remiss to not mention, of course, Jeff Pulver. I was determined to get him somehow on the program. just because it's so important for him to be part of this conversation. The only space I could work him in was on the keynote. So, I had Jeff as a special guest, and because you couldn't be there, Chris, he kind of took your spot and he added his comments as I was sharing all of this industry data. And it was great to have his perspective there. It was also timely, Chris, you may have noticed this too. During the event, he noted that it was marking the 30th anniversary of one of his VoIP milestones. I can't remember which one it was.

VocalTec and VoIP Being the Big Bang of Telecom

Chris Fine

VocalTec.

Jon Arnold

Well, yes.

Chris Fine

It was the first company that really had voice on the net and IP-based voice. Essentially everything we use all the time, including how we're recording this now. is derived from that original research. And that those early days, it's like, all the internet evolved from some of the work that led up to that in those decades. So, 30 years, right? 30 years of voice over IP. And remember, when that started, nobody thought that it would detonate the entire telephone industry, right? Telephones have been around for 100 years - they worked really well. And look at where we are now.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's truly, for folks who weren't there, it was the big bang in the telecom industry. And VocalTec was the first company that kind of brought it to life in a way that businesses could see value in. And well, so the direct line from there to the show was Ari Rabban, who I know you know, from Phone.com. He and I crossed paths many times there - he worked at VocalTec early on, and of course, his boss, Alon Cohen.

Yeah, he was supposed to come to the event, but I think he had a sore back or something and couldn't come. For those of you folks who need to know, kind of connecting the dots of this history, Alon was the founder of VocalTec and certainly one of the pioneer innovators and inventors - probably inventor is the better word of the technology that came to be VoIP and has come to, as you say, Chris, kind of displaced. legacy telephony and putting it into a packetized form so it can run over data network instead of a voice network.

That truly is the big bang that changed everything in telecom. So, there's a real through line here, not just future of work stuff, but the people who are in this TMC ecosystem and the remnants of Jeff Pulver and his VON community are alive and well and still doing things. This space just continues to kind of evolve with the new technology, so it never gets boring.

Chris Fine

No, it doesn't Jon. So, as we think about winding down, what would be a couple of takeaways that you think people should really hear from your sessions? Like, what really came out of it that people should know and would help them?

How AI is Reshaping the Future of Work

Jon Arnold

Technology is obvious, but the AI piece, as we know, it changes every five minutes. One of the big messages is the need for employees to be able to upskill. One of the catch phrases I said at the event was, if you're not thinking about AI, you're not thinking about future of work. You need to filter future work through what AI is doing. A couple of sessions talked about the AI use cases and innovations that are working into the workforce, impacting, you know, everything from knowledge management, workflows, communications, et cetera. If employees are going to thrive in this new environment, they're going to have to get some level of skills that are specific to AI, how to use it, how to manage it, how to orchestrate it. And of course, the digital generation, I think, will come to this natively.

But for older employees who you really want to keep, you're going to have to develop some form of skills base to help them adapt to AI. I think that's a really important theme. In fact, one of the other slides I quoted from another survey from Stanford talked about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. Yes, they expect some headcount reductions through automation, but they also expect net new growth from new jobs that will be created that will be kind of AI-based. And a very high percentage of respondents to this particular survey expected a pretty high level of upskilling to be required for their employees. So, this isn't just me talking, but the data supports this. I think that's a big, maybe an HR-related kind of aspect of future work that I think is a big takeaway from the event.

Chris Fine

Interesting, because that kind of supports what we said last couple of times, which was like every technology evolution, there's reskilling. People do learn new skills, and they become able to work in the new environment.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and that's just going to be a constant with this stuff. And not just work itself. But as we've talked about earlier episodes, Chris, is the organizational kind of structure itself. How are businesses of the future going to be organized and managed? Is it going to be a flatter structure? Is it going to be a decentralized approach? AI is going to reshape a lot of this stuff. So that's one.

The second big takeaway is because AI is becoming so prevalent and there's a hunger for data now. Businesses are recognizing, feed the AI machine and make it work really well, it just needs an endless stream of data. And now they've discovered that data in the workplace from our everyday communications and interactions has value. That's why this is so central to our world of communications technology. Now they are investing, mandating that IT develop capabilities to capture as much data as possible from our everyday communication. That means that all of our calls, all of our texts, all of our emails, because they're all digital now, create these new forms of data that have never been really tapped.

When Jeff Palver talks about vCon and what he and Thomas Howe are doing, this is exactly what they're talking about - for emails to find a way to access, pull out relevant data from these bottomless pits of communication that we've been doing forever. This represents kind of like a bit of a gold mine of potential data that we can be using to make our organizations smarter, more agile, etcetera. That's a very big picture, and it might be a little kind of grandiose and maybe a little too overreaching, but it's very clear, certainly from our sessions, this is a new reality that organizations are seeing. I think it's going to be a key driver for what future of work becomes. It's going to be really about data and knowledge management, because we now have the capabilities to do that with AI.

Chris Fine

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to watch what happens with the vCons because there's two aspects to that that are really intriguing. Number one, it puts some structure around unstructured data.

Jon Arnold

Yes.

Chris Fine

And then the other is it provides a level of security. As I understand it, and it's getting better all the time, to enable you to block off certain elements of data that you might or might not want vacuumed up into the AI. If you have a policy or there's compliance, you know, or other things, it allows you, because it has some structure to separate elements of conversation out, right?

Jon Arnold

For sure. Yeah, and this is gonna seed a lot of what we do for next year, right? Future of work. I think, Chris, as we wrap up now, I'll just give people just a bit of a trailer here to say if you were there, you saw most of the sessions. I did several informal polls during the sessions, and it's clear that most people who were there were first timers, so that's great to see. But because the sessions are not recorded, if you weren't there, you weren't there.

What I will say to you is if you're interested to catch a little bit more of the vibe of what we did during the event, I can point to three things for you. First, if you follow me on LinkedIn, I was posting throughout the show with some commentary and photos in the moment. So that's there to be tracked if you're interested. Secondly, the Future of Work News is a newsletter that's part of the TMC family. They wrote articles about a few of the sessions, and they're publicly available. I also did a blog post a couple of days ago, which is on my website, where I kind of centralized most of the photos I had from the event and links to those articles that covered specific sessions. at the event.

So that's all there. You can check that out on my blog anytime. And of course, what we're talking about here on the podcast. That's the closest I think I can give you for what was going on there. My buddy, Thomas Brannen, a fellow analyst, he videoed my keynote and he's going to release and share some snippets of that fairly soon. So, stay tuned. That'll come on my LinkedIn channel. That's pretty much the story. With that, Chris, we'll wrap up and maybe get you thinking about next year, 2026, February. We'll do it all over again and just keep fine tuning as we go.

Chris Fine

Looking forward to it, Jon.

Jon Arnold

Thank you. Me too. All right, we are definitely at time. So, thank you all for listening today. We hope you enjoyed our podcast here and that you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access all of our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts, and we're on all the major platforms. Anything that you like from listening to us, we'd love to hear your thoughts or review or rating, and certainly suggestions for future topics that Chris and I can cover here for your interest. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks for listening, everyone, and always thank you for following the podcast. And we'll be back next month with another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Cognigy, HP, Jabra, Leesman, Mitel, Nice, Phone.com, Verint, VocalTec, Zoom

Return to Office and Agentic AI Realities - April 2025 Episode Transcription

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·       Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Transcription: Return to Office and Agentic AI Realities

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys, finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as a technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company's Integrative Technologies. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Watch This Space. Hi, Jon. Always good to talk to you. How's your month been?

Jon Arnold

Pretty good, Chris. Yeah, same here. Good to be back. Good to be on another episode with you here. We're into the spring. It's still winter like in Toronto, but you know, you can feel the change out there with the longer days. And in our world, that also means longer forms of travel. So, I'm in the midst of a long run of kind of almost weekly going to different events in different places. I will cover off some of that as we go along here today. Otherwise, things have been going along as usual. And we've kind of finished off from Future Work Expo event from February but have moved on to many other things since then. And I know you have been busy too, out to a couple of things. And I think we'll probably go to that as our start off for today. And then I'll share my updates as well.

Chris’s Recap of Leesman Research Event

Chris Fine

Great, Jon, thanks. And yes, it is getting busy. I mean, I'm not anywhere in the league of travel that you have, but even I am hauling myself around a few times the next few months to various things. So that should be fun. Always good to get out and see new people and see familiar faces, learn about new things. But one thing that I did go to this week that was quite interesting, and it's a bit of a follow-up on your future of work, was an event in New York City sponsored by Leesman Index. And we've talked about Leesman many times.

They're one of the premier research houses on the workplace and workplace technology, worker attitudes, management views related to essentially the office. They always have interesting things to say. They have provided some data to you for your future work. And a couple of years ago – and we talked about this on Watch This Space - I worked with them on a project with HP Enterprise and a bespoke research report about future work and workplace technology. And that was just, they did a great job.

I always try to catch them when they're in town. What was interesting about this one, and they're doing a webinar about it, too, that you can Google and sign up for if anybody's interested, is Leesman traditionally, their claim to fame and base of power is an enormous database of extremely detailed data about worker surveys, about job satisfaction, essentially, but along many dimensions, which companies pay them to do. They then roll it up and evaluate against all their other data points that they have elsewhere into a kind of a common score of workplace quality, called the LMI, the Leesman Index. So, that's their core database.

But what they've been doing in the past few years, really since the pandemic, or it started in the middle of the pandemic, is to talk to senior people, too, mostly top real estate managers. And they have a group of about 135 of them now that they survey about twice a year. And so they are launching a new product called Focus Forward, which is really based on this data, which is fascinating. In fact, the HPE project is one of the first times they used that database when they only had a couple of surveys worth. It allows you to get a sense of what's top of mind for strategic level corporate management, and then compare that to what the workers are thinking. So that was the core subject.

They had three areas of discussion which were super interesting. One was about hybrid work and how, despite the fact that there are all these back to work mandates in the headlines, that that's actually not what's happening in most places. And they had a lot of data to back that up. And then the second one was workplace experience. And that was where there was actually the biggest disconnect between what the managers were thinking and what the workers were thinking about what's most important to them.

Then the third was the ongoing evolution of the real estate portfolio, which this audience or this survey audience is really able to talk about because they're in charge of it. I thought it was an interesting perspective. There were maybe 75 or 100 people there, all, you know, relatively senior real estate managers. It was it was a good program. And as usual, they did a good job. So that was a highlight of my week. But do you want me to tell you a couple of the things that they said?

Jon Arnold

We, as you say, we've, we, we've featured them, in various ways, over the years and certainly for the keynote that I did at Future Work Expo. I had some of their, I think it's called a Hybrid Future Report. I cited some of their research there. But it's always better when you're in person to see it face to face. So yeah, I'm keen to maybe hear a few takeaways that might have stood out for you. And certainly if you see that the sentiment is changing from, you know, say a year or so ago.

Chris Fine

Well, let me give you just a very few bullet points on those three areas. On hybrid work, it's still showing very strongly that most people are working in the office two to three days a week. And again, we always have to give our disclaimer that this is mostly what they would call knowledge workers, right? They're people who work in offices. They're not frontline responders. They're not people who are more operationally oriented. It's more knowledge workers in offices. But despite all the so-called back to work mandates, most companies have settled on some way of managing about two to three days a week for most people.

The corresponding data point for that was they asked the managers, you know, do you think your company has an established policy on this and what do you feel about it? And something like 65% of them said, well, it's a work in progress. It's not really done. We're not that happy necessarily with it, but this is what it is. So clearly, it hasn't really come to where the workplace is compelling enough or circumstances are in place to get people back in most places to the five-day so-called mandate that you see in all the headlines. So that was interesting to see what's actually going on, which is an ongoing story. And it'll be interesting to see if there's any catalyst that's really going to change that.

On the experience side, the one thing I wanted to mention was that they asked the managers basically why, what's the most important thing about the workplace? Like what purpose does it serve and what kind of work does it support and why is it important to people's job content? And the top topic or the top item cited, everybody got to cite three. The top one cited by the managers was collaboration, and that does not match what the workers are saying. The workers and the managers do agree that for collaboration, the workplace is pretty good to sit there in person. It's whatever you do, right?

But for the workers, the top priority and the top job content still is individual-focused work. For that, the home office or remote office just wins, hands down, over the workplace. So, you've got the majority of managers saying, well, we want to set this up for collaboration. But the majority of the surveyed workers saying, what we really need is individual-focused work. And I've seen a lot of anecdotal and other and some research data points that back this up, right?

That the way most offices are configured, it's actually not that good for individual focused work, even if you have to spend part of your day doing that, which everybody does almost. That's one of the reasons why you get people just going in and go for the meeting and then go home. Because in a lot of offices, particularly those that were built in the years before the pandemic, it's all open office stuff. And there aren't enough places where you can just go hide and think. That has to evolve and the managers understand that it has to evolve, but it's not there yet.

Finally on the real estate, they, you know, the general response on the managers is effectively what they call optimizing the portfolio, which effectively is reduction and it's still, it's less than it was the last couple of years, but still 20, 25% trying to cut out the cost. And what I thought was interesting with that - and I was actually going to follow up with Leesman about this - is I don't think it's all just reducing.

I think some of it is swapping into newer space, at least in markets like New York, where there's a lot of newer buildings where they have great offices in them. So I think some of this we're reducing space may be partly offset by going into new space. Those were some of the biggies, but that meant that made for a pretty interesting afternoon and there was a lot of lively discussion about it.

Jon Arnold

Wish I was there.

Chris Fine

Nobody disagreed, really, by the way.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Yeah. And were there any like geographic trends of note?

Chris Fine

Yes. Somebody asked about that. And Leesman said that, yes, it does vary. It varies by geography and factors which they didn't really discuss here, but they do analyze, like commuting. How easy is it to get to the office? How near do you live? And also, what kind of space do you have? But one of the things that came out of the discussion was interesting. There's kind of a perception out there that young people are going to flock back to the office because they're living in small apartments, they have roommates, etc., etc.

That has not proven to be the case as much as people thought it was going to be, because they'll just go work anywhere. They don't have to come to the office necessarily, right? Their workflow laptops or phones or tablets or all of the above. You can go to any kind of a cafe or, you know, a temporary workspace or even the lobby of a hotel or your roof deck or wherever it is you want to work.

A lot of buildings, a lot of apartment buildings, at least in New York, but also the newer ones in a lot of other cities have some lounges and amenity space where you can work. Just the fact that you live in a small apartment is not necessarily driving you back to work. So there was a good bit of back and forth about demographics and geographics and not so much about differences in industry, which we covered in the HPE study and bigger Leesman studies do that. But yes, there was some of that. And it's always interesting to look at the variation.

Jon Arnold

And I know we could spend a lot more time on this stuff. And we've talked about also a few times the role of third spaces that give that balance, because not everyone can work from home. And especially, I'm sure, in Asian markets where people live in very tight quarters, typically just not conducive to that kind of thing.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and I think what's changed - and maybe we leave it at that - but what's changed, I took this away, I'm not sure, I would have to look back at the data to see how compelling it is, but I felt that there was something of a decline in company-provided third spaces versus just upgrading the workplace itself, the office itself, and then letting people either be there or at home. I felt that it was a slight decline in that. So that was interesting.

Jon’s Recap of Enterprise Connect

Jon Arnold

Well, that's great. So we'll go from New York to Orlando.

Chris Fine

Yes, yes, we had a big event. So let's take it away.

Jon Arnold

Short hop, same time zone, which I'll be happy about. And so I had, so there were actually two important events last week, but I could only do one of them in real time. So that is Enterprise Connect, which I typically call the Super Bowl event of enterprise communications. And it's been running a very long time, and much like IT Expo, it has been there kind of like almost forever. This is the biggest and most important event for certainly the tier one vendors, the Microsofts and Zooms and Ciscos of the world.

This is where the community does the most in-depth gathering for the four days that we're there. It is a show that started out, if you don't know folks, basically as a telephony show for the PBX. It used to be called VoiceCon, and it was very much about voice communications. And at the time, telephony was defined by the PBX. And obviously, since then, it's evolved with a few concentric circles around cloud and unified communications and now UCaaS. And yeah, the word you mentioned earlier, Chris, about collaboration. This is what drives a lot of the industry right now. In more recent times, the show has also taken on a focus for the contact center customer experience space, in part because the UCaaS space has become fairly mature in the sense that the leading vendors are well-established, and Microsoft in particular with Teams is very dominant.

The sector is really not doing a lot that's different other than becoming more AI focused. The growth really in the enterprise world for these technologies has been the contact center for a couple of years now because that's a bigger problem set that has more immediate needs and implications. This show has kind of been forced to add that element to the programming mix, and it's making it a little more blurry as what the focus of the show really is. But it's still a must be, must do, must be seen at event for the major players in the space. That extends, of course, to the partners, and extends to us in the analyst community. Ideally, it extends to the buyers who should be flocking to shows like this to help drive their decision-making. But that's turned out to be a bit of a challenge, Chris. The buyers aren't coming like they used to. Really? Wow. Yeah, and we could spend a lot of time maybe speculating on why that is.

But shows like this that are very much driven by the traffic on the show floor, that's a big part of the recipe. There's a lot of education needed in this marketplace, and that's where the real value of this event, I think, comes in because of all the sessions, mostly run by the vendors, but also us in the analyst community. We're, you know, speaking on a lot of these and leading a lot of the panels. But yeah, a lot to be learned, and so much is changing, as we know, especially through the AI lens. It's just every week to something new and different. And it's a pretty big treadmill to kind of keep on top of.

The event does a good job of, showcasing these technologies, but it's a little frustrating, I think, for the, certainly the exhibitors who spend a lot of money to be there hoping to find new customers. It's become more challenging to bring those customers out. So that's a high level take on the show itself. I mentioned, Chris, that, the UCaaS space has become fairly, mature is a bit of a misleading word, but, the vendors are established, the product offering is well understood, and a lot of the vendors have very similar type of offerings. There wasn't a lot of excitement in terms of breakthroughs or innovations in the UCaaS space and collaboration space. The buzz was mostly about, you know, yes, predictably AI and in particular, agentic AI, which I've been tapping as one of the big trends of 2025. And for better or worse, Chris, and I'll let you have your say on this in a second, because I think we're like-minded here.

You know, the excitement around AI is everyone wants to be in, nobody wants to miss out. But when it's a vendor-led phenomenon, which it typically is, there's a lot of focus on the newest, the latest, the greatest. You got to have it and you got to have it now. But yet when you start talking about these new generations of AI, namely agentic AI, but also generative AI, It's hard to put a fence around this to define what it really is, what's the real business benefit of this, how does it actually work? And so there's a risk of just adding another acronym to the mix here and making this space a little less appealing in the sense of, geez, there's just so much going on. I don't even know where to start.

Chris Fine

I guess one place you could start, and I'm kind of just thinking about this in real time, is you could look at use cases where you could argue that if properly implemented, AI, agentic or otherwise, would really do a better job. Right. Like, is there anything where that's true? What, you know, versus a versus an agent versus a human agent? And how many, you know, you could, the thing that comes to mind is probably routine kind of queries.

But my experience just as a consumer, which of course may or may not be typical, is that they're not quite there yet. They're getting there, but a lot, there's an awful lot of times when I end up having to do the equivalent of press zero to talk to an actual person, like trying to get through a telephone tree, you know? I don't know if that's a good comparison. So it feels like it's making progress, and sometimes you have encounters that are good, but I feel like it has a way to go. I don't know if that matches your thinking.

How Agentic AI is Impacting the Contact Center

 Jon Arnold  

Yeah, well, the idea of where to go is challenging because, yes, when it's well-defined, agentic AI applications can do those kind of things, as you say, but not as seamlessly as we would like to think or what we expect as humans who are used to talking to humans when doing customer service. These capabilities are evolving quickly; I will say that. There are some vendors who have some very good real-world, you know, proof points to show where it's being used and how it's making life easier in the contact center and better for the customer. So, the possibilities are there. But yes, as you say, the routine inquiries are kind of the low-hanging fruit for this right now.

The vendors are really sending a strong message that Agentic can be so much more. The big difference here with what makes Agentic interesting is the ability for a virtual agent to handle an inquiry end to end without human supervision, not just to do checkbox kind of, you know, tasks, but to actually behave like a human in terms of using reasoning. That's a hot button term that we're hearing a lot now, that term reasoning, you're going to hear that a lot in the vendor messaging now to basically present the notion that these virtual agents driven by AI are now capable of using logic and building on customer history and human behavior. They're able to draw conclusions that are ideally things that maybe customers weren't expecting or haven't thought about and make sense for them.

On the times when it's right, it is very good. But of course, it's not always that way. So the trust factor here, of course, is a long way to go on that still. But it's clear that this is where the ship is heading, right? This is where all the vendors have glommed on in a very short period of time to say, we believe that AI is good enough that it can handle problem solving at this kind of human-like level where they can draw conclusions, make decisions, based on these inputs. And it does sound a little, a little big brotherish for sure.

When the rules are well established and the guardrails are there, yes, under the right conditions, conditions, agentic AI can be a very good thing in the contact center, but also extended further out, not just there, but in the workplace, right? We're having individual workers having their own virtual assistants that have a persona that basically the worker creates and then dispatches to go out and execute certain tasks. That shows a lot of promise for kind of taking collaboration to a new level where it's more AI first rather than just AI assisted. But yeah, Chris, there's a lot of aspiration here, but we're all trying to get our heads around, you know, is this what we really want? Is this what the workplace is really going to become? And how are we going to know that this is the right thing to do until we try it?

Chris Fine

Yeah, I don't think we know. I sometimes think, and I'd be interested in your view on this, that maybe the underlying goal that's not necessarily articulated, one of the best managers I ever had used to say the widely known but seldom articulated fact, is that really what businesses may be looking for is the ability to support large volume, relatively low to middle quality interactions without people involved and just customers like it or lump it, you know? So I think of things like, you know, dealing with many institutions you could think of, you know, the post office, I don't wanna pick on them specifically 'cause they have some good people, and Lord knows they get enough abuse.

But you know, how, like, are they gonna spend the money to have high quality interactions at customer support - versus just being able to handle the quantity of interactions with lower quality, and that's just the way it is. Sometimes I think that's where it's going, where the kind of intuitive support that you get from a real human being who's really trained, that just doesn't scale.

You can't find enough agents who you're going to pay what they pay, who are really that way, so why wouldn't you mechanize it? Maybe that's where it's going, I think. If they could find a way to make it intuitive and reasoning and logic and really provide a higher level of support, then I think some organizations would do that. But I'm not sure that's the core of it. Do you see what I'm saying?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. To me, it reflects this kind of silver bullet mentality around AI being the solution to a lot of our problems. We're putting a lot of faith in it as the future, and there's no doubt that, that's where a lot of people want to see things go. And it's got a feeling now, maybe more so than last year, I would say that it's kind of inevitable that, every vendor is becoming an AI first story, and that's understandable. It doesn't diminish the importance of human interaction in the mix. And that's kind of an important sub-theme to all this, that they're very much aware that we still have to keep the human touch in the picture here.

Where this goes, the market will decide ultimately, right, how much of this they're going to actually pay for and deploy. But, when you talk to the vendors, who are way ahead of where the customers are typically willing and able to deploy, the capabilities that they have are pretty impressive, that they've really leveraged a lot of these tools. Because the thing with AI too, it's very important kind of underlying theme here is that because AI has the ability to almost like train itself because it draws from all the data and just processes things so much faster than humans can, the ability to drive innovation is just at a whole other level now to do it faster and cheaper.

That opens the door for a lot more new capabilities that we just didn't have. I briefed with several of the vendors there – a notable one, Chris, was a brief I had with Google about their whole AI story, primarily in CX for contact center. What they are seeing in the market is what customers are asking for is they want, they're almost leading with the inquiry about “how can we make AI work for us”? Where are the applications that will make us more automated and more AI-based? In particular, they want to leverage generative AI because it's a way to automate a lot of the communication and the responses that come during the customer service experience.

What they're looking for is basically technology partners who are very much AI first, rather than being customer service or contact center first. In other words, when you think about companies that are, very much out of the AI world, it's companies like Google, right, who are not by nature contact center vendors. When you look at the established players in the contact center space, right, that's how they started. AI has come second. It's come later into the game.

Chris Fine

Right. We're trying to get it to imitate the old model rather than say, if we're starting with something new, what would we do?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. And if this is where buyers are seeing value and are willing to put their money, this actually puts Google, you know, I don't know who else is like this, but certainly puts them in a very good position to really become very credible players in the space. If that's what's going to define value, who does it better than them? So that was a very interesting kind of, I don't know, takeaway for me that I wouldn't have thought of Google that way before. But if this is where the market is going, this tells you what's changing in terms of what constitutes a good buying decision.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and I, you know, I do think we're going to get there because it's inevitable, right, to make the economics of it and the technology power are advancing. so rapidly that it is going to end up powering a lot of things. And, you know, to be honest, Jon, I think if you talk to end consumers or end users of CX, right, whether they be business or individual consumer, that, you know, they would welcome or many people would welcome a method or approach, whether it was mechanistic or not, that just gave you better support. Right. Like if you could prove that it did, if you could, if your customer sat scores really went up and the scores on the interactions really went up, then I think the end customers would support that, don't you?

Jon Arnold

Yes. What makes this space so fascinating to me is that, you know, there's a gap between the buyers and the sellers. And the technology is moving faster than in terms of AI. It's moving faster than anybody is able to really manage. And there's this kind of Pollyanna-ish set of outcomes that people want from this, and they want it as soon as possible. One of the overriding things I see here that I'd be a little worried about is because it's becoming available so quickly, it will be, could become commoditized very quickly. In other words, that like when you talk about things like large language models, everyone has access to this technology now and the cost curves are coming down as you'd expect.

So, it's becoming, a harder thing to differentiate on, much like how we've seen UCaaS become commodified. There is a risk here that this is moving along so quickly that as the costs come down, it will be kind of almost like table stakes for everybody to have and be harder to differentiate on it. I think this just speaks to the need to fundamentally, you know, rethink what AI should do for you because the easy solution is to look for cost savings and automation. But the transformative potential here is a bigger story. Related to that is who you're selling it to, right? Because AI, when you start thinking about contact center, it's not a point solution.

I mean, every line of business in an organization is looking at AI in one way or another. And so decisions around this for one thing, like customer service, it's hard to do this or shouldn't be done in a bubble as isolated from everything else in the organization. This is where, you know, AI strategy comes into the picture of saying, well, yes, we know what the technology can do, but bigger picture, where does it fit to the overall priorities to make the organization itself, you know, more effective, more agile, you know, more responsive to changing you know, changing environment.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I haven't seen the absolute killer app yet, but I see it closing in on a bunch of them that could happen. I don't know yet. But, you know, you mentioned Google, right? So Google is applying AI all the time, every day. I don't know if you every time you do a search, the first thing you get back is AI generated. And it's not useless. But I, you know, I wanted to mention with regard to collaboration, you're right. It's becoming, the word is consolidated rather than commoditized, right? Because it's just consolidated around some huge vendors who give a lot of it away as part of sort of a broader enterprise license or what you're paying for something else and you get this thrown in some, you know, not the equipment itself necessarily, but like the service.

I think having said that about the workplace and the disconnect with collaboration, it feels like organizations still really have to invest in this. And better technology does have an opportunity because you just can't avoid it, right? I mean, even if people are not always in the office, even if people are in different places, and even if there's a different culture or an organization's in a different type of business, don't you think that this is just kind of table stakes? It needs to get better than it is in many places, the collaboration facilities. Despite all of its woes that you mentioned, don't you think it's still an area of investment that enterprises have to do?

Thoughts on Cognigy and Agentic AI

Jon Arnold 

Yeah. And that's the operative word, I think, is have to, because it's just moving so quickly. Even though the benefits aren't earth shaking, everyone can see the potential. The last thing you want to be doing is being the last in line. So, I mentioned, Google was a good example. I briefed with several other companies like Cisco and NiCE along the way here. Oh, sorry. The other ones I'm thinking of would be like Cognigy. So, Google, aside from them, I did meet with several other vendors at the show and getting their updates on things. Companies like Zoom and Cisco, Cognigy, there's quite a few and they're all doing really good work in this space.

There's no doubt that the capabilities are pretty, you know, market ready. They're not going to do everything for you. But just like you say, as enterprises need to invest in AI, obviously the vendors are doing it already because they do see the potential here for where it's going to go. When you start thinking about, things that were like, seem like, magic just a year ago, like, real time translation and the meeting summaries, they've all kind of become standard features now, which are all have a lot of value for sure. But, rising above this, though, I mentioned like an AI strategy thing.

Companies like NiCE are already thinking along these lines. And the narrative that they're using, we're going to see more of this. They're talking more about orchestration. That's going to be a big theme I think you'll see as people start to try to tie all these pieces together. In other words, whether it's collaboration in the office or customer service in the contact center, AI is touching so many pieces now that to pull it all together and really extract distinct value for a particular customer or particular worker on a project team, the AI pieces have to be able to work across multiple systems, multiple touch points, multiple data sets and knowledge bases, and then make kind of pull it all together and make it relevant, kind of almost in real time for the end user, for the person who's going to be using this information and providing kind of digital assist or this co-pilot idea of being by your side along the way to help you.

If you're trying to utilize all this information and you might miss a few pieces, the digital assistant right by your side will bring that into the conversation. This is kind of part of how the orchestration affects everything from like before you have to need it to when you need it until after once you've already used it, how you kind of follow up on maybe next steps, right? All the things that flow from that, whether it's for yourself or other members of a team. This is a more strategic kind of look at the technology.

Just to close out, Chris, I did want to pivot just briefly to another event I was at. I was at Cognigy's Nexus 2025 event in Dusseldorf, an event I was at last year as well. There aren't too many analysts who are getting to this event, but I'm one of them. When you see a vendor who's really laser focused on conversational AI, agentic AI, and also to see what they're doing with real customers, it's a real good validation of the kind of success you can have with AI. Rather than just aspirational stuff or what it could do, a company like Cognigy, which to me is kind of at the front of the line for a lot of these things, demonstrating their ability to automate processes and interactions both with assistance to live agents, but also agentically automating a whole process end to end.

They had some really great proof points from pretty big name customers across many verticals that are getting, you know, tangible outcomes, tangible benefits, and measurable impact on the whole process, whether you pick a particular step in the customer journey or the net impact overall to operations. It was a very good front row seat to see what it looks like when it's working. And the rest of the world still has to catch up to a lot of this stuff, but definitely a company to watch for where this agentic stuff is going.

And also, Chris, to be fair, in the EU, I think they might be a little further ahead in some of these applications in terms of being willing and able to deploy some of these capabilities because I haven't seen this level of integration with these technologies as much in the US yet. It's coming for sure. But the proof points, I'm seeing more evidence of it there than over here directly in the US.

Chris Fine

Well, it sounds like it was a good month. Glad we had a chance to talk about the AI. I'm sure we'll talk more. It sounds like things are rapidly improving, and so it's going to be a question of who deploys it and just it makes such a difference that it gets in all the headlines and that becomes a new standard. Maybe that'll happen soon.

Jon Arnold

I think so. Yeah, I do. And I'm not trying to undermine what's happening in the US, because there are great things happening here. But I just see less evidence of really tangible results so far, or maybe just that the vendors aren't telling the stories enough. But wherever it's happening, it's happening. And I think that's the main, if there's going to be one of these watch this space takeaways for the listeners today is that it is a real thing. By the time we even just do the next episode, there'll be more success points to validate where this is going. I think that's a good kind of wrap up for the month. Certainly the Leesman stuff, Chris, is really important because the workspace is where these tools get used, right?

Chris Fine

Well, it's always good to see research data on people who are actual stakeholders. You know, sometimes you and I get very focused on vendors, but it's nice to see some data that's about, you know, people who are kind of on the other end of all this stuff. We're trying to manage it, right.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. As you say about a killer app, you know, we don't quite have that yet, but I think that will emerge. You know, we're still very much in an experimental stage with this stuff. And the only concern, of course, is if the results really get tepid and we just don't see much financial benefit from this stuff, that the appetite might wane. But, I'm not seeing that yet. There's good reasons to be pushing back in terms of guardrails, et cetera, in the marketplace. But the overall, you know, the overall sentiment is pretty clear. You know, this is where it's going and you got to be with it, not without it.

Chris Fine

I mean, if history is any judge, then mechanization and automation usually ultimately wins. You know, it gets overhyped at first. It's the old hype cycle, but it finds its place, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. And coming from the analog world, I think we understand that pretty well.

Chris Fine

Exactly. Comparable, I was thinking, is analog equipment, you know, like if you're trying to play records or something, you would always try to get the mechanism more precise and everything else. Whereas what they did with DVD players is they actually made them cheaper and cheaper, but they worked because they put more software in the chips to understand what the errors were that the cheap mechanisms would encounter. And they put more redundant data on the disk so that it didn't matter if it's had reading errors, you wouldn't see it on the picture.

So, you know, that was a case where rethinking the problem and mechanization and automation took over, right, versus the fundamental precision or quality of the equipment. And If you have the ability to process enough statistical data and large input data sets, you know, maybe it's similar, right? You see where all the patterns are if you're in AI and you realize what you actually need to focus on. I think that's what they're aiming for, right?

When you have like a problem set with a huge amount of data, can the software, can the systems go in and say, well, you know what, this is what's relevant. And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to do this better, you just have to call attention to the right things. I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's my kind of parting thought for today.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I'm with you on that, Chris. So, you know, analog has its place and more importantly to us, I think it's the way of thinking about things that leads to the value that digital solutions ultimately bring. Because you got to, everything starts with a mechanical or mechanized piece. And then once you automate it, then you can scale to get the results the way, automation can provide. And I think that's being applied now to the workplace and the processes around customer service, et cetera. And, you know, of course, the trick is to keep the human element in there. So far it is. And let's just hope it stays that way.

Chris Fine

Definitely.

Jon Arnold

Okay, so that's time for today, folks. And we'd like to thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed our podcast here and that you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work on Watch This Space. You can access all of our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, we'd love it if you left a review or a rating. And if you have suggestions for future episodes, we're all ears. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

I'm Chris Fine. Thanks again, everyone, for listening to another episode. And we will speak to you next month with another edition of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Cisco, Cognigy, Google, Leesman, Microsoft, NiCE, Zoom

Spotlight on Innovation with AI and Communications Technology - May 2025 Episode Transcription

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·       Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Transcription: Spotlight on Innovation with AI and Communications Technology

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation and emerging tech and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company's Integrative Technologies. Hi, Jon. Hi, everybody. Jon, how are you doing? Did you have a good month?

Jon Arnold

Pretty good. Yes, yes. The travel continues, so I've gotten out to a few events, all of them interesting, as have you. So I'm glad to say as well, though, my run of travel is easing up finally. It's been almost constant since February. I've gotten to see a lot of great events, a lot of the world, actually, which is pretty cool. And I'm looking forward to a quieter May, let's just say. But glad to be here. And it's always good to be with you here. And as much as we are a virtual team, Chris, you know, it's too bad our paths didn't quite cross when I happened to be in New York this week. And, you were at the vCons event, which we'll hear about in a moment, but our paths will cross again later in May when I get to go back to New York again.

Chris Fine

Well, I hope so, Jon. I was sorry to miss you, but I know you had a nice day in New York.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it was almost a beach day. It was that nice. It was pretty good.

 Takeaways From Jeff Pulver’s vCon Event

Chris Fine

That was a warm day. Yeah, well, I was up in Hyannis on Cape Cod at a conference called the vCon Conference. And it was really interesting. The person who put the conference together is our friend Jeff Pulver, who is sort of a tech guru of long standing, very good at spotting trends and getting communities together. That's really his forte. And Jeff, as you may know, was one of the original evangelists for voice over IP, which has revolutionized the entire communications business. He was the force behind an FCC order that protected that business. You know, one of the few sort of just normal people to go and manage to get an FCC order done, not an industry group or anything like that. So that was pretty historic.      

And then Jeff was very early in the days of Twitter and short form messaging and in chat bots and a whole bunch of other things. And so, a couple of years ago, now, geez, it's been almost two years, Jeff started to get interested in some work that one of our other friends, Thomas McCarthy Howe, was doing with the idea of encapsulating conversations in a new way, conversations being interactions that involve voice and video and notes and all the other things we might associate with, let's say, a customer service interaction or a video conference, which if you look at it right now, the data behind all of these things is typically stored in a very ragged way and very proprietary for a lot of vendors. And this is all open source and getting standardized, the vCon.

A vCon allows you to not only encapsulate whatever was captured, but for example, to add AI processing for things like translation. So the vCon object can just be shipped off to an engine that will then come back, let's say, with a translation or notes or whatever, offline from the original conference or whatever the event was.

It's a very promising thing. It's sort of simple at its base, but I've gotten very intrigued with it as well, and this conference was quite a step up from where it was a year ago. You had real companies here, people investing money and building technology around this. And I think that among other things we saw at this conference was there's been a standard type of engine developed that this data can be put into. And then the engine can connect to any external data storage or processing steps. It's called a conserver. That is going to be defined as a standard.

All of this is going to be brought in front of the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, that basically sets the standards for the whole Internet. That's where, for example, the SIP standard for voice over IP got codified and became a worldwide standard. You know, all of the things we use like email and everything else and how web servers work and everything went through that. So, I felt it had a lot more traction. The last day, I wasn't able to get there because it was really for the vendors only and who were involved, but they had an interop lab, you know, to test all the different components that people were working on.

There were nine companies there, apparently, which is a relatively serious amount for an early technology. So, Jon, I think the takeaway is that, you know, companies in your space of unified communications really ought to take a look at this. I think if this keeps going within a year or so, it's going to be visible, you know, really have traction. I think the power of it is quite good. It seems like a simple thing on the surface, but it had its birth in a very practical set of circumstances. Thomas Howe works for a company that does customer service across a wide range of auto dealerships. and they wanted to improve how all the systems work, and that's where this started.

So it had its base and it has its funding and its backing from end users, which is very different from where these things generally start. That's kind of it in a very small nutshell, but I feel like it's gaining traction, these vCons, and that we'll see more from it. Do you see it as relevant to your space potentially?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, for sure, Chris. I want to break this down a little bit because even for me, it's still pretty esoteric. I know you got to speak there and if I if my schedule had lined up, I would have been there as well. If folks don't know, Jeff's been, as you said, Chris, he's been running various types of events for the past few years. And we have both been regulars at his events, speakers contributing to the community. And just to amplify what you said earlier, Chris, Jeff, he's always had that kind of visionary vibe about him. And he usually bets right.

In this case, having gone through what all of us have lived through with the evolution of VoIP and internet communications. When you've seen what works and doesn't work at this stage of the game, I think you'd agree, Chris, there's a little more, I think, gravitas to when Jeff gets behind something like this at this stage of the game, having done what he's done and seen what he's seen, I think there's a probably higher chance of success that this is going to be for real. Like you say, it's looking like a serious thing now. And as you say, the kind of attention he's drawing to this now, it does remind you a bit of the earlier days of VoIP. And once the vendors get in, it becomes a thing, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, and I would say, so Jeff is very good at envisioning trends and he'll kind of get involved at the very early stages of something and try to form a community and get ignition for it. And I felt that that was what was going on here because there were some serious people there, people who are operating businesses that can either use this or can create tools or services for the ecosystem that's growing. And that's what really gets something going. What I spoke about was where else could you use this and how do you go to market and what would make companies interested in this? What's the kind of big picture?

I think the big picture here is the idea of unstructured data, which is a bane to anybody in the IT business, right? Where you have all this stuff laying around. And very often there's no way to combine things that are related, but not, let's say, the same vendor or the same system, the same type of key to match one thing with another.

This uses a very well-known kind of thing called JSON, which is a way of combining data in a standard way. But the structure that it creates allows you to take all the different piece parts of an interaction and combine them in something that can be secured, it can be verified. There's a protocol called SCITT that's similar to the blockchain where you can sign and verify and secure and encrypt a vCon so that, for example, if you need it for compliance or you want to go back and you need a canonical version of something and things don't disappear, you can do that too.

My point was that there's all kinds of interactions in the world that maybe this would apply to, that started out maybe as just an e-mail or something or a message or something, but then it starts incorporating all this other stuff. And it's not really combined together.

So one area that I think about is the security business, where let's say you want to track a visitor, right? You've empowered a visitor to come visit. Let's say it's a technician, whoever it is, a visitor. And now you're probably going through four separate systems to kind of keep track of what they're doing and enable them to access whatever they have to access. Your records are kind of fragmented if you want to go back and do anything forensic, right? You have to go assign somebody to investigate the case. And I envision, you know, an experiment where there are certain triggers that cause a vCon to be created. And then once it is, that's it. That's the bundle.

I think from the point of view of security, that would be really powerful because it would basically then you put it in a database that's optimized for this and you can search it a million ways or put it on dashboards. It's much faster than going back and try to put together a bunch of pieces. There are other instances that I could name, but in your world, contact center interactions are definitely one of them. Like let's say you had a system that managed the day-to-day interaction, and then you had another super-duper AI system out there that was going to analyze everything. This is a way of sending the whole package over to the AI and getting it back in the same way. And so it's all standard, right?

Much less complexity, much less integration, much less code. That's the promise that it has. And so I know I'm going on, but I'm trying to kind of identify what the core of this is. When you apply a standard or set of standards to something, it starts to get really empowered. That's what I think this is addressing.

The Opportunity for Virtualized Conversations

Jon Arnold  

Yeah, there's a lot there, Chris, for sure. Let's break this down a little bit, because I think for anyone who is not familiar with any of this stuff, let's just start with the term vCon. What do we actually mean by that?

Chris Fine

It means virtualized conversation. So, the virtual means that it combines all elements in a single data structure. And the conversations, it means that it's designed to track and encapsulate all elements of a conversation. Conversation to me being an interaction that involves multiple piece parts, multiple media, multiple participants who can be identified, and takes place over a period of time. Whether that's a call to a call center, whether that's a sequence of responses to a tech ticket, whatever it is, you know, phone call, that's a conversation. And that's what it means.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and just to clarify for the audience, because it's easy to kind of interchange the words, con as conversation and comm as communication.

Chris Fine

Right.

Jon Arnold

Just to clarify, this is not strictly just for voice conversations. It could be text-based conversations too, like emails and messaging.

Chris Fine

Sure. Either way, it's not a protocol, right? It's not a standard way of communicating, let's say like voice over IP, right, or SIP. It's more a data structure. So, you know, there are probably instances where something is so simple that you don't really need it. Like just a plain email, Hi, Jon. Hi, Chris. Right? But what's happening is that fewer and fewer things are actually really like that. You know, so I would say conversation expands to interaction. And there are fewer and fewer interactions that are just some simple, only one medium transaction. You know what I mean? There's something greater than a transaction, and that's what this addresses. Does that make sense?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and in fact, transactional types of interactions now are becoming much more automated, again, by AI, which you mentioned earlier, right? And so that's kind of the rise of these better bots that we have that are built around conversational AI that can handle unstructured things and basically, as you say, automate fairly routine interactions where humans don't have to be involved. I just want to again, step back and say, we are talking here primarily about conversations, which to me is also communications between people, right? This is people to people. Is that kind of the universe we're talking here?

Chris Fine

Yes, involving people, at least at this point. Yeah. And you actually raised a really good point, which I neglected to mention, which Thomas Howe says this makes robot food, which essentially means that using this structure or discipline creates artifacts, digital artifacts that are much more easy for AI to digest because everything's in one place. Their standard definitions of the data, as we would say taxonomy, right.

So, one of the things that Jeff always says is that if you go back and try to retrace something, I don't know if you've ever tried it, especially like something that has a whole bunch of pieces or documents or recordings or videos or whatever, whatever around it, it's very often hard to go back and even read. Like if you ask the AI the same question that involved that data a month later and the AI hadn't already committed all of that. it might not even find it. And this provides a record of it. And it also formats everything into a way that's much easier to feed to an AI processing engine.

AI and the Power of Remembering Everything

Jon Arnold 

Yeah, but on that note as well, I think the attraction for a lot of the AI use cases is the fact that it does have full and total and permanent recall of anything it tracks. Right? Like you say, if you and I came back a month later and said, what the hell did we just talk about, Chris? Neither of us would really remember. It'd be hard. But AI, when it captures everything structured or unstructured, it will have, it will cover everything. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or a year ago. Memory is not an issue.

That is, when you talk about things like compliance, you know, all of a sudden, this kind of uplevels things quite a bit to say in terms of the accuracy of our records when you start talking about whether it's financial transactions or medical advice, right? You know, these kinds of things where the content of the communication or the conversation is very relevant or important or could be in the legal world, he said, she said, whatever, it's all there. Right. And I think that's where this could be a superior form of, I guess, representing data. Yeah, retention, documentation.

Chris Fine

Right. Because what you said is true, but then think about how does the AI, I mean, let's even think of it as a fancy version simplified, right? This is oversimplification, but a fancy version of Google search, right? If you go, Google has access, it's crawled everything, it has everything, right? All of you, anything that happens to still be on the web, it's out there, right? But how do you know what's real and how do you know what was the canonical or final result of something from a search? You don't really, right? Because most things are stored in directories, files, that could be modified in any time.

You can go back and look at snapshots, but that's a complex process, particularly if it's backup systems. And so how do you know? Like if you ever try to search for any information, you know what you have to go through to find out what's actually real, and or current, right? The AI has some ability to sort that through. Like, if you have an answer from 2024, it may be more relevant than from 2020. But you know what I mean? There's not really any tagging on a global level that says this is this is, you know, for lack of a better way to say it, the source of truth, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, boy, this gets us through a lot of rabbit holes.

Chris Fine

It does. I'm trying to be simple. I know it's hard to. Let's just think of it as a way of storing kind of unstructured data around conversations and then manipulating it and processing it, attaching it to subsequent follow up steps in a standard way.

Jon Arnold

So, to whatever level our listeners are interested or understand what the hell we're talking about, just again, watch this space in capitals. This is again, when Jeff has had a couple of kind of iterations with this vCon thing now for the last probably year and a half. He wouldn't be sticking with it if he didn't think there was something there, because Jeff tends to move on quickly when things aren't taking hold or have run their course.

As you know, Jabberwocky as some of this stuff might sound right now, as you say, Chris, it's an emerging idea that is going to take shape. When you start hearing terms like blockchain, you start looking at these other worlds that are not normally associated in communications technology. But when you piece them together in a certain way, they start to make a lot of sense.

That's kind of what I'm seeing coming out of this little digital swamp that's being created right now. Some life form is going to emerge from all of this because we know Chris, Thomas Howe is like an 11 on the scale of smart guys. He knows what he's working with and working with the right people to get behind it. this will start to take shape. And so we'll look at this a little bit foggy right now, but I think you and I both know that there's enough pieces there that are worth working on and evolving this into something a little more tangible.

Chris Fine

Yes, I think so. I think this is a definite watch this space, Jon. And I agree with you about Thomas, but to his great credit, he has really surrounded himself with smart people who are enthusiastically involved in this all over the place. And he's been very generous. And the company he's working for, the auto company Strolid, they've really backed him. And there's nothing like an end user business that could come out and say, this thing's great. My CTO did something that's great, and it's helping my business. And he had the business guys there saying that.

A lot of times new technology has to go on and on and on before it gets into an end-user environment, or it's an esoteric IT project that started in an end-user environment, but didn't have somebody visionary behind it who saw the big picture, so it's hard then to make it into a product. I think that we'll see. We'll see. But it's also not super expensive to get involved with it. It's going to be standardized, but there's a lot of opportunity, I think.

Jon Arnold

And I think it's early and esoteric enough that it's too soon for the Amazons and Googles and Azures to jump in; the hyperscalers, because once they do, it's over, they'll own it. But those guys weren't there, right, Chris?

Chris Fine

Not at this point, no. But I will say, though, Jon, that there are companies like those companies and companies like Walmart, FedEx, who will sometimes grab hold of something in a very early stage, like Walmart did with RFID and EDI and a bunch of other stuff. Basically, when they say, you're going to do this, then their whole vendor ecosystem is going to have to conform. We don't have that yet, but we'll see. I also think if one of the major companies in your sector that you talk about all the time and we need to get to that. But I think if one of them adopts it or starts working with it or becomes compatible with it, that's going to be a major boost too.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I think so. And as I say, before the Amazons of the world get in on it, this is why you do it now, because you can. Like I should say, if Walmart can kind of rule the world with this kind of thing, on their terms, you're damn right they're going to do this because it's too late once those other guys start to get involved and kind of set the terms and control the whole ecosystem and the distribution of data and everything.

Just to cap this off, Chris, I've always been not concerned, but wondering, and I've asked Jeff and Thomas about this. A lot of this seems to be things that a lot of what the comms vendors are already doing with their AI initiatives in terms of capturing all the conversations with NLU, NLP, NLG, getting a handle on unstructured data, putting it in a form that AI engines can read and build into their learning models. It strikes me that they're already doing a lot of these things, but I don't understand it well enough to know what it is that they're not doing.

Because that's what I'm trying to get to, see what is it that's happening here, all of the big players, whether it's contact center players or unified communications players, you know, Zoom, Cisco, all the big guys, you know, Genesys, NiCE, the contact center players, that they're not already doing. And I don't know what that is yet. So that's why I need to get a little deeper on this and we'll just kind of keep this conversation going.

Chris Fine

Yeah, Jon, I think that's a good idea. Let's see how this develops. Let's see where the deltas are compared to where the industry is, or whether this is just an easier way for them to do it, right? And to be more interoperable and less complex integration, which may in itself be justification for it.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, because as you say, the key to all of this for the listeners is that it's going to become standards-based, and that's what makes it real.

Chris Fine

And open source. A lot of open source, being an IETF standard.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and as I said with Jeff, having done this with VoIP, having done this, as you say, with the FCC, people who know how this stuff works know how important that is. Once it becomes a standard, then it has legitimacy. Then you can build an ecosystem around that, and that's where the business model starts to take shape, right?

Chris Fine

Right. And when you get people, you know, maybe it's not AT&T yet, but when you get people to stand up or come to something like this and say, you know what, I run a big customer service operation, or I run a phone company, or I run a, you know, an ITSP, Internet telephony service provider, or I run whatever it is, and I'm interested in this, that's a real step.

Jon Arnold

Yep, for sure. Okay, well, we've seen this movie before.

Chris Fine

We'll see.

Jon Arnold

VoIP World, and we shall see.

Chris Fine

Yes, I know I have a bit of geek enthusiasm about this, but I really do feel it's something to it.

Jon Arnold

And for our listeners, we'd like to say you heard it here first, right?

Chris Fine

Absolutely. Well, yes.

Jon Arnold

For the most part, I think that's largely true.

Chris Fine

So what about you? I've said enough.

Recap of Jon’s Events – Cloud Communications Alliance, 8x8 and Vector Institute

Jon Arnold

Yeah, no, this is good. And we, this is a conversation we have to keep moving for sure. But from my side, I had several events over the course of, well, since our last episode. I'll just touch briefly because we are on a hard stop today. I was recently at CCA, which is the Cloud Communications Alliance, which is not that far removed from the vCon world in certain ways, because it is about, you know, you could just change the words, Chris, from Cloud Comms to Cloud Cons conversations, because that's the gist of what it's all about.

Mike Tessler, who many of us know very well. The CCA Cloud Comms Alliance is basically the ecosystem that came from the BroadSoft world. So, most of the MSPs and carriers who had again, Chris, standardized their comms platforms around BroadSoft. That community is still alive and well. For those who don't know, BroadSoft was kind of one of the very first ones to come up with this kind of integrated platform idea. And in time, they were very successful. Anyways, Cisco acquired them and it's been just swallowed up into that bigger brand. But Mike is still very active through his True North partnership that he is an investor and an advisor to several emerging companies in the space.

So he's still very active. Anyways, he gave, I think he gives a keynote there every year. This was in St. Petersburg, Florida. The big takeaway I want to share, Chris, is he talked about how with AI that almost all of the public domain information that has basically, you know, all the search conversations, has pretty much all been absorbed now by AI and all the machine learning models, et cetera, et cetera. So all the public data has now been captured, digitized, standardized, structurized, whatever you want to call it. There's really nothing to compete, sorry, to differentiate on competitively. Everyone has access to that now.

But the flip side, private conversations, like what we're having here that aren't indexed or search engined out there, he says he feels that's more like 2% of all the volume of traffic and discussions that are out there has not yet been captured by, you know, in the AI realm. And that would equally apply here to vCon.

So that's where kind of like the gold rush is. And that's why, and we've talked about this before, how companies now are really embracing AI because they recognize there's a lot of value potentially in that data, if it can only be captured and harnessed and put to work to help optimize workflows, you know, and automate processes, all the things that AI is built to do so.

That's the kind of the big opportunity, right? How do we capture? It's also referred to, I think, as dark data, things that just are ephemeral conversations. But if you can somehow capture all of that and we have the tools to do it now and analyze it and draw predictions and learnings from it, that's kind of where AI can really take things forward. And because it's not been done, there's still a lot of potential there. For enterprises, this is also a land grab to almost have a proprietary, like a small language model of their own internal conversations that become the basis of their own internal knowledge bases, which, you know, that's a form of proprietary information.

There's a lot of opportunities here to do these things. And yet, Chris, everything you've been saying about vCon, I think it's pretty relevant to what Mike was getting at here and kind of where the opportunities are for these new companies.

Chris Fine

Yeah, yeah. I also I think you're going to see much more use of sort of the equivalent of Microsoft Copilot, where it's very integrated into the enterprise data as well as the outside data. And we're, you know, obviously subject to the normal levels of security and everything else. But when you're fully integrated with something like Copilot, if you ask it for some information, it may be able to draw on internal sources too. But again, to your point, those sources have to be organized in a way that AI can understand it and understand that it's relevant, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yep, totally agree.

Chris Fine

I think the small LLMs that are the smaller that are just absorbing all the internal data and not for external consumption are going to really grow. I think a lot of companies are working on that right now with the available tools.

Jon Arnold

Yes, I agree on that point. So we're going to hit time today, Chris. And so I'm just going to very briefly mention two other events that I have been to recently that are worth talking about or referring to. One would be 8x8. I attended their analyst event in Southampton, England, believe it or not, earlier in the month. 8x8 is really coming along with a very good story now. Their management team is well in place.

Their portfolio has kind of been expanded and right sized for the market that they're after, which is mostly mid-tier sized businesses and a strong focus on CX, contact center, customer experience, not trying to compete with teams in the UCaaS space. They've got a good story, and I really like what I see there, and can refer you to some of the write-ups I've done about the event. So there's places to go to learn more. But that's all I'm going to have time to mention about that today.

I also took part very briefly, remotely, in another very research-focused event called Vector Institute, or that's the source of this. where they have an annual event called Remarkable here in Toronto, but it's a very closed community. It's very research oriented. So I wasn't allowed to attend in person, but I could participate remotely and follow some of the presentations. And it was fascinating to see close up some of the real theoretical type of research that they're doing with AI, all of which, of course, from these academic environments will translate into private sector applications and real-world applications. But it's really refreshing to see the kind of level of energy and research dollars that are going into developing these things.

The big takeaway from that, folks, is that when AI starts to become part of the research and development process, the innovations happen a lot faster. because AI can kind of learn and build on previous experiments faster than humans can do it. And that's a big takeaway to me is that the pace of change and innovation is only going to increase the more AI becomes part of the groundwork for doing all of the initial research.

Chris Fine

Boy, I don't know. Is it going to be another enlightenment or is it going to be Black Mirror? We'll just have to watch this space, right?

Jon Arnold

Yes, so as a parting thought on all this stuff, for folks who know how to find me, I document a lot of this stuff on my blog and my various articles that I write, like for No Jitter or BC Strategies. So it's out, the stuff's out there and you can always contact me directly if you want sources and links to these things, because they are there. But unfortunately, we're just on a hard stop for time today. Okay, so with that, Chris, we have to wrap up.

So, thanks everybody for listening today and hope you enjoy the podcast and you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes at www.watchthespace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And by all means, leave us a note if you like what you hear or suggestions for future episodes. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks again for listening. And we will be back with another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

8x8, Amazon, BroadSoft, Cisco, Genesys, NiCE, Strolid, Zoom

Book review - With Folded Hands - Where is AI taking Us? Where is Today's Bob Dylan? Roudup of Events, and 2024 takeaways

Audio links for original podcast:

·      Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·      Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

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Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging technologies, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys, binding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hello, everyone. Hi, Jon. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. It's been a busy month, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's fall. We're going into the, I guess, we're getting into the colder weather. So it's really feeling like the seasons are changing. And we are heading into this being our really our December edition. This is going to be the last podcast for 2024. We'll talk about December highlights, but that won't come out till January. So this will kind of take us out of our season 7. And just like we've had a lot over the years we've been doing this, every year there's interesting stuff. No shortage of fun things and interesting ideas this month, too. I'm sort of at the end of my busy run for travel for industry events, and we'll get to that soon.

So I think, Chris, you know, we're going to set things up maybe in a little bit more of a structured format We're kind of following what our listeners are asking about. Also, we're going through some updating folks to our format, our look and feel. So a bit of a teaser. Starting in January, the podcast itself is going to have a few modernization fresh ups and look and feel. So watch for that. I think you're going to like it. And we're definitely looking to make this endeavor a little more accessible and digestible for our listeners.

So with that, Chris, I'm just going to maybe outline the flow of what we're going to get to today. And we're going to start with a book review, folks, which we've never done before, but I think it's very apropos and you'll see why when we get through it. And then we're going to talk about where we've been the last month, where you've both been on the road with a bunch of things. And as we go into our last month of the calendar year, we'll maybe just recap with some takeaways for the year itself. What were the big stories and themes? So how's that for a starting point for today, Chris?

Chris Fine

That sounds great. So let's dive in.

Jon Arnold

Okay, so here we go. Topic #1. We have never done a book review and it may seem like an odd thing to do on a podcast, but stick with us, folks. That's why we call it Watch This Space. Got to keep it interesting and different every now and then. So today we are going to talk about a short story from the sci-fi genre. that is a classic in its own right. And Chris, I think I'm going to get you to do the setup of this, but it's a story that I didn't know about and didn't know about the writer. Chris, you sent me, you told me about this and sent me a PDF of the story to read.

You have a long history with this story, as with many others in the genre. But it was new to me, and I've just finished reading it. And boy, oh boy, is it on point for what's happening in the world today. And that will certainly be validated by our last section of the podcast, our takeouts for 2024. So over to you to set the stage, Chris, and we'll talk about it in our own way.

Chris Fine

Okay, Jon, great. I've been a fan of golden age, it's so-called golden age. science fiction short stories for a very long time. And if you want to think about golden age science fiction, it stems back to essentially a revolution in the genre that happened in the late 30s and 40s, mostly under a man named Campbell. And Campbell edited a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction, and his guidance to his authors was it can't just be like a space opera. It has to be treating current themes or eternal themes in a context of a science fiction environment, i.e., you have freedom to change the planet, change the people, change the technology, but you need to talk about human themes.

And it resulted in an incredible outpouring of great science fiction for years. And in fact, if you even go back to Star Trek, that is effectively a later generation version of this, where Star Trek was a framework of science fiction with a lot of human themes. And so they could go to a planet where something was different and use that to emphasize some sort of a point. Anyway, today we're talking about a story called With Folded Hands, which is absolutely classic science fiction. It was written by a man named Jack Williamson, who wrote a lot of other great science fiction too. And he taught at the University of New Mexico for a long time. He died not too long ago.

Jon and I talk a lot about the potential impact of AI. And so we started talking a while ago and we said, well, what would be a short story or a very digestible piece of science fiction that was really on point of what might happen? And With Folded Hands is very much that. And With Folded Hands was published, if you could believe it, in 1948. It's about an Earth of the future where it's a combination of space travel, so other planets have been reached and colonized or whatever, but  Earth is still not super futuristic.

It opens up in a very typical town with a very typical guy who's in the household robot business. And these robots are just not that good. And he's not doing very well. And he's on the way home and he sees this new building that owned by something called the Humanoid Institute. And there are these super humanoid robots that are coming to Earth, have come to Earth. And they make everything that is here at the time look like garbage, literal garbage. And their motto, the humanoid's motto, is to serve and obey and guard men from harm.

And so the little robot salesman is on his way home, and he detects that his wife has taken in a boarder who's this guy that nobody's heard of called Sledge. And Sledge is telling this yarn that he invented the humanoids. And he's there to stop them because they've become very bad, even though he designed them to save his own planet, which was on the verge of complete destruction because of war based on a new technology that was literally destroying the planet. But once he built the humanoids with the directive not to hurt people, the humanoids took that far enough where life has absolutely no meaning.

And so the rest of the story is about the humanoid takeover of Earth and how Sledge tries to stop them. And then what happens to him at the end when he becomes assimilated. So Jon, is that a fair synopsis of the story? But it's really AI thought about in 1949 or 48. And so thus very entertaining, but also very thought provoking, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it sure is. And yeah, the town was two rivers, right? They don't tell you where it is. And what was the name of the planet he came from? Something District 4.

Chris Fine

Wing 4.

Jon Arnold

Wing 4.

Chris Fine

And he had fled because when Sledge built the built the humanoids, he provided a certain immunity for himself that they couldn't stop him. They couldn't brainwash him. They couldn't He had immunity, so he was able to escape. And he had devoted his quest of staying just ahead of them so that he could try to fight them. And the story is about how that ultimately becomes something of a futile endeavor. But the humanoids are based on this planet, Wing 4, and they could, but because of the power source that was invented on that planet and almost destroyed it, they can be anywhere. And it's as if they're just there. They don't need separate power. And they're basically invincible.

And, you know, when you think about the intent of artificial intelligence and how it could very easily go awry in a design that's supposed to be good for people, that this is your story. And in fact, I found a quotation on Wikipedia that kind of sums it up. And so I'll read it. It says, in 1977, Williamson's good friend, Frederick Pohl, who was another giant of science fiction, reported that a few years ago, the founder of MIT's AI laboratory, computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, one of the original pioneers of AI, asked to meet Williamson. Jack was surprised, if not pleased, to hear from Minsky's own lips that the humanoids was Minsky's personal candidate for the best non-technical description of the way artificial intelligence was likely to operate that had ever until that time been written.

Williamson reported as of 1980, the story was still being taught at MIT to graduate students in the artificial intelligence department as an example of where computer science might lead. So that's how relevant this story is when somebody like Minsky had it taught at MIT and quoted it as the most accurate potential outcome if things go awry. Thought that was interesting, right, Jon?

Jon Arnold

Oh, yeah. And we are so in the moment with this, like right now in 2024, because we've gone from generative AI and ChatGPT to kind of like the next level of AI, which is really taking over as we speak, right? I mean, all of this, these new advances in AI that are transforming everything now, like we're filtering almost everything we do through the latest iterations of AI. And it's becoming the default for so much, and we're investing so much, obviously, money and resources into mastering speech, mastering language. And just like in 1984, the only thing left that it can't do is thought, right? And as soon as you share any thoughts, speaking, writing, it's tracked by AI.

So at that point, they know what you're thinking. And as long as your thoughts stay inside your head, you like in this book, this novella, you can't do any harm. Your thoughts only stay within you. And it just strikes me that this is so much, you know, it's a bit of a Tower of Babel story, right? Where he or Sledge tries to invent the perfect technology, thinking it will make the world better, but in fact, it turns out to be exactly the opposite. So we, lesson #1 is, we're, there's only one God and humans can't do what God did. And, efforts to do that will end badly, which is exactly what happens here.

But also, it's just the unintended consequences, right? he talks about how These, all these wonderful labor saving devices, you make life so easy and wonderful, but it does everything. And like you say, do no harm. It takes everything away. So all of a sudden we have nothing to do or aspire to. Art has no purpose. There's nothing to strive for in your life because, you know, it's the humanoids have become so advanced. So like my thing with AI is we call it artificial intelligence now. because we're still in charge.

But as soon as AI becomes much more sophisticated and is really, we're working for AI, so to speak, we're gonna call it advanced intelligence because that's what it's moving towards. And like he says in the story, you know, there's no point, like the daughter, what is it? Aurora's the wife. The daughter I think is Gay, I think the name. And she decides, she gives up trying to learn how to play violin. She's like, because there's no point, because the humanoids do it so much better than me.

Chris Fine

I'm going to be better. They're better.

Jon Arnold

They're better. So there's nothing to strive for in life. So there's no meaning. And so there's no, what he thought would create, you know, happiness and bliss turns into the, I think he uses the word futility, is the state of mind that everyone.

Chris Fine

Yes. And the humanoids also have perfected brainwashing and brain surgery so that if you don't like them and you make too much noise, they, in the spirit of calming your troubled soul, will just operate on you. So it's not only the daughter with the violin lessons, the humanoids insinuate themselves. At first, everybody's thrilled to see them because, you know, things like chores disappear, hard, heavy work disappears, you know, the Aurora, the wife, loves the humanoid because they can prepare any kind of food. They can, you know, and they're perfectly mannered and they, but then, you know, they take down your old house that you love and they put up a plastic house that has soft walls that you can't bang into and toys that you can't hurt yourself with.

And, you know, you can't do violent play and, you know, even, even sex is supervised and it's all in the, you know, there's just all of this in the idea of, of guarding people from harm. And the difference between this and a lot of sort of AI stories, classic example being the Terminator movies, is a lot of times, you know, a story will be about some sort of a machine intelligence that really is fundamentally malevolent, right?

So like the world of the Terminator, where that was all invented to fight wars, which is, of course, a very big danger, even in our current day. But With Folded Hands really talks about something that was genuinely built to try to make people's lives better. And you've seen other stories and television and Twilight Zone episodes and things like that that have kind of, you know, echoed this theme after With Folded Hands. But this was one of the original versions of it. And it's just extremely well written and it's not that long, so we can recommend it.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. It's only about, I think the PDF is only about 28 pages, so you could read it. probably an hour or two tops. But I'll find, you know, as the writer in me, I also find it very interesting that it's told in the third person, which I think a lot of science fiction is done that way. So we're not getting the narration from the protagonist, whose name is Underhill. So it's that the story is told kind of from a distance, right? It's just describing everything that's happening.

But we don't get a window into the soul other than through their discussion, the dialogue, right, through the whole story. So it's an interesting perspective. It's kind of got this feeling of detachment because it's not, there's no first-person narrative in it. Here's another maybe unintended consequence to this, Chris. You know, I find it interesting right off the top that his name is Underhill.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

And all I thought about, of course, is the typewriter, which has been obliterated, but I think at the time it was too early to predict what would come to replace a typewriter. This was in '48, I think, '49, when the story came out. So I don't know if that's just a coincidence or not, but that's what came to mind right away.

Chris Fine

I think it meant buried.

Jon Arnold

Under a hill.

Chris Fine

Under a hill, buried. That was my interpretation of it. But you're right. However, if you want to read another story that was preposterously ahead of its time and predicted the whole internet, you can read A Logic Named Joe, which came, I guess, a couple of years later, maybe 1950. And that's a whole other story. So maybe we'll have another book review one time for A Logic Named Joe. But some of these stories are really worth reading. Like if you can get an anthology and go back and read those short stories from that era. First, they're hugely entertaining, and they tend to be extremely well-written. and really open your mind. I started reading these when I was a kid and I would say it's been really influential in my life and I think a lot of other people too.

Jon Arnold

So I have, yeah, I've got the whole collection of Arthur C. Clarke short stories. That's a retirement project to read them all. Coming out of the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, I mean, there's a lot of like understanding the milieu that they were in at the time. So there was certainly the post-war prosperity in America and, there were all the rise of suburban households and, convenience, everything was there to make our domestic lives easier. So it's easy to understand the appeal, especially to his wife at the time of having all these things done for her.

And that would have been like miraculous at the time for that. So I could understand where that's coming from. But you know, this is also right around the time, Chris, that 1984 was published. And actually, Orwell did not live to see. He died just before it came out. And I've talked, this is my benchmark for all this stuff - has always been 1984. And the parallels are like unbelievable. I don't know if Williamson followed Orwell or read him or had a relationship with him, but the ending is almost identical.

Chris Fine

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, with folded hands is a little more mechanistic, but remember the technology was an absolutely key part of 1984 too.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, but at the end, when he gets lobotomized, basically, and he comes to accept Big Brother, and like this, he sees why the humanoids are good, and he's had the, they take the bandage at the back of his head, so he knows he's been done, and now he's happy. And all they want is happiness. And that also ties into the contrast to Orwell is Huxley with Brave New World, where everything is run on the idea of perfection and happiness, that's the state we're striving for and how boring life was and pointless life was in that book.

But that was written in the thirties. But still, the parallels to these are all really, really interesting. And as I said, coming up, 'cause the big term, and we'll get to this for our next episode, I think we'll wanna talk a bit about 2025 outlook and AI agent or agentic AI is gonna be one of the big themes.

And that's the reason you should read this story, folks, because Agentic AI is all about, AI has reached a point now, like literally now, where it's being trusted and used enough. And the big guys, the big tech players are investing heavily in it to create capabilities that can be autonomous and done without human intervention. And that is a real sea change for how we've used AI in the past. We're getting it to trust it to a point where it can do its own decision making. And you can see it's not a big leap from that point to the kind of things that happen here with the humanoids.

Chris Fine

Agreed. And I guess my final thought about this, I guess, because we could talk about this all day, but I'll offer this up, is that I don't think with folded hands is really anti-technology. but it's anti-thoughtless technology that gets a lot of power, right? It shows you how you can go into something with very good intentions, and then have it turn out to be really not good. And so the thing with AI is it just has so much potential power that you really wonder, whether humanity is going to do better than its classic track record of understanding the malevolent effects of technology when a new one comes along.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

Right? Because every new technology really has more and more power. And you wonder what battles might be fought because of mistakes that are made with this and what we might lose because of that, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Well, he talks about the central directive, right? And how he said, he even said himself, my logic was too perfect. He created such a perfect mechanism that all the intelligence is controlled centrally. So those humanoids can multiply endlessly and they all have the same capabilities. And he talks about them being naked, but have like, they don't even have eyes, but you know, they can sense everything. And they have, like I say, there's no point in trying to read or write because it, the humanoids do it better. And, but in the name of what, like you say, in the name of happiness, that's, the driver for all of this?

Well, we want to be happier for sure, but are we that unhappy that, we want to give all this up? No. So, one last idea too, Chris, from this is you mentioned, reading this whole kind of class of writers and this whole genre of sci-fi. I also, what I find so interesting about that style of writing is that it's done free tech, so to speak, right? It's done before any computers or Internet came along, and our mentality, the way we thought about technology. was completely humanistic. We didn't have any technology, you know, narrative in our DNA to compare against that.

So we only could think about what we understood as humans. And so the approach to technology was very much about, you know, be wary of it, it's got limitations, it can't really do a whole lot, but we're still in charge. But yet, when it turns against us, it's like, oh, what have we done kind of thing. But their perspective on technology is very different from a contemporary sci-fi writer who was born in the era of the internet and sees that relationship between man and machine very differently. So I just love that era because it's totally unfiltered. It's totally pure. It's not driven by any technology references that we have today, but they didn't have them.

Chris Fine

You know, I think if I went back to school and I was going to get like a master's degree in some sort of liberal arts, like one of my sort of fantasy projects, I think I would write about that era of science fiction because those so many excellent stories were written and so many of them really proved to be quite, quite predictive of event because they really, as you say, they wrote from a humanistic point of view. So a lot of the stories kind of, used human characteristics and imbued the technology with relation to those characteristics, right?

So if you thought about, if you really understood sort of human instincts and then you looked at the direction of technology and you were just very good at putting the framework together, you could actually predict, you could build a world that was very plausible. And one of the rules of the editors back then is you really had to be believable. you couldn't just go so far into fantasy, although there was a counter movement that was dragons and fantasy and all of that, which was became very big too, obviously. But this had to be something that related to human themes and thus very relatable to people. And so you read Some of the stories and the technology is really way out there, but it's about people.

Jon Arnold

Yep. Yep. And emotions.

Chris Fine

And nature and the earth.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

But you're right. It's like when all of that was written, and if you grew up on that, writing science fiction today seems like a little bit like composing classical music in that you can, but you really have, you got a lot less material to mind that's original.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and it's a lot less unknown now compared to what it was back then. We know so much more about technology and so we can, you know, we have a frame of reference to talk about it. Then it was all just hypothetical what we think could happen. But also the undertones of the Cold War, because again, the contrast of the richness of freedom in America after the war and how, you know, we could be very, our emotions could live authentically compared to the Soviet Union, which is, at the time, which was totally based on reason and rationale, logic, no emotion, the whole soulless, Soviet, mentality, that kind of thing.

So those extremes were kind of that driven, drove most of what we lived through in the West in the 50s. and 60s. So there's an element of that, too, that even within our own Earth environment, yes, we have these two competing kind of narratives of how to build an or how to build a civilization. But he didn't get into that and there was no need to. I think there was just enough there talking about what the humanities could do.

Chris Fine

Well, I think it was I think you could describe the Soviet Union as a type of tyranny. And so a lot of these stories were about tyranny of one kind or another.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, again, 1940.

Chris Fine

Right, and the dystopic effects of tyranny. And so whether it was fascism or Bolshevism brand of communism, it was considered to be tyranny. So that thread actually, you're right, that got to be more so in a whole lot of stories that were written like in the early 50s. But it's just really interesting. And I personally believe that you could write a story, you could write a book, one could, that would be a modern interpretation of some of the way that these thoughts were done. And it would be really good and you don't really see it and it wouldn't be derivative. So maybe that's another project.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. All right, we're going to segue out, but just last on this, just to remind the listeners again, the name, the writer and the story name.

Chris Fine

Sure. The story is called With Folded Hands, and it's by Jack Williamson. And it's in most classic sci-fi anthologies, but you can also probably Google around and find a copy online.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I've got the PDF that came from you. And also, as I read up a little bit, and this too, that it was also extended into a novel as well, right? But was it ever given a screen treatment? Do you know?

Chris Fine

I don't think it was, but it was, if you like With Folded Hands, there's a novel that was actually a sequel to it called The Humanoids, which built a lot of the themes. And also, it also spent a lot more time on Williamson's interest in the potential superpowers of normal human beings and how the superpowers of normal human beings could fight this and who won and who lost. So it's a good book, The Humanoids.

Jon Arnold

Noted. All right, here's the segue, folks. Our analog guys here, fellow listeners, we grew up in a very different time and, you know, music had a lot more social relevance and they were voices. And when you talk about pushback, there is a lot of hurt in today's world, of course, a lot of inequality. And certainly the way things are going in terms of how technology is changing our lives, the way politics is going, the way our economy is going, a lot of unhappy corners of the marketplace. But where, yeah, so Chris, where are the Bob Dylans of today?

Chris Fine

Look, music, it's hard to make blanket statements, right? So let's try to break this down just a little bit, right? And you can agree or disagree. So don't forget that Bob Dylan, he became a very successful guy. And sold out in an old way too. Yeah, to some degree. But I just think music has a different role to a lot of people now. I think it's really, and it's just hard to say this because you're going to have people who are going to say, well, we disagree with you. I think there's still a great potential for protest music, but as it was back in the day that people don't really remember, for a long time, protest music was not in the big business world of music. It just became, it became successful enough that big business noticed, the big labels noticed.

But you know, when you, even when you think about Bob Dylan, you know, Bob Dylan became where he got where he got to because one of the most famous legendary impresarios, you know, talent finders in music. John Hammond discovered him and was able to get him into a studio and get him a contract with Columbia. So I don't think protest I don't think protest via music is a dead thing. I just think that the big mechanism of it is not aimed that way, because why would it be?

I mean, I just listened to an anthology of bubblegum music. And I discovered through one of my favorite magazines called Shindig, which is all about a kind of old garage music and everything. Yeah. And, you can't forget that the Monkees were like the biggest thing for years, that kind of music. But I do think that there's a potential for a protest in music, and you see it on the fringes with folk music and other types of music today. But it's all on the Internet. It's all on, you know, Bandcamp or streaming. And you don't see it as visibly. But if you wanted to compose more socially relevant music, you could and you would have a way to distribute it. It's just not the core of big music, if you want to call it that. I mean, that's my two cents.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. But I mean, the spirit of rock'n'roll, I mean, is what, drove our generation. But it brings me back to Neil Young because, you know, he did it in his own way in the 70s, in the 80s. And then, but he reinvented it. with Pearl Jam, with Rockin' in the Free World in the 90s, just to show, hey, this is how it's done. And there are voices out there who can, you know, who can do what Neil Young did, but there's just less and less of it now. And it's, anyway, it takes me back to the story with folded hands. Like I said, there's no need, there's no role for art or music or personal expression.

Chris Fine

Yeah, With Folded Hands world.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, in that world there's no place for it. And so this makes me think about, you know, I see, and just how everyone feels happy, which is exactly what the humanoids wanted us to do. And so I just feel the contrast there are a little jarring. And I also compare, you know, Taylor Swift in some ways, her popularity is like what the Beatles were at their height. And the Beatles were unstoppable, you know, '65, '66 when they were on top of the world. And as you, I'm sure you remember too from the film, Pennebaker film, Don't Look Back? Don't Look Back, that's it. And there's no apostrophe in the word don't, by the way. I love it.

When he met the Beatles, do you remember this story? They were at the top of the world, like the Monkees, doing pop music, boy meets girl, happy stuff, nothing to be worried about. And he said, remember he said to them, I like what you're doing, but you're not saying anything. And that forever changed the whole dynamic for what the Beatles became. And at that point, they realized he was right.

The times they are changing, as they said, and they started to change the tenor of their music. And they spoke more about, you know, real issues of the day, and they got more psychedelic, blah, blah, blah. But it took just that one thing, that observation from Dylan to say, Look at what I'm doing and how I'm reaching the youth of today. Very different from what the Beatles were doing. And, you know, but there's no one out there, there's no Dylan to counter that. that I can think of that might say, not that we need to change it, but I'm just saying that, the music is of the times and our times today are just as disruptive and chaotic as they were back in the 60s.

Chris Fine

I guess people, musicians and artists have different roles depending on who they are.

Jon Arnold

All right, we're gonna.

Chris Fine

We have to stop. We have to stop.

Jon Arnold

I hope you're liking this stuff.

Chris Fine

Oh my goodness. All right. So let's get back to the future of work, right? So.

Jon Arnold

Okay. All right.

Chris Fine

So what are we going to say at this point?

Jon Arnold

You have two minutes. Where have you been in November?

Chris Fine

Hey, we're supposed to run longer. People say we should run longer. You know.

Jon Arnold

We're already running long. Okay.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I know.

Jon Arnold

Where were you in November, Chris?

Chris Fine

I went to two trade shows in New York, CRE Tech, which is CRE Tech, which is corporate real estate. and ISC East, which is one of the bigger security, physical security kind of show. It's the smaller one, the ISC West is the big one in April in Las Vegas, which is pretty fascinating. And you know, the thing I took away with all of these is just the growing use of video. And we've talked about this. You know, video that started out with surveillance, right? So looking at a door to make sure that nobody broke in and looking outside and make sure nobody's loitering around has gone so far with AI that you really have eyes wherever you want them. And they're getting used for more and more things.

Everything from occupancy analysis, like how many people are there in the space and what's the traffic flow to facial recognition, which really has become eerily good at what it does. both to, it's for use, to replace like a badge, so it verifies your identity, or to detect somebody that's like on the no admit list, or any other thing you could think of with facial recognition. And then correlating that and bringing it all back into an AI backend.

If you looked at kind of the leading-edge products in both of these spaces, That's what you saw. And I think that's going to be open for a big debate, and it's going to depend on what company or organization chooses to adopt it and how they adopt it. But even if you look at some of the products around real estate occupancy analysis that aren't related to security, you're seeing the use of video, even if video isn't what comes out of the back of the camera, even if it's just data that was derived by analyzing the video with technology in the camera, it's still video and you have to wonder where that's going to go.

But to me, the biggest takeaway was video input. Video is a sensor being fed into an AI backend. So that was that was my takeaway from the two shows. Generally interesting to go to if you're into this space. Oh, and also there's just the ongoing debate about back to work, which I want to talk about as a theme of the year. So I'll stop there.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, we talked about video, I think last episode as well. Yeah, for the UC Expo in London, the prevalence of AV exhibitors there. Yeah, I totally agree. And again, it's, you know, comes back to, you know, folding hands a bit, you know, this surveillance thing that they're all seeing, all knowing, and you don't know if it's going to be used for, you know, you know, for good or evil, whatever.

For me, I only had one event travel wise, which was the Talkdesk analyst event, which was just last week in Charleston. Never been to Charleston before, very highly recommended, a lot of history, especially if you're from the East Coast, pretty interesting stuff. And there, just I'll say very briefly, a good example of a pure play contact center vendor that has gone All in, again, here we go with AI and doing very interesting things with, again, agentic AI being a big focus for them and how they're using, you know, all the language capabilities to help agents better understand customer intent and mood and just kind of predicting behaviors and, you know, obviously streamlining processes and workflows.

All in the name of improving CX customer experience, of course, but it's very much, you thought we were doing AI last year, now it's just leaps and bounds ahead of that. So, but one interesting takeaway is, we assume that the market is keeping up with the vendors and it's not. A lot of contact centers are still not stuck with, but they're still invested in premise-based legacy technologies. And they're at risk of, falling way behind because it's hard for them to. to migrate to the cloud, and they have good, valid reasons to stay on-prem otherwise. But companies like Talkdesk also have capabilities that integrate with legacy technology.

So I think a story that maybe not have been told, I think, loudly enough there is that, yeah, you don't have to be cloud-based to get some of the benefits of AI. I think that's a good story for companies that are, you know, for all kinds of reasons, very heavily invested still in premise technologies. And I think That's a good thing. But clearly, there's AI and there's really nothing else right now. I think it's the only story pretty much all the vendors are focused on. So that's my takeaway for being away in November. And otherwise, you know what, I'm not the only analyst. We were happy as some of us at the event there to say, yep, this is our last event for shows for the year. So I'm very happy to be done with that for now.

Chris Fine

So you're done? No more crazy traveling around?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so I'll be home for a while. Yay.

Chris Fine

That is great. I have to take one quick trip out to California and back in a couple of weeks for a meeting, but I'm looking forward to the meeting. I would've normally wanted to stay a couple of more days, but I gotta get back for a bunch of stuff. But that'll be nice to get out there again, I do like to visit Silicon Valley when I can. You know, I actually had a question. I had a question for you about Talkdesk. Is what do all these contact centers feel is the ideal that they're trying to establish with this AI? Don't, that's too big a question, right? But the reason I'm asking it is I think it's similar in the, you know, moving into the themes to, you know, what are, the operators of the workplace trying to establish, like what's their goal?

And my theme would be for 2024, at least in my world, is it really has been a year of transition. And I don't think that a lot, I think everybody's trying to figure out what the new normal is with respect to work. It's just not there yet. And there's a lot of uncertainty and it's really interesting how different perceptions you get talking to different organizations about what they're trying to accomplish with new technology and new design and new work rules and new job structures and everything else. It's just not really there yet. And so it's gonna be interesting to see in 2025, but coming out of 2024, I see a lot of uncertainty, but a huge amount of interest in, you know, smart building, smart workplace sustainability, all the HR elements of the workplace and how it's laid out and how you divide remote and on in-person work. So it's going to be a good watch this space. That's kind of the number one I came out in my space. But what about you?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I do agree there, Chris. You know, this is kind of a bit of our 2024 look back and maybe a little look ahead. A lot of this ties to what we're going to be doing in February at the Future Work Expo in Lauderdale as part of the IT Expo. And I've been remiss to this point, Chris, to mention that TMC is our media sponsor here for the podcast. I got to do a quick shout out for that. But everything you've been just saying now, yeah, this is beyond, this is kind of on the table for what we're going to be looking at during that event.

So if that's your cup of tea, folks, we'd love to see you at the event February 11th to 13th. And we've got, speakers are lining up now for the program and we've got a lot of good topics and it's much along the lines of what we've been saying here. And so that for me, Chris, as a 2024 takeaway, it's much the same. Another comment from Talkdesk event, which echoes what I've heard as well, is that yes, we know where we are as vendors with the technology and we're showing that it works, that it can deliver benefits. But a lot of the market isn't ready yet. They can't adapt it fast enough. And this ties into, like you say, the transition to what the future of work is going to look like. We haven't figured out hybrid work yet. Yes, the pendulum is going more towards the back to office thing. And so we're struggling.

And I think we said this last time, too, that a lot of the focus on video is to help make that in-office experience better and richer in different ways, not just for virtual meetings, but for in-office experiences. And then the other thing too is, yeah, the AI advances have really come a long way, just like they were very radically different last year. We're going to go into even more, you know, more, I'd still call it disruption into 2025. We just don't know, again, coming back to folded hands, we don't know what the intended and unintended consequences of these technologies are really going to look like. we talk about hallucinations with AI, right?

Whatever inputs you give it, that's what the outputs are based on. But now these language models are getting so advanced. They can really just take the utterances, just two or three sentences that we say is enough for them to produce an entire likeness of you, the way you speak, the way you look on video. And it's going to get harder and harder to tell the difference between human-generated content and AI-generated content. And content is just the easy part, but eventually that's going to be ideas. And whose ideas are really going to be setting the tone for how we approach future work. Is it going to be AI-generated ideas or human-generated? We don't know. We don't know.

But that's my big takeaway for 2024 is, yeah, just the higher level kind of, I don't know, table that's being set with AI now. The expectations are getting higher and higher. And it's just the lead. Almost every company I talk to seems to be pretty much at this point all in with AI. And I couldn't say that last year, but at this point in 2024, I think it's pretty clear.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I agree with you. I think at the end of 2024, what we're seeing is much more of AI kind of woven into ordinary life. Like when you look at the latest version of iOS and all of Apple's other software and also what Microsoft is doing. It's just much more likely that in a given day, you're going to have contact with it. It's assimilating itself into every aspect of interfacing with technology and becoming much more of an ordinary part of the picture. And it's done this in a relatively short period of time.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

You know, when you go into 2025, you can just see that really continuing, but being more and more involved in more and more aspect of life.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and it's benign, and we don't even realize it as it's going along. And again, coming back to With Folded Hands, in the workplace, the way AI, this is my last thought for the year, but the way AI is moving, as I said, with this automated form of AI. This agentic AI, remember that term, folks, AI agent, agentic AI, these are gonna be the big drivers next year. As these autonomous applications come in, they're gonna be doing more and more of our everyday tasks at work, right? Meeting summaries, writing emails, responding to emails, planning meetings, you name it, all the day-to-day tasks that we spend time doing.

Well, when you're basically, your bot, your personal bot is doing all of this, just like in With Folded Hands, Chris, it's like there's nothing left for us to do. So you won't even have to go to meetings anymore because the automated agent is going to attend on your behalf, take the notes. So you won't actually have to do a lot of work. So then what are we going to do? And again, this is a big existential kind of future work issue, but we're kind of going down that path. And again, as a closer here, Chris, it takes me right back to the story. It's like, that's exactly what happened.

Chris Fine

Yeah. And where's the imperfection that generates meaning?

Jon Arnold

It's human nature, right? To me, it's the vagaries of language that this is why AI keeps getting it wrong, because it doesn't quite know the intuition and the nuances of dialect and slang and intent and humor and sarcasm. It's got a long way to go to capture all that. Right. And I hope it never does, frankly, because there'll be nothing left for us.

Chris Fine

I don't know, Jon. I just don't know. I don't want to. make a prediction one way or another. I think it could very easily get away from us. It may not. It seems kind of benevolent right now, but don't forget that even in areas like information, like search retrieval and where people go to seek information, I'll sort of put that in air quotes, information, AI is having more and more of a role. Every time you Google something, right, every time you want to look something up, what comes up first. It's the AI digest of it.

In fact, I was working on a document a while ago with a team. I wrote two sections of it and I submitted it and somebody said, let's see what the AI says. I'm going to ask ChatGPT to come up with a, and you know, maybe we can tack that along to what we've written, you know, or maybe we can take something out of it. And that was not something you would have heard a year ago. And that's, I think, where things are going. I mean, at some point, maybe ChatGPT, right, or its successors writes that entire document. Exactly. So that's what we're going to need to think about, I think, going into 2025.

Jon Arnold

Single source for truth. There'll be nothing left for us to do and we won't be trusted anymore. Okay.

Chris Fine

All right. Oh, gosh. Well, happy holidays.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Thanksgiving is coming.

Chris Fine

Happy Thanksgiving. We're recording this a little bit before Thanksgiving. You'll listen to it after. So I suppose we hope that everybody had a nice Thanksgiving holiday if you celebrate that. And best wishes going into the holidays at the end of the year from us. And thank you always for listening.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Okay. With that, We hope you'll continue to stay with us as we explore the future of work here and watch this space. As a closeout, I'll just say, as we always do, you can access our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, we'd love to hear from you. On the website, there's room to make comments or rating or review, whatever. And also, yes, future work is coming. Our Future of Work Expo, futureofworkexpo.com. if you want to check that out. And we'll be there. And with that, I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks for another great discussion, Jon. Thanks, everybody, for bearing with us and listening. And we look forward to having you join us again in a month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Google, Talkdesk

Takw Aways from Fall Conferences - AI Evolution fro EX and CX, Getting Workers Back to the Office, and Future of Work Updates

Audio links for original podcast:

·      Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·      Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

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Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, Jon. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Watch This Space. Jon, I know you've been scrambling, a lot been going on. So why don't you kick it off today in the where in the world is Jon Arnold and what's he doing segment.

Jon Arnold

Hey, that's a great, we need a sponsor for that theme. I think we should get American Airlines or someone like that or a Hilton Hotel chain.

Chris Fine

I think you got to go big, get a private jet company to sponsor you.

Jon Arnold

Even better. Yeah. Well, we did talk about Lear last month, right?

Chris Fine

No, exactly.

Jon Arnold

Different context, but that's okay.

Chris Fine

I think they still make them. They may not be called Lear anymore, but they still make them.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. if you're selling, I'm buying, folks. So let's go. All right. So we are, yeah, we're certainly in the midst of the busy season for industry events. So for us who are pretty rooted in the technology, really the communications technology space, and you know, the big buzzwords in our world would be things like digital transformation, obviously, you know, AI, intelligent, advanced. Well, it is advanced. Artificial intelligence. We can talk later about advanced intelligence. That's something else. But yeah, these technologies are shifting everything around. And that's why we have this big future of work theme on the podcast.

So to stay current, we get taken and go to a lot of industry events, as you probably all know out there. So I guess I'll start off with kind of pick up from the last episode where we kind of talked about where we're going to be going. And now we can talk a little bit about where we've been. And then after that, where we're going next time.

The main events that I have been to since last podcast would be, that would be Verint, which would be their Engage event, which was back in September. I was also scheduled to go to Sprinklers event. in New York, but last-minute hiccups, put that aside. So the Verint event was very good. This was a customer focused event as opposed to an analyst only event. So these kind of events are where the vendors really kind of put on their best clothes, so to speak, and try to, you know, show their customers all the wonderful things that they're doing and, you know, to get their prospects to feel a little more comfortable with what they're doing. And they're kind of a really good example of a company that has put itself at kind of the leading edge of where AI is going and being used in the whole customer experience contact center space.

Every vendor out there is kind of struggling to do this. And as we see, Chris, this is a short aside, AI is quickly becoming commodified in some ways, much like the whole UCaaS space has become and the whole CCaaS contact center as a service space has become. And this is the reality of all of these SaaS, you know, cloud-based business models. But I just want to say quickly, LLM is kind of one of the big buzzwords in this space, right? Large language models. And these days, it seems in the last few months only, it seems like every vendor has an LLM. There are several major LLM players out there and everyone's kind of using these platforms. So there's getting a sameness to this as a differentiator very quickly about this with AI.

This is again part of the AI is going ahead of where the market really can absorb. But that aside, and I'll stop on that in a sec, Chris, where Verint is going, they are leveraging kind of the best of AI technologies to create these bots. And their approach, rather than having a kind of umbrella all-in-one platform that handles all of your customer service needs, they've gone the other direction where they are building specific purpose-built bots that only do one thing. So eventually, if you go all in with them, you're going to have a little army of these specific bots that each does a different thing. And their focus is kind of this ground up approach where do one task and do it very well.

Bots have to be trained just like your dog. When your dog is well trained, it does what you train it to do very, very well. And that's kind of an anomaly. That's kind of a, sorry, a parallel here with what bots are being trained to do. And It may sound a little bit clinical, but when they share the results of the impact that these bots are having with their customers, it's a pretty good validation that they're on the right path. And for all the negativity about AI and the cautions of it, when it's done right and done well, it is not yet, it is now making a difference. It's not something that's going to happen a year or two from now.

Chris Fine

That's really interesting. I mean, I guess if the customers are starting to say that it matters and it's making a difference, then it's really made a lot of progress. I think your comment about commodification is a really interesting one, though, because I do think a lot of these engines, there aren't that many of them, the really top-notch LLM systems, right? And so then it's a question perhaps of how well they do the training, right? So, it's like you might have five of the same breed of dog in the dog show, but one of them is trained better and wins the dog show, right? It's back to your analogy about dogs. So I think it's going to be that way in a lot of different sectors that basically they're relatively rare fundamental breakthroughs and they immediately get applied to all the engines, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, exactly. So I think it's just a good example of As I said, when you kind of do AI in a manageable way, like in, digestible pieces, I think it's good. you can't go too far wrong with this stuff. chatbots have had such a bad reputation, but that's only one part of the story. So I think there's, they're a company to keep an eye on, and they're a public company, by the way. I did go over the pond as well to British Telecom's analyst event. and to the UC Expo.

Those were both in London and I got to do them back-to-back. So that was an entirely different experience. But I will say, when we talk about AI, Chris, right, we're generally about what the vendors are doing and where it makes sense in the business or office or enterprise setting for the users and the IT folks who have to deploy it. But when you look at it from the other side of where the carriers are coming from, for them, so at BT's analyst event, which was my first time attending their event in person, there's, you know, they're all in on AI as well.

But most of what they're doing with AI is kind of, you know, beneath the covers, right? It's all about developing their more efficient, more intelligent forms of networking, right, to manage and move traffic around, do it in a way that makes money, but also brings, really, the connectivity that their enterprise customers need to do their own applications of AI. But it's another indication to me, you know, of just how AI has become so pervasive that, you know, different audiences you need it and use it in very different ways, right? The carriers are a whole other side of the equation, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, but your point is well taken. I think there's a very generic use of AI, which is effectively the concierge you couldn't have otherwise on whatever it is, right? Supervising and optimizing any kind of activity, right? So in a network, you think about the economics of it as networks have evolved over the last 20 or 30 years to where every bit is just about the same as every other bit in terms of the value of the bit. they evolved from where some bits are more valuable than others to kind of bit, just bits.

In that environment, the more cost you can lower the price per bit, That's the key statistic, right? And the price per bit involves everything involved from generating it and then moving it from one place to another and then delivering it somewhere. And so you can imagine that if the network, it's almost ironic because the network's becoming more intelligent again, but in a different way, right? They used to claim that networks were intelligent. Then they got to be kind of, dumb's the wrong word, but kind of vanilla. And now they're trying to put some different kind of intelligence back in the network.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, well, they have to. I mean, the network, well, again, I guess there's two types of networks, right? The carrier networks that they need to deliver to deliver services or manage services for their customers. And then, of course, the enterprise has its own network, which is once they have the connectivity, how do they internally manage all that traffic? But their needs are pretty similar. And the big game changer that I see with AI being in the center of everything now is that, as you say about bits, maybe they all have a similar value now, but the point is that there are now so many more bits, the volume of data now is so exponentially big compared to what it was in the past.

There's huge pressure on internally within enterprises for AI to kind of show an ROI on all of that data, because they're kind of like the spigot that has everything coming through them. And every line of business has its own needs and priorities for what the data that's pertinent to their line of business means to them. So they're putting all these demands on IT now to get analytics right and reporting about different forms of data that matter to each line of business.

So the pressure on IT now is not just to provide optimum network performance, but it's actually, that's the meta level, but the actual data itself It's creating, all these new forms of intelligence that AI is harvesting for all its learning models and stuff. There's so much more kind of new value that's created from all of these data streams. So whoever can harness it the best and, you know, pull out the insights that are actually valuable to the organization, That's kind of, to me, like the IT 2.0. That's a very different kind of requirement that they need to be managing now. And it's just very, very different. And the AI demands are just going to keep getting bigger and bigger.

Chris Fine

Yeah, well, if you look at the investment in AI by Cisco and HPE and the other networking companies, you can see how they're bidding on it too, right, to do just that. But there's also a ton of AI that can be applied to applications that come out of, that can derive from network data. Like for example, a lot of the work I do in smart workplace, where it's, network data can be used for occupancy analytics, network data can be used for compliance and security, and a lot of other things. It's been there all the time, but without some kind, but trying to use traditional logic to really analyze it has been challenging.

Whereas if you apply AI to it, learning models to it, you really start to understand what the norm is, what the normal behavior is, and you can identify the anomalies. And you can also find patterns that you wouldn't used to be able to find. And there's many, many, many examples of that. But to your point, it isn't even just the network itself in terms of intelligence about the network. It's also what all that data can do other than that.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, this is a whole other topic.

Chris Fine

We got pretty far away from. But you said you had a one-day trip to New York too, right?

Jon Arnold

I did, but let me just, I'll just finish off the London side. So BT, so what the carriers, their perspective on all this AI stuff is very different and interesting in its own. And then I was at the industry event, and then we'll get to your industry events, UC Expo, where I think this is my fourth time there. This is the UK version of Enterprise Connect in the US. So this is like the big show for enterprise communications in the, I would say UK for sure, and probably all of EU. So it's a very Eurocentric crowd. And it was pretty good. I was involved on three different panel sessions, and I did a bunch of interviews on the floor. So if you're interested in that event, folks, there are a few examples of it up on my website, if you want to check that out.

But the main thing is, you know, this is, it's a trade show first and foremost. So there are a lot of vendors there. And then various tracks for different, you know, breakout talks. And demos and stuff like that. But anyways, what was really interesting about this show, Chris, is that, when you go to enough of these events, you kind of know the lay of the land and the types of vendors you expect to see. But at this one, it was, I was surprised to see how many vendors were from the AV space. And it's both audio and visual.

So the way we think about collaboration, you may not expect to see guys like Bose, Yamaha, I think Sony was there. Guys who you associate with video components and certainly high-fidelity audio. And I did get a really good demo at the Bose booth, and they use a beam forming technology. There's all, you know, there's so many granular layers of how they try to make audio better in the workplace. And I just find it's really interesting that you don't normally think of brands like that in the enterprise space.

But it tells me that what we talked about last time, for example, with return to office for this, again, folks, this is a big future work thing. How do you get people back? And you know, the bottom line is you got to give them a better experience. And when you have more kind of tools and toys like this, especially from brands that we identify with as consumers, I think this all kind of ties into how you make that, trinket, that little shiny ball you're waving a little more attractive for people to come back and say, look at this cool technology we're using here, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah. Well, what I think is interesting about that is that those vendors have always participated in what you might call really high-end AV and conferencing room installations, but there's two things going on right now that are relevant in that space in my mind. One is that there's just more AV in the office in general. There's more audio playback in open areas. There's even some degree of noise masking technology used. There's more different types of spaces where you may or may not just use the kind of standard base or middle level conferencing type of gadget to do it. And then the high-end rooms are going even higher. and you need better service in more rooms because of the hybrid participants. Like you can't have dead spots, and you can't have the remote participant feel that they're not involved in the discussion,

And so some of the more high-tech vendors are, I would argue, getting inserted into more places in the workplace. And that's all related to exactly what you say, better experience, hybrid work where not everybody's on site and not making people feel that they come to the office and they're doing exactly the same thing they could be doing in their living room, except they got to put on all their good clothes.

Jon Arnold

And by the way, this isn't just about making it a better experience for the employees. So, you know, yes, you get excited, oh, I got a Bose headset or it's a Sennheiser headset, the ones we all know. Yes, the headsets are part of it, but it's also the audio quality that happens like in a conference room as well. But with the audio and with the video, it's as much also about capturing as much data as accurately as possible to feed your AI engines. This is as much about that. So we're all working for AI. That's where this is going.

Chris Fine

Boy, that's a great point, right? Because the AI is going to have to parse all the audio and video. And so the higher definition you have and the better the system picks up everything, I guess, the more the AI likes it, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, because you leave out the extraneous, the background noise and the crinkly wrappers and the tapping on the keyboard, that gets filtered out. So it's pure, you know, voice. So nothing gets in the way of that. And of course, with the smart framing that they have in the, you know, in the conference rooms with the video, you hear this term meeting equity where everybody is fairly represented, whether you're in the front of the room, or the back of the room, where the lighting is good or bad, or you're at home, or you're in the room itself, to make sure that everyone who's participating needs to get captured in the stream for the automated summaries and all the other AI things that happen post-meeting.

And then, of course, you also have to have it clean so you can accurately identify. There might be 3 guys in the room named Mike. How do you know which Mike is speaking, right? So again, when the audio and the video feeds are clean and there's no distractions, it's much easier to accurately attribute, right, who said what, that kind of thing, right?

Chris Fine

And to be able to pick up precise direction so you can identify sort of which Mike was talking, right, and get enough clarity on the voice so that once Mike #1 identifies himself as Mike, and Mike #2 identifies herself as Mike. You kind of know which ones are talking, right? And you need clarity for that.

Jon Arnold

Right. Because also AI will generate profiles, right, of each meeting participant. So they know the mic who speaks like this, they know his audio profile, that person, you know, aligns with the image we have of this mic as what he looks like. right? So it's all kind of validated that way, which again is another kind of security feature to make sure no one's impersonating somebody else, right? Authentication. There's so many layers to this stuff. But again, it's about the AI. That's to me the main idea here. It's about as much the AI as it is for the employees themselves.

Chris Fine

And even the conference, right, Jon? Even the event, right? Yeah, It's all the post-event analysis and capture.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Okay, we could go on, but let's move on to other stuff. I mean, you've been at events as well, and you did mention I had a one-day New York stop, but let me quiet up for a bit here because you've been to places too. So let's shift over to you.

Chris Fine

Well, I want to actually cover one thing though before I do, because you had a couple of podcast related things you were going to talk about. And I don't know if you want to do that at the end or we jumped into, we usually do that stuff sort of at the beginning, we kind of jumped into the events. But do you want to talk about that now or you want to hope we have some time at the end?

Jon Arnold

I'll bank on having time because I've been doing a lot of the talking here, but because you've got events too to share some stuff. So why don't we go there first?

Chris Fine

Okay. Well, I've got two to talk about. One was VON Evolution up in Boston. It was at the end of September. That's, we've talked about Jeff Pulver, who organizes the events before. Jeff's a friend of both of us, a visionary, and has accomplished many things in the transition of technologies and evangelizing new ideas. And this particular get-together was super interesting because Jeff's gotten involved with a new initiative called V-Cons. And this is completely tied into what you were saying, because what VCONS are, is basically a way of, it stands for virtual conversation. And it's a computerized way, a data-centric way of encapsulating everything involved with a conversation or a transaction in a kind of secure container that keeps all the data lumped together.

That may sound kind of basic, but believe it or not, the scattered and unstructured data with very little security around it is the bane of enterprises, right? It's called unstructured data. And what the VCons allow you to do is basically, so Thomas McCarthy Howe, the creator of this, calls it robot food, right? Because essentially these nuggets of encapsulated data are perfect to feed it to AI, because the AI doesn't have to randomly search and try to correlate different components of the same thing. Like for example, a slide deck that was projected or versus the audio versus the video versus the metadata. And then this can all be encapsulated in a secure container.

So like if you think of a comparable, it's a little bit like what they do with like Blu-ray video. If you digitize it, put it on a computer, it'll be encapsulated in a container. It has all the video titles, the subtitles, the metadata, like what's the name of the movie, let's say. And that's common in multimedia environments, but it really hasn't been applied. MP3 has a basic version of that, even though it's one file. There's a whole bunch of different sections of the file that have different types of data.

VCONS are a way of keeping track of all that in one place that you can track the provenance of, and that has huge implications. And so there's a request for comments out about this in front of the Internet Engineering Task Force and a whole bunch of work going on. And in parallel with that, there's a protocol and a system called Skit, which is a little bit like, it's not a blockchain, but it's a distributed, credentialized way of authenticating that all of this is what it purports to be. as a way of describing it. It's a little bit like a distributed ledger, but optimized for this type of content.

So I had two days of absolutely fascinating discussions about that. And I think this is definitely a watch this space. I'm not sure how this business is going to grow or who's going to be the breakout or exactly what direction it's going to go in. But it feels a little bit like the early days of voice over IP. And so I think it's definitely a watch this space. Does that make any sense, Jon? I tried to describe it.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, So when you hear about distributed ledger, you start thinking blockchain, right? And I know Jeff has certainly kind of dabbled in that. What is it, fungible NFTs and all that stuff. That's not my world.

Chris Fine

This isn't the same though, by the way. There was a whole session about how blockchains per se are not. optimized for this kind of content.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I can see that. But certainly, for those of us who've been there to know what the Vaughan vibe and the VoIP vibe was, you know, 1.0, knowing just how almost once in a lifetime that kind of change comes along and to be part of it, It's always great to come along again and see it, that we're going to see another movie like this one. And you kind of know a lot of ways how this could unfold because you've seen it before. So it's kind of, that's a benefit, I think, of having us been doing this for so long. You know, we've, and the same players, by the way, it's worth saying that a good chunk of Jeff's core, right, have been there from his very beginning days, right?

Chris Fine

There were some familiar faces, but some new people too. But I think when you compare this, for example, to voice over IP, there are some differences. It's not quite as clear, at least to me right now, what the evolution is going to be. But it's early, right? Because you don't have the equivalent, I think, of like a multi-gazillion dollar telephone hardware market that you can steal, you could ****** whatever the word is. That's probably the wrong word. I have to point that out. But you're not going to grab. And it's, more a better way of doing things, but it's not clear where the multi-zillion dollar TAM is right now, the total addressable market. But it's the kind of thing that can take off really quickly when the right killer app is found for it. And so that was kind of what occurred to me from the conference.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, And we've seen this before. So it's, kind of, it's kind of cool to have a front row seat to this stuff, right? And yeah, for, yeah, and I'm glad you pointed out with Jeff, by the way, we don't want to sound like we're some, you know, closeted group that doesn't talk to the outside world. Yes, there was a core of us who've been there 20 plus years who kind of been there from the dawn of creation when it came to VoIP and how important that was to everything that's come since.

Also, you're right, Jeff also does attract a lot of people who are 1/3 of our age, right, who are like the next generation. And it is very, this is one thing that's special about Jeff, folks, if you ever can get to his events, is he brings the young and the old together like nobody else. And I think it's great because the younger generation is totally digital. They see this in very different terms than we do, but they're just as smart as we were when we were their age and their stuff just moves a lot faster than it did when we were learning about all this stuff.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and there's a whole new team ready to grab the ball and run, to get fired up and start companies and do investments and stuff like that. So that was number one. Number 2 conference was, I think, one of the best in the real estate and real estate technology world, which is work tech. And that's actually a series of conferences throughout the world in different cities. It tends to be sort of global plus local content. So it's run by a group out of London called Unwired Ventures. This time I was just a spectator. I wasn't speaking or talking about future of work at the VON Evolution.

But this was all really senior, what you might call workplace experience people, right? They had titles like that, or workplace transformation, or real estate and workplace, you know, head of all of this. And so it was fascinating to hear their perspective on where we are with hybrid work and return to office and how the workplace has to evolve. And so my headline there was it was really not very technical. It really was, there was more focus on architecture, you know, layout, interior design, new buildings that are being repurposed from traditional office space. And then, what the head of personnel or the head of real estate feels about where the office has to go and how they, they're concerned with occupancy analytics and all the stuff we talk about all the time.

It was striking to me how qualitative this stuff can be in addition to all the quantitative that you're always talking about, like how exactly much space per square foot are you going to save by making things smarter. I thought there would be more sensor vendors there - only one or two. There were a few companies I know pretty well on the workplace application side. The one sensor vendor that was there came up with a great presentation with a lot of data in it, and people devoured that presentation that was data centric as though it was the wonderful dessert they'd never tasted before.

So it was a really good day. And if you're interested in workplace thinking and future of work, these things are good. They're not super expensive. It's very manageable time. They usually throw in a second day where you can go on some fabulous tour of a really leading-edge space. And there's probably some other program as well on the second day. So that was where I was a couple of weeks ago. I've been thinking about it ever since. It was pretty interesting, right?

Jon Arnold

Oh, for sure. And you know, that's going to be one of our topics for Future of Work Expo. So we may have an offline discussion there, but maybe some potential speakers we could approach?

Chris Fine

Yeah, I will say that the, how do we get people back to work and retain them and make them like it? was the number one priority - the whole discussion. And companies are taking very different approaches to it. And it's just interesting to see what they're doing. But it was the lack of, I mean, lack is not really the right word because that would imply there should have been, but there wasn't. But the very high-level focus that then ultimately, sort of the IT levels that we think about sometimes are just, they're going to be the implementers and successful creators of what is requirements driven by this higher-level group of people.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, well, that's important for our listeners because, the vendors, are adapting to, right, all the collaboration vendors who are, who they're selling to now, right? It's not just IT. And from what you're saying, it sounds like some of these decisions are being made, higher up, right, about, because the priority is about managing the expense of having all this space and how to best use it.

And that, in turn, I think dictates maybe the IT some of the technologies that they're going to have to look at to accommodate, you know, what the folks upstairs need. And that just speaks to, I think, to the vendors, the need to, and they are doing this, of course, to broaden their net in terms of who the buyers and the influencers are for them to sell their platforms, right.

Chris Fine

Yeah. And by the way, to your earlier discussion, there was a pretty reasonable amount of discussion about AV. and collaboration technologies and how you fit that in with architectural design and where that's all evolving and how do you instrument different types of spaces to be really top-notch in that area to make it easy for people to plug in or to connect wirelessly or, you know, just basically make it less painful with the idea that you're going to be, you're going to be in some AV-enabled environment more often, right?

So how do you avoid that standard 10 minutes of fiddling with the cables or whatever you're doing, right? When the leading-edge architects think about this and IT and designers think about this, this is what they're thinking.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, And a sidebar to this earlier today, Chris, and this might give away the date we recorded this, but I was on an analyst pre-brief call with Cisco for Webex. And this was a preview of what they're going to be sharing at their Webex One event later this month. And I have to be at a different event, and we'll get to that shortly. But one of the, they're really investing heavily in both the audio and visual pieces to make office-based collaboration, especially office-based, really, really good. And one of the things they showed today, which is hard to do on a virtual presentation,

But they're trying to make the office meeting experience so immersive and engaging and almost cinematic. And they do use words like this, that they are demonstrating a basically a visual of being in a conference room with a video presentation that is on a regular screen, but it's a 3D effect. But you don't need the glasses. And this has come up in the metaverse space as well. And we've talked about this before, but it doesn't come across in a virtual demo.

I've seen this a couple of years ago at a Huawei exhibit at Mobile World Congress, where they have this 3D effect on a computer screen. that you just look at it and it's like, how the hell are they doing this? But this is again how this technology is evolving. But again, you can't get that at home, folks, right? So when they can make those experiences that immersive and, you know, it's just a whole other level aside from just being, you know, 8K quality, whatever, it's just that visual impact to say, wow, that's, you can't not look at it, right?

Chris Fine

Should be an interesting event for sure.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. So, okay, let's move along because we have other things to talk about. I'll just have a short outlook for what's coming. I've mentioned before, one of my events in the next couple of weeks is with a NICE contact center vendor and they're hosting their analyst event in Livingstone, Zambia of all places. And that's about as exotic as it gets for me, folks, and probably for most of us. So let's just say I'm going through a lot of logistics right now with getting the last-minute travel details and, you know, vaccination shots and stuff in place to do this. But that's a pretty exotic place to go for a conference. And but it's going to be good. And we will be. Boy, that should be great.

Chris Fine

That should be great, right? A real adventure.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, for sure. So they'll give us a little taste of the local. culture and of course, all the wildlife and the nature and the water, the Victoria Falls. I mean, it's, world renowned for really spectacular scenery. And that's terrific. Yeah, that's going to be pretty good. So yes, you can watch this space a little bit on that one, folks. And anyone who wants to follow the play by play, as best I can, I'll certainly be posting on LinkedIn while I'm there. And otherwise, afterwards, I'll be writing and sharing photos about it. So stay tuned.

Chris Fine

Great.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. I do want to touch briefly, you mentioned I had this short New York trip, and this was more of a not an industry event. It was more a client event, but it was for a Toronto-based company called Vidyard. And it's kind of worth mentioning because they have me come lead a roundtable talking about basically some of the AI evolution that we're seeing. And what they're doing is that they have developed these AI avatars that are focused on the sales function. So they're trying to show these options where instead of a salesperson just cold calling people all day long from their phone, that they can develop these highly personalized and very realistic avatars, but they're very lifelike looking videos of yourself talking and in a very personalized way for each prospect or customer that you're trying to communicate with.

This is the power of AI. You know, you hear this term mass customization, but when you can get all the tools in place and now folks, you can create a video or yeah, a video or a photo representation of just about anything with just a few lines of text. So for example, these avatars can be created, I think, with less than 90 seconds of hearing or seeing you speak. It can get your language down just about right and your facial movements and look and feel and all that stuff. And it just shows you how incredibly powerful some of these AI tools are becoming.

But when you think about, how I can help automate the sales process and do it at scale with personalization, that's a pretty attractive option. I think one of these vanguard type of companies that are getting into this space, because when you talk about where enterprises are going to deploy AI, they generally want to do it where they're going to have the best business impact. That's why customer service gets so much attention with AI, because you're solving really big problems that affect your brand, your sales, your market share, all this stuff. And what's more important to an organization's top line than sales, right? So if they can do a good job and help the salespeople be more productive and effective, that's going to get AI funding every time, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, I don't know what I would buy from an avatar, but then again, as we always say, we're analog guys, right.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Now, you may not actually buy from the avatar, but the avatar might move the sales process along far enough that by the time you speak to a live salesperson, you've already got them, just like in a contact center, and that's the analogy I used in my talk. By the time you talk to a live agent, all the heavy lifting's already been done. At that point, the sales agent is actually moving more into closing mode than opening mode, right? Because you've done all the other stuff already.

Chris Fine

You bring in the closer.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, yeah, right. Well, we can be very direct about it, but that's how sales works, right?

Chris Fine

That's true. Ask for the order.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, exactly. I do have an update for the podcast to share, and we did want to talk about some podcast stuff that came out of some of the metrics that we get on Watch This Space.

Chris Fine

Well, an interesting one anyway. An interesting data point.

Jon Arnold

This won't take long, folks, but for Watch This Space, I track my stats and everything. Anyways, on a Sunday recently, I had a big spike. We had a big spike in traffic that's well above what normally we get. And also, who does this on a Sunday, right? Anyways, it turns out that almost all of this activity, as we found, was coming from likely one person who looks like they were doing a click on every episode. And I think what they were trying to do was to download, a chunk of our archive. And we don't know yet who this person was, is. We don't know what their motivation was, what they're going to do with this, if it's going to be for good or for evil. Are they going to like hold our bank accounts hostage now? Because now they hear our voice. They can impersonate us.

Chris Fine

Don't give any ideas here, Mr. AI is great.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

Don't give any ideas here.

Jon Arnold

We're getting a little worried about it. I'm just kidding. I don't think it's going to be to that, but it just shows you it's interesting when you pick up these, what are to us, anomalies. There's so much stuff that goes on under the covers that we don't even see, right? Maybe you can talk about that agent and what it's actually about.

Chris Fine

Well, this is what the theory is, that it shows up as a browser called LAVF, which is a format used by a system called FFMPEG, which this all sounds like jambers, but basically the long and the short of it is this is the engine that underlies a lot of software that processes media. It's an open-source engine. FFMPEG is a great program. And so some of the podcast programs on Android phones apparently use FFMPEG under the covers. And you can set your browser, or you can set this program to download everything. Like you can do that in iOS too, on an iPhone.

Say, I want to download everything if I subscribe to a podcast. And so we think that's what that was. I started doing more Googling on it - there's a lot of Reddit and other traffic out there from other podcasters who said, we see these spikes where like suddenly somebody downloaded our whole archive. And It doesn't seem to be malicious. It seems to be just a function of this program and how you said it, but it's intriguing, right? It just was, and we see it because, we're not exactly top of the pops, although we want to get there in terms of massive numbers. And so it makes more of a difference. But I bet if you dug into traffic streams and download streams for podcasts with bigger numbers, this is a lot of this there too. It just shows up less, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. And again, it might be pretty benign for the most part, but it's not that big of a shift to the earlier conversations we had about AI, where all data is fair game that feeds these LLMs. And it's an issue for all of us in the content creation field, whether you're writing, speaking, doing video interviews, but everything that you put out there that's public, you know, is fair game, right? And so whether they're doing it to kind of build their own models, steal your ideas, whatever, we don't know what form these things could take.

But there is a much kind of bigger kind of cloud that there's other things going on. So, you know, it used to be going back to our analog days, Chris, when I would use my rotary phone to make a call and call you and you pick up your rotary phone. That's the circuit switch, which is still, I think, one of the most underrated things about analog telephony, right? Because it was a dedicated switch, a private connection between two parties. Nothing can get in between it. That's the ultimate form of security. And when that call ended, there was no trace of it. came, it went, it was ethereal. And that was it. There was nothing more to it than the call. Now everything we're doing is, that's just the first step of what is actually happening. Now it's digital matter that can go in any direction, right?

Chris Fine

Well, I agreed. I mean, everything is inherently public. You know, if you're going to be out with any information, you have to believe that you could see it on the front cover of whatever is the equivalent of a front cover of the newspaper tomorrow or today. So you just have to bear that in mind, right? Everything is public, is super public. I think going back to the era of the telephone, you probably get a different point of view from somebody who lived in those days in countries where there's a lot less Rules and regs to prevent wiretapping. Like if you spoke to somebody who lived at the time in East Germany, for example.

CALEA was a law that came in this country in the 90s and then amplified after 9-11 that basically put automated tapping in every central office that's out there. So yes, it was great when it was great, but I'm not even sure if you had two landlines, you'd be that safe today.

Jon Arnold

No, for sure. And there's lots of ways, of course, to game the system. But anyway, the point is, I think that whatever we put out there, folks, is really out there now. It just is. I don't think there's any getting around it. You know, how do we copyright? How do we protect what we're doing? You know, we shouldn't even have to think about it. But that's the reality of these technologies now.

Chris Fine

Yeah, if we have a guru in our listenership who really understands LAVF and exactly what it means, feel free to weigh in.

Jon Arnold

So, if you're that guy, if you're trying anything, we're the one who did it.

Chris Fine

We got our eyes on it.

Jon Arnold

We'd love to hear from you. OK, so with that, we got one more thing, a short one to add, and I think that'll probably take us out. If you don't know, folks, TMC has recently become a media sponsor for Watch This Space for good reason, because we're about the future of work. And as you know, we also do our Future of Work Expo, which is part of TMC's IT Expo coming up this February. I want to certainly acknowledge and thank them for being a media sponsor. It gives us more exposure, which we are happy to have.

But also just as a news item, in case you're interested in our event, and we are looking for speakers and sponsors, we just recently announced the agenda. So that's a fairly new thing that's been out for maybe a week, week and a half. So if you want to see what our program is looking like, it's up on the website, which is futureofworkexpo.com. And certainly if you make your way to my website, you'll easily be able to find it.

Anyways, that's a good news item from our last podcast - the program is up. And as we round out the speaker roster, we'll add those names as they come. In case you're wondering, yes, Chris and I are going to be the keynote speakers doing the opening talk about some of the research that we're following for trends in the space. So that's a watch this space item about Watch This Space.

Chris Fine

Well, I'm just color commentary. You're the main person, I think, but I'm happy. But thank you for that. And I'm very looking forward to sharing it with you.

Jon Arnold

Great. Okay, but let's call it on time for today. I think we've covered a lot of ground, and we hope you don't mind us going long from time to time. We do know from some of our listener feedback, by the way, that a lot of consumption of these podcasts favors long form format, because people are often doing other things while listening to us, not just sitting, staring at a screen while they're doing their work.

We're going to be doing some other things with this podcast to make it a little bit more accessible and more interactive. So that is coming. Okay, we're at time for today, so we'll thank you very much for listening, folks. Hope you enjoyed it and that you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work here at Watch This Space. And you can access our episodes at the dedicated website, watchthisspace.tech. You can also find them on my website, jarnoldassociates.com. And if you poke around on the TMC site, you can see it there. In the UK, in the EU, you can also find the podcast on em360.com. I thought that's worth mentioning. That's another new development for us. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

I'm Chris Fine. Thanks again for listening to another episode of Watch This Space. Have a good month and we will see you with another episode next month.

Companies mentioned:

Bose, British Telecom, Cisco, HPE, Huawei, NiCE, Sennheiser, Sprinklr, Verint, Vidyard, Yamaha

Fall Conference Preview - VON, VERINT, BT, UC EXPO & NICE - Along with Amazon's Full Return to Office Mandate

Audio links for original podcast:

·      Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·      Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys, finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, everyone. Hi, Jon. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. As you said, I know we've both been busy. We were comparing notes. In fact, we're recording a little bit early this month because we both got stuff going on next week, which we can talk about. But right, we're actually a little bit early.

Jon Arnold

Yes, and that's just the way it rolls. The main thing is we need to bring timely, breaking news, not so much breaking, but news and ideas, thought leadership, provocative, you know, insights. That's our game, we hope, and bring it to you on a timely basis. And as you probably know, as a follower, we try to publish on the first Tuesday of the month, and this will bring us to our October edition. So we continue. Chris, we are getting to the tail end of our 7th season. So yes, folks, we've been at this a while. We are not household names yet, but we don't need to be. We enjoy doing what we do. And I think we've got a pretty distinct rapport here with our perspectives. And I think by the support we get from listeners, I think we've got our support base.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and I think you're about to talk about it. We've decided that the podcast is popular enough and we think we like it enough, the feedback's good enough, that we're going to make some, you know, we're going to upgrade a little bit, make some changes, right, Jon?

Jon Arnold

Yes, Some of it, I think, by necessity and some of it by choice, because I think we have established our voice pretty well, Chris, in terms of what we talk about, how we talk about things. There's always ways to do it different and better. But aside from the content that we produce as speakers and insiders, so to speak, it's also the production of the podcast itself. So we have been audio only since the beginning. We have not had guests by choice.

That's not to say it couldn't change, but we are going to do some things to make it easier to find and certainly easier to consume because right now we're just giving you basically a standalone, 30-ish minute recording, but we're going to have to add some things like, chapterizing it so you can index and find segments more easily if you don't want to listen to the whole thing or just jump to 1 hot topic that you really want to hear what we have to say about.

So there'll be things like that to really be more, you know, more engaging for our listeners, whether that includes moving to video or adding some more visual elements, hopefully some music, things like that will up the production value of what we do. And there's always room to do a spin-off podcast as well that might have guests that follow maybe a different format. So things like that, Chris, we're always open to ideas and want to hear our listeners' ideas as well, what they would really like to see us be doing too.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I think we've historically just kind of analog guys that we are, even though we use all the digital technology, we kind of just said, roll tape, right? And so we're sort of in the cassette age of podcasts and that, you know, it's hard to find where a particular song is. You listen to the subtle side, that's great, but maybe you want to cut to a specific area of discussion or whatever. So we're at least going to get to the point where vinyl is, where you could drop it on a specific track, right? And then maybe one day we'll get to the 21st century, right?

Jon Arnold

Or go back to 8-track.

Chris Fine

8-track.

Jon Arnold

I mean, that was, in its day, was a superior.

Chris Fine

It was revolutionary.

Jon Arnold

It was a superior technology because you could go from, if you only wanted to hear Taste of Honey by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, you could just hear that song. Well, not entirely.

Chris Fine

Not entirely, but you could get down to like 3 songs. But you know that was just invented for cars so that you could play with hands off. They were relatively easy to reproduce, not all very expensive cartridges. They were invented by Bill Lear, the founder of Learjet. because he also sold auto parts. And so he had a way to get it into all the manufacturers. Fascinating story of eight tracks, but yes, they were a little bit easier to access the tracks.

Jon Arnold

Well, so here's, so here's my big disappointment. I was telling you just before we started recording, I'm buying a new car. It's been a long time, like 13 years. So I've conceded that there's no cassette decks in the car anymore. We've moved on. CD player, I've had that forever. The new cars, I'm getting a 2024 model. It was like the last thing I realized about this when I sat in the front seat to check out the layout and everything. No CD player.

Chris Fine

They've been gone for a few years. Yeah, I know, right?

Jon Arnold

Do I have to have an external drive attached to the car? You know, I'm laughing at myself, folks, don't worry, not with you, although I'm doing that too. But yeah, it just shows you, obviously, yeah. And we're going to talk about, that's really about how we consume stuff, right? So of course, everyone's on streaming. I'm still sticking with my CD collection. I just won't be able to use it in the car. But you can stream anything and everything now at a moment's notice. And it's the same, like we're saying, with the podcast. We need to make it a little more accessible, give you a little more control over how you enjoy it. So it's really no different than that level, right?

Chris Fine

That's what we're trying to make it more consumable. What else is in the hopper? I know you're also working on some other initiatives. relative to the podcast.

Jon Arnold

Yes. So just a couple of news flash items. This is where we have to have the drum roll with the big music.

Chris Fine

Yeah, they used to call it a stinger on radio.

Jon Arnold

Stings, exactly.

Chris Fine

Stinger, right? So the way home.

Jon Arnold

Breaking news.

Chris Fine

Yeah.

Jon Arnold

How many times a day do you hear that on CNN? Like every 15 minutes is breaking news of some kind. It's not breaking if it keeps coming. But so we have two things that are making the podcast as of now more discoverable for some anyways. So one is a partnership I have with a UK based publisher, EM 360. It stands for Enterprise Management 360. It's targeted mostly at CIO type of people, but it's, you know, enterprise oriented, mostly UK. audience, but also North America. And I am a regular contributor to them. I do podcasts with them and other things as well. So I'm featured on their website as an analyst. And they are now going to, they are now carrying the podcast there. So if you are using that website, em360.com, it might be em360tech.com, but anyway, it's not hard to find, Enterprise Management 360.

On my profile page there, you can see where the podcast is. There's a dedicated website on their site for our podcast, where the 10 most recent episodes are there. So if you are a visitor to that site, that's another place. You can just find it directly instead of using a podcast partner, right, to just subscribe. So this is just another way. And because this is an audience a little outside of my everyday core, it opens up, it's just another channel for us to be discovered by a broader audience in our space. And a little more international too, so that's good. Great.

Then the second one is with TMC, who are the hosts of IT Expo, which is the annual event that runs in Florida every February. And tied to that is where we do the Future of Work Expo that you hear Chris and I, we talk about it here regularly. And we'll talk about it a little bit more because with our podcast, having a core theme about Future of Work, it's naturally aligned with the Future of Work Expo that I Chair and Chris and I are both going to be speaking at this coming February.

So we are now discoverable on three of the TMC websites. Future of Work Expo has its own website. They also have a monthly newsletter called Future of Work News. That's another place that the podcast, there are banners running on that site to find it. And third will be the TMC website itself, which is the mothership, which has millions of page views every month. So that's a very large reach. And because TMC has many different events and sub-events and publications and all kinds of things. So it really opens up our audience again through another channel. And anyone who finds our podcast on any of those three TMC websites, they will be taken directly to our dedicated website, which is watchthisspace.tech.

So again, more ways for people to access the website other than signing up for podcast platform. I'll take those as a good development. You will hear us talk a little bit more about TMC just to recognize that yes, they are a media sponsor now for our podcast. And also, as you may amplify, Chris, that doesn't have any implication for our content and how we do things. It's really just a barter where they're just making our podcasts more available. And we'll talk a little bit about the show, which we'll be doing anyways, because we're doing the Future Work Expo, which is in their court, but we're the ones creating the content and running it. So there you go.

Chris Fine

It sounds good to me, Jon. I mean, to have a sponsor that is hands off on content, that sounds like a really good thing. So thanks for putting that together.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, you're welcome. Gotta keep trying things, folks. And so here we are. And so that's probably the news segment or update for the moment. I know we've both got stuff to talk about that's coming up over the next couple of weeks, I guess. But it might be a good jumping off point for you.

Chris Fine

Good, Well, thanks, Jon. I'm going to be in Boston next week for Jeff Pulver's VON Evolution conference. And I'm going to be talking about future of work on a fireside chat, probably with Jeff, which is always nice. You and I have done that. He's always asking good questions and he's a good listener. And typically it's a pretty engaged audience. I think it's going to be a pretty good event. He's got some good sessions lined up.

And there's also another interesting angle to this next week. I'm there for a day before the main show, which is this whole idea of the VCon effort, right? So VCon, we haven't really talked about it here, but it's a super interesting initiative to add security and encapsulation to communication sessions. It provides a lot of protection against deep fakes and fake audio and fake sources. as well as packaging everything up in a way so that it's easily identified and tagged and all of that. So I'm actually really looking forward to that. It's in the process, I think, of becoming an internet RFC.

There's a bunch of companies working on this initiative, because right now, if you think about the media involved with things like UC and like this session that we're doing today. There's no real rhyme or reason or encapsulation of the entity that we produce. There's not really much of a way to protect it or to make sure it only goes to the right place or anything without a whole lot of extra weird layers of crypto and blockchain and all of that, you know? And so this is incorporating that. So we'll see how that works out.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I'm going to the Kutztown Antique Radio Fair, which is always fun. This time I don't have my table. I'm not really selling. I'll have that back again in May when I go through another layer of stuff that I have, but always enjoy going and seeing all the regular characters. seeing what great old equipment might be available for me. So that's a little bit of an update here. What about you?

Jon Arnold

I love it. Well, I just want to add to what you're saying. You've got a little bit of a peek into the future with Jeff's show and keeping the past alive. So you got a foot in both worlds there, right? Again, analog and digital, that's what we do, right?

Chris Fine

Exactly. Although I really can't bring anything bulky home. So it's taking so much of my time to go through my layers and layers of collections of retro technology that it really would be defeating the purpose to bring more of it home. But I'll try.

Jon Arnold

I don't think your wife is going to like that.

Chris Fine

I don't think so.

Jon Arnold

It's what we do, folks.

Chris Fine

We'll see.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. What am I going to do with my CDs, Chris? I can't play them in the car.

Chris Fine

Digitize them, put them on a digitizer, rip them and put them on a USB drive and put that in.

Jon Arnold

I have done some of that as well. Yeah. Again, the media is very versatile, folks. It's very good. Just don't leave a magnet around a cassette tape. That's not a good idea.

Chris Fine

We spent months digitizing all our CDs a few years ago. We would just have it running all the time, no matter what we were doing, pretty much, and feeding them in. And the programs will generally identify what's on them, so you don't have to type all that in.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and the album covers sometimes, right? Or can be downloaded.

Chris Fine

Yes, although we could have a whole episode about how bad metadata is. I keep waiting for somebody to invent an AI that you could aim at media metadata. And if I think if somebody invented that and I had to pay a few bucks a month for that, I would totally do it.

Jon Arnold

That's worth it. So when you're when you're uploading or digitizing a one of those like compilation albums that's got very VA, various artists, that won't get captured in the metadata. They won't pick out the specific songs and artists through the whole collection. It'll just say various artists.

Chris Fine

Well, without getting down too much of a rabbit hole or network more of rabbit holes, there actually is at least one program that I'm told that will apply a Shazam type of thing to the content and identify each song at a time by listening. If it's like a mixtape or a mixed CD that you made that you don't want to type all the titles in or you forgot what they were. I actually did a pile of these for my daughter and I like, I don't have that tool to be able to listen. So there was a bunch of more like rock'n'roll four, you know? And then it's like title one, title two, title three.

Jon Arnold

What is it called? Pebbles. Yeah, but those are all on the 60s.

Chris Fine

Nuggets and Pebbles.

Jon Arnold

Nuggets.

Chris Fine

They're both great. But Nuggets just celebrated its 50th last year. It was a great concert in New York.

Jon Arnold

Oh, you Gen. Zers have no idea what we're talking about, but that's okay. That's why you keep coming back, I hope.

Chris Fine

Yeah, no, that's right. But look up Nuggets collection. It's a lot of great music.

Jon Arnold

Music was fun.

Chris Fine

Whoever's still around could play was at the Nuggets 50th last year. It was a blast. There was a lot of young people there too. So anyway, now we've completely digressed off everything we might ever want to talk about.

Jon Arnold

We have to turn off our boomer elite vibe here. It's fun.

Chris Fine

I don't think we're elite.

Jon Arnold

We're not old.

Chris Fine

We're not elite.

Jon Arnold

It's fun. The music was good. Okay, so where are we going now? I just want to mention, yeah, with Jeff's show, we go when we can. I'm great hearing that you can go. I would have been there too, but I've got another event, a vendor event that I have to be at next week. It seems this is when the travel ramps up for people like me, September, especially October, November. It seems that every event I have on my calendar right now, there's one or two others that are like the same dates that overlap.

That’s the heavy, busy season, there's only so many slots of time you can get, and there's just more events than there are slots to take. So there's always going to be conflicts. Yeah, I feel bad I can't go to Jeff's. That's just the way it's going to roll. But yes, he is, as always, reinventing and moving along. I know Thomas Howe is playing a big hand in how he's shaping the program. with all this stuff and very always smart, visionary, leading edge people. And anyways, from my end, I would certainly recommend to anybody. It's at the BPL, right? Boston Public Library.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

So it's very accessible. And yeah, it's not far from Fenway Park, but that's not important this year. Next year, maybe. My Red Sox. Okay, and then yes, you got the radio show.

Chris Fine

So what are you doing?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so I travel next week to a vendor called Verint, and they're having their customer event, so it's called Engage. Most vendors in the communications tech space folks that they generally have two types of events that analysts get to go to. The customer event is like the big one, where it's all customers and partners, and they tell success stories, they share roadmaps and all that stuff. So it's very good, and it's a way to show appreciation for the customers and the analysts. typically come as well.

So I'm going to that event next week. And they will also run smaller scale analyst-only events where we get more kind of deeper dive meetings, one-on-ones, and all the exec team is there. So very accessible. And so this is how we build our relationships with these companies. And of course, we learn from what they're doing and that informs our view. But anyways, Verint is a player in the contact center space. They're very big on chatbots and automating customer service, applications. They talk about automating CX, which is kind of trying to orchestrate the whole thing rather than just one element of customer service. So they have a whole collection of bots - every bot is designed to do a different thing to automate. So they break down all the tasks, right, that happen within a customer service interaction, and many of the other vendors do similar things. But they've been at it a long time. And Jeff Pulver should smile. This is the last thing I'll say about it, because they're based in Melville, New York.

Chris Fine

Oh, isn't that something?

Jon Arnold

Which is where Jeff's organization, I use that term loosely, but yes, that's where the Pulver organization was based in Melville, not far from where he lived on Long Island. So yeah, small world. Small world.

Chris Fine

Definitely so. And what else? Anything you anything else on your calendar? Because I want to bring up my Amazon.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, let's get to that in a second. So the last, yeah, coming up there. That's the late part of September, which of course will have passed by the time we air here. But then coming up in October is the UC Expo in London, England. I'm going to be there October 2nd and 3rd. And I'm on a couple of panel sessions, moderating and speaking. Anyways, so that's the big UC event in Europe. And they've been doing this several years now. So I'll be going to that.

And the day before, BT, British Telecom, is having their analyst event in person. So because I'll be in London at the same time, I'll get to attend BT's analyst event for the first day and then two more days at UC Expo. And that's also just a small tie-in to what I mentioned earlier about EM360, the UK-based publisher, who is now another way to find our podcast here. They are a media partner at the UC Expo, so I'll be doing on the floor interviews with them. during the show.

So you'll not just maybe hear me a little bit here on this channel, but also see me on some of these other channels at that show. That will be coming up in early October. And then I have a couple of other ones coming later in the month. I'll just quickly mention the big one for me, for regular listeners, last year, one of the vendors we are very involved with, NICE, they're a leader in the contact center space. They took us to Machu Picchu, which is like ridiculously exotic for their analyst event. And every year they keep trying to up-level. This year, they're taking us to Zambia. And that is a whole other level of experience. So let's just say, Chris, I've spent two full days at clinics getting my vaccination shots and tablets for all the potential risks I could be facing going to that part of the world. So I'm preparing myself because at our age, we can't afford to take chances, right?

Chris Fine

Boy, they also, I don't think will let you in or let you out unless you have the shots. So, but wow, that's some amazing stuff. That's pretty exciting.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, definitely. The busy season, so I have to be ready. I've got to be in good shape, but it's going to be great. So stay tuned, folks. You'll be, we'll share what we can here, on the podcast. And of course, I write about it and speak about it in other places too. So just watch this space and others as well. That's the calendar for the time being. But let's get on that big tech track, Chris, because it means a lot of things, especially in our world of future of work.

Chris Fine

Yeah, so there was an interesting bit of news last week that probably most people have seen because it was covered by all the mainstream outlets about Amazon mandating a five-day return to work. And I would say that they're not the only company that's done that. But they did it in a very public way. And this is in the presence of what seemed to be quite disappointing statistics across all companies as to how many people returned for more days after Labor Day. Because a lot of companies were thinking, well, another summer's come and gone. People are going to come back just naturally.

There have been some articles about how younger people in particular really are enjoying the workplace. One person discovered that they actually do have free coffee there, that's great, and a comfy chair and all of that. So, none of that's bad. But the problem is that none of the senior people are necessarily coming back in. And then so there's a lack of mentorship and there's all kinds of teleconferences where you're in the office, but you still have to be on Zoom, right? So why are you there?

All these types of complaints. But in the midst of all of that, the idea of mandating back to work five days a week seems kind of risky to me. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, I understand the rationale for it, but there's a lot of pushback, apparently, if you read the coverage. And I feel that a blanket declaration like that is probably, while perhaps justified in its reasoning, going to be tough to do. What do you think?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I totally agree. before the pandemic, for the most part, there are certain job functions like sales, right? They're not needing to be there. But for most employees, obviously, and as you'd like to reiterate on our podcast, Chris, yeah, we're talking mostly about white collar, right? Office workers.

Chris Fine

Yes, not frontline workers, right? People who don't need to be in a specific... location. And thank you for reminding us of that.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, because we were so like focused on this, right? Well, no, it's not everybody. It's a segment of the workforce, but the knowledge workers get all the attention and whatever. So, but yeah, it used to be, of course you worked in the office, like where else are you going to go? But now that this pendulum swung the other way, well, now the workers have all the, I wouldn't say power is the right word, but it's interesting because these jobs are generally not unionized. And we've talked about this before as well. So workers do not have much of a voice when it comes to stuff like this. And it really makes you wonder, Chris, you know, in this day and age, the role of, you know, manager to worker is, you know, the relationship is still very much in management's favor.

Yes, the workers kind of had the last say with the pandemic, and now that they've had it, they don't want to give it back. And that's understandable, but it raises all these existential issues because the reasons to be in the office from their management's point of view are very valid. But as you say, this is again, without any union representation, you know, one against many, it's easy when you have all the power, but when you don't, workers, you know, what are they going to do? I guess the disaffected ones will just try to leave and go someplace else that will let them work that way.

But it's going to create a lot of, as you say, unrest and bad will. I don't think anybody's got an easy answer for it, but you have to feel for them too. I mean, the organization needs certain things from workers that they're not going to get if they're home all the time. And so I don't know what the middle ground is and there's no there's no mediators or negotiators to bring, workers and management together. And so I don't know how it gets resolved. It seems it's only one side talking to the other, trying to convince each other that this is the way it's got to be. But there's nothing in the middle.

Chris Fine

Well, I mean, hybrid work was supposed to be in the middle, right?

Jon Arnold

As a solution, yes. But I mean, as an agent of change, there is no middle ground unless you start talking about lawyers and regulators, workplace, legislation.

Chris Fine

I agree. I mean, I don't have an answer to this either completely. The headline I would take away from all of this is, you know, it's still very much a situation in flux, even when mandates are given. I don't think it's anywhere near a done deal. I think that that there are just certain facts that are hard to fight if you're trying to get everybody back into the office. One is the technology really has evolved to where you don't need to be there for a lot of jobs. And so you can't argue that there's  like the typewriter isn't in the office anymore, you know what I mean? Like you had to be there to use it, or you had a computer there that you couldn't get at home. It's all gone.

So, you could really do a lot of jobs from just about anywhere and people have. On top of that, there had been multiple years of demonstrating that in fact this works because the technology had been around for years before that, but management and organizations have been able to say, well, it doesn't really work, right? Just like we've talked about with telephones and VoIP, that it took some awful disaster like an earthquake or 9-11 to prove that you could have a phone at home and it would work exactly the same way that it works in the office, right? And to switch to voice over IP from the old kinds of telephones. And computers have been over this line for a long time and collaboration software and a reasonable level of security.

It's hard to argue that there's any specific task-oriented reason for a lot of positions that you really need to be there. So it comes down to kind of the nebulous culture. And I think a lot of organizations basically were able to ride for a very long time on the fact that people basically needed to be in the office to do their jobs. And it was such a long tradition of it. But they have to now think of a new reason to attract people and they're working on it and there's some good work being done, but it's still in flux.

And then I think finally, there are just a lot of logistical considerations for people working that are not easy, like commuting, right? The cost of that, the pain of that childcare, you know, being able to be home when something needs to be done to your house or to take your car in or to go to the doctor, right? People have realized the freedom of not having to be commuting every day. So when you look at cities like in Europe, and this came out in the Leesman data, they're always talking about this. is when you have neighborhoods that are walkable and bicycle friendly and where workers can actually raise a little bit of a family and yet get to work very easily without the commute, there's a higher attendance level.

Also in those countries and cities, the lodgings tend to be, you know, the apartments are a little smaller, so you do get more space when you go to work. But when you're in a suburb where a lot of the population's concentrated, in this country, or a good number of workers are concentrated. And you've got to commute through horrible traffic and underdeveloped infrastructure to get to where you want to go. And your only choice is a car. And you've had four or five years of not having to do it. It's kind of hard to get you back. So that's the end of my rant. And it's definitely a watch this space. But it's interesting that a behemoth like Amazon will put that mandate on.

Jon Arnold

But even for them, as big as they are, how thoroughly can you make it stick? You can be like Musk and just say you're fired if you're not coming in, but okay, that's a hard practice to keep going. It just kills all the morale and everything. But you raise a really good point there, Chris, like in the EU, you know, or even here, they talk about the 15-minute city, right, where everything you need in your existence is within a 15-minute walk of where you live. And think about how different that environment is for creating that balance of work and, work and home life.

I do know that some cities are trying to evolve that way instead of densifying and, growing vertically with just taller, taller buildings and centralizing everybody, start to have more decentralized hubs in your urban kind of fabric, where those, city, those neighborhoods or whatever you want to call them, that are a little too far from the core, that they themselves can support local businesses and infrastructure and things that make it accessible for people.

So you don't have to go to the core to get your work done. And so there are ways of doing this, but these are bigger picture solutions that really aren't about technology. It's just really the way things are changing. But yeah, you're right. This is a watch this space thing because there's so many angles to this. I think we will talk a bit about this, by the way, at the Future of Work Expo in February. I know we're going to do at least one session on the concept of the office and also how spaces are evolving to accommodate. And like you say, to incentivize workers, is what is different or better about that space that I can't get at home. And you're right, in small apartments in Europe, you know, the office is a bigger, more spread-out space. It's pretty attractive because now you know, you're not living in a cooped-up place all day long. And who wants to work in a 400 square foot apartment all the time and be home all the time? That's just insane.

Chris Fine

No, it's true. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on. We haven't got time for today, but we should cover like about the all the changes in real estate and mixed-use development and social investment here and there about creating these kind of mixed-use, walkable, you know, finite sized places. They're not even all in the cities. You see developments, for example, where I live, there are some developments in my state, where they'll take what was sort of a traditional urban office building or a suburban office building, I should say, with a big parking lot. And they'll start to figure out how they can develop condos and, apartments around that so that, and retail, so it becomes more mixed-use.

They're doing that with malls too. They're repurposing some of the malls and, you know, to provide more working environment. with mixed-use housing and retail around it. So I think when you get past this real estate cycle, which I think is going to take a few years, you're going to see a lot of changes, which probably are for the better for all sides. But like many things, I think it's hard to take the old and try to mandate it when you're in the midst of a major revolution of change. You know, I think you have to let the cycle do its business. and you will ultimately have things that are more aimed at where things are going. And real estate and offices and organizational culture and all of that is not a fast-moving thing. It's very cyclical. And so that's the watch this space is to watch where the cycle's going.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, there's more concentric circles to this conversation, because these ideas you're mentioning, point to a less car-centric model of urban living. And then from there, if you start reducing the need for cars and to be greener, less fossil fuel, carbon neutral, zero emissions, you start moving into other kind of parts of society that are affected by this, it becomes a much bigger conversation about, again, not so much what's good for me as a worker, but it's also my organization, the whole industry that they're in, then it's the environment that they're locating their workspaces in.

And it just keeps going further and further. And then it becomes a bigger story about, oh, well, how do we be more climate-sustainable? How do we have a cleaner environment for us to work in, a safer environment, and one that allows us to be productive in better ways than we could before because we're not wasting time commuting and all the stress around that? And then, of course, the government gets involved and has to step in with policies and, as you say, like with childcare, and ways of offering continuing education for upskilling. So yeah, very much a watch this space. You know, the germ of an idea suddenly becomes very big and interconnected, right?

Chris Fine

I'm actually kind of optimistic on the longer term. I think we're going to go through some bumps and fits and starts. And right now it's a bit of a tug of war. And I don't think it's being handled very adroitly by a lot of organizations. They're trying their best, but it's a tough nut. But I really think it's almost an infrastructural kind of question, you know, like the whole way that work and life kind of integrate physically and non-physically, you know, and that's not something that changes overnight. But I think, as you say, there may be a lot of side benefits to considering it, right? I mean, The model we're in a lot of places really is kind of a mid-century, 20th century kind of model still, even though the cars are newer, most of them, right? But the whole way that the whole way the relationship of office space and work is just not really changed. And I think it's inevitably going to change. So the question is to take advantage of that opportunity and realize some of the benefits, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. And how have we got this far in the podcast without even mentioning AI? How do we do that? Wow. AI could potentially make all of our jobs redundant anyways, and then we'll never leave our homes. That's a whole other thing.

Chris Fine

No, I think it's got to get better than it is. I mean, just a bit. Right. So I had my AI anecdote of the week. A good friend of mine used it to make a spreadsheet because he wanted to figure out what files to copy for me on a various exchange of music and stuff. And it didn't really get that good an answer. He had to tweak it himself. So that's just to make me a spreadsheet, which should be, kind of not that hard. But I digress. So I think that's I think that's the end of it right now.

Jon Arnold

I think so. And there's no bot popping up to tell us that. We did it all by ourselves. Aren't we resourceful?

Chris Fine

Well, we could have a stopwatch. I mean, we are looking at the clock.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

A clock? What's a clock?

Jon Arnold

What is time anyways? Okay, we are on time, at time. Okay, folks, that's it for today. And we will thank you now for listening. Thank you, listeners. So we hope you've enjoyed it and that you'll continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access all of our episodes online at www.watchthisspace.tech or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like it, please leave us a rating or a review. And otherwise, we'd love to hear your thoughts on what we're talking about. And if you have ideas for future topics, we'd love to hear that too. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thank you, everyone, for bearing with us during a somewhat rambling discussion with hopefully some interesting content. And we will catch you next month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Amazon, British Telecom, NiCE, Verint

Transcription: Hiatus Time for Watch This Space - June 2025

Transcription: Hiatus Time for Watch This Space

Audio links for original podcast:

·       Click Here, to listen on the dedicated Watch This Space website

·      Click Here, to listen on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent tech analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, everybody. Hi, Jon. Good to be back for another month. Busy month, right?

Jon Arnold

Busy month. And yeah, not quite the ides of March, but we do have changes afoot, and we're going to talk about that in a moment. But good to be back on track here with another episode. And for those who are late to the game, so to speak, we are well into our eighth season here. And Chris, we'll use that as a bit of a segue to what's coming next. And I'll just hand the mic over to you for a moment and then we'll just get an update going here for the audience.

Chris Fine

Well, then I would say that before we get to where we've been on this last month that it's a pretty special episode, right? And we've got some things to say about where we've been and where we're going. But, you know, first kind of the mechanics of what we're thinking about the podcast, right? And some changes that are coming.

Update on Our Hiatus for Watch This Space

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that's a good warm up for our news here today, folks. So, we have been doing the podcast, I think since 2018. Yes. Okay, so I know we're somewhere in the 80s for a number of episodes, and I didn't get a chance to review all of them, but we do have all of them. And anyone who is an interested listener can access all of them. That's an easy one if you really want to go into the archives.

But yeah, the main news is that we are going to put, Watch This Space on hiatus for a few months. And I'll weigh in with my take first, Chris, and I know you'll have a few things to say on that. So, we've had a format, folks, that we've kind of stuck with for quite a while. And we certainly, we love doing it. And it's fun. And we think it's a pretty unique perspective that we bring to the audience and the broader tech space, mainly because, as our kind of tagline says, Chris and I are from the analog generation, and I'm sure that's pretty obvious to anyone who knows what we do.

We think that's a pretty important perspective to bring to looking at the evolution of technology in the future of workspace, particularly because we are now in the digital age, and digital natives who have only known that world.

There's a lot of things that may not cross your mind that are kind of underlying how and why we do things the way we do them today, and how what looks to be so easy and valuable today is really, you know, the end result from a lot of hard work and ingenuity and engineering genius that went into making these things work from the analog world to get them into the digital world. No easy feat, but we're here.

But this stuff didn't just come out of nowhere. So, we are kind of maybe keepers of the flame a little bit, Chris, about what came before it and why some of the sensibilities to that are still relevant. So, for the time being, I'll give it to you in a sec, Chris. Yeah, we're going to be putting a pause on the podcast. We just want to reevaluate some of our priorities and direction with the podcast.

And I, in particular, will be open to new avenues and ideas for how we do the podcast going forward. So, this will be a bit of a work in progress. But we're going to put a hold on it for a couple of months to kind of reposition, maybe rebrand how the podcast goes forward. So that's the news item for now. And we certainly will continue to enjoy following these spaces. And we hope you stay with us. With that, Chris, I know you'll have some things to say too.

Chris Fine

Well, thanks, Jon. I want to start by saying how grateful we are to our faithful audience who listens to these, whatever your numbers may be. We really appreciate it. We appreciate the feedback that we get, and we appreciate that people might actually care what we have to say. So, thank you for that. And we are aware of it and always grateful for the listenership and input that we get. So, I'll start with that. I think when I was looking back to the beginning, it's been an evolution for us. I'm usually the one in charge of what we would call post-production.

I remember starting with just the crudest kind of use of YouTube basically to record a video and then strip the audio out of it, and that was funny. To this day, we still use video tools and we just keep the cameras off, which is, you know, maybe something to reconsider, Jon, you know, on the return of at some point, especially if you have guests, 'cause, you know, now most podcasts, podcasts and the world of podcasting has evolved to where the production values and production techniques are different. They've evolved a lot, and so I think, you know, that's something Jon is sort of the master producer of this. You got to think about, we have to think about.

And I think also we've always had an extremely loose format where we're just talking exactly whatever comes up. You know, it may or may not be more structured, it may or may not make sense to do that. We also have never really had guests and that's something we've talked about a lot. I think that's another thing to throw in the mix, but those are my preliminary thoughts, but I would just say again that my number one is just gratefulness to people who've supported us for these eight seasons, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, totally agree. And yeah, I would have been wanting to say the same as well to thank our listeners. It's funny to call them listeners. We don't call them customers. We don't call them patients. We call them listeners because it's an audio format. But I suppose if we had video, we'd call them viewers. But anyway, regardless of people who have been following us, and it means a lot, of course, because we wouldn't be doing this without that.

A chemistry that we've evolved over the years. And it's just because folks, you know, Chris and I have known each other for a very long time. This is a very kind of easy dialogue for us to have month after month, because we look at the world in very similar ways, but we do different things. And we think there's some value to that. But as always, it's the listeners that matter the most. So, another big thank you for me as well for all the listens and downloads out there.

And we hope that continues, because the good thing with these podcasts is, yeah, they don't just disappear into thin air. There's always a way to find them and archive them. And as far as I know, Chris, the content is searchable. So, there are ways to kind of maybe look for some, if we really want to put AI to work, to pull out our five greatest quotes or something, you'd need AI to go through everything to find that. But it's there. We may be stopping for a while, but the podcast will continue to live and there will be another iteration a few months down the road.

Chris Fine

Yeah. I also think we want to take some time to reconsider what the big themes are. And we're going to talk a little bit about that later, about where we think some things have matured and then what is ahead for the future and should we change our mixture a little bit too, is part of a rebranding, right? To think about exactly where the tech trends are going. Because I think, you know, when we started and we've been very satisfied about this, that, you know, we really had correctly pegged even before the pandemic. what things were going to happen. I think we've been correct about a number of them, not always, but generally. And, you know, right now we're into another cycle, if you will, maybe another stage or another phase at least of some of this stuff that we've talked about. And so I think that's worth considering too.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, totally agree. And as I kind of like to say, tongue in cheek, we've been talking about the future of work for so long. I mean, it's no longer the future. Yeah, so every year we have, the conference I've been doing with TMC for all these years. And, I think in our gut, Chris, we feel that we have kind of done this topic now. I think we've done enough exploring about, you know, focusing on the concept of work as the future. And I think now the future, I think there's a bigger conversation or maybe a different conversation we have to look at because AI is just so transformative about everything. And I think it's going to be very difficult as AI kind of, I wouldn't say take this over, but becomes just so, you know, embedded in everything we do, I think it's going to be really difficult to kind of have this like silo approach to thinking about everything.

Like, we put work in this bucket, we put our home life in this bucket, we put our family life in this bucket, you put your, you know, your teamwork in one bucket and your individual work in another bucket, and everything is now connected. And, you know, so to just think about, well, what's the workplace going to look like? Well, there's so many things attached to that, that, yeah, I think there's a different conversation we need to be kind of or themes we need to be exploring. So, I think that's another reason why we want to re, you know, just reconsider and, you know, just maybe refresh the focus.

Chris Fine

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're the bleeding edge of anything, but I think we've been relatively leading edge. And so, to take a comparison, right, if you, maybe we weren't some of the people that were thinking about the internet in 1980. maybe we've kind of come into this future of work stuff when we started in 2018. Maybe some internet thinkers in 1994, 1995. And whether you're right or wrong, if you'd sat at that moment and predicted what was going to happen with the internet, if it happened, then it's happened, right?

And so, then you have to think about the next thing. It doesn't do much good to sit and say, I was right about this with the internet. Look what it turned into, right? You can report on what it is, but that's not really the future of, as you say, right? Yeah. Right, so like when you think about your world of, for example, contact center technology, where would you during a hiatus, and I don't mean to answer this question, but it's like, where was the next thing for that? Where's the ball going, right?

Because you have talked many times about the growth of AI assistance and of unified communications and many other things. agents, bots, all of that, that's transformed that world that you cover as an analyst. But then what's really next, right? And so, if you're going to be talking about the future of anything, you sort of have to do a reset occasionally and say, okay, what am I at right now? What's the starting point right now? Because I successfully predicted a good bit of this stuff. Not that it took any genius to do it, but nevertheless, you're right. And, you know, whatever intellect and connection we had to be able to do that, great.

But now we have to rethink. There's so much macro change going on in the world, economics, politics, but certainly change. that maybe it's just time to do a rethink and put a pin in a different place and start from there. You know what I mean?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and everything builds on what's before it. So, we, because we've been doing this monthly for so long. There is kind of a, we've kind of not kind of like a hardened view, but we certainly have a well-informed view of how things are evolving and the foundational knowledge that comes from just, thinking and talking about these things on a regular basis puts you in a position to say, yeah, well, where is, where are we going to put that new pin? And then from there, you'd be surprised just how applicable a lot of the stuff you've been talking about comes into play.

And we've seen that because we've been through many technology cycles in our 30 plus years of doing this stuff that you kind of know, you kind of can see, human nature is what it is. And Unless AI reprograms everything about our way of thinking, which we're not there yet, but it could be, then there's certain things I think are fairly easy to anticipate in terms of how we're going to respond. And that's what makes it interesting, because each time it's a different type of technology, but human nature is what it is. And it responds to stimuli in a fairly predictable way.

Chris Fine

Well, I think that's sort of the main headlines, right, of the transition and the pause, the hiatus. Right, Jon? I mean, I think, since this is Watch This Space, we should maybe spend a few minutes talking about what we've been doing. And then I think we want to have a broader discussion at the last part of the broadcast about what did we think were some of the top things that happened in the past multi-season, season one of this podcast, and then what we think might be ahead for the next phase.

Recapping Recent Industry Events for Jon Arnold

Jon Arnold

Yep, that's a good, that's a good placeholder for the transition here. We'll talk about the future of this podcast. And now let's talk about what we did last month.

Chris Fine

Yeah, so go ahead. What's, you're usually the one who's been in a zillion places. So, let's hear the recap.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, well, for me May was a quiet month in terms of events. I've been kind of continuously going places through probably early February, and probably starting with Future Work Expo, actually. It's been not every week, but almost every week there has been something I've been going to through pretty much all of February, March, and April. This month has been a quiet, you know, the month of May for me has been quiet in terms of travel, but I'm setting the seeds for June, which I have three events, or maybe four events.

Anyway, so there's more stuff coming. A lot of this month for me, Chris, has been, it actually has been more about writing and doing video stuff as opposed to going away to events. But what I can say is from the way the month has unfolded, a lot of the vendors are, they're very active in terms of trying to keep their, brand front and center. And why I'm saying that is whether I'm going to events or not, I mean, there are several vendors that I still follow closely on a daily basis. And this speaks, I think, to how pervasive technology is becoming in our lives, that all of the vendors that are almost all the vendors are being very conscious currently about keeping a high profile with their brand. and using the tools, especially social media, to amplify that and hold your attention as long as they possibly can. And that's fine.

That's typical business and that's typical marketing that you've just got to do that. But it speaks to a marketplace that A, is crowded, which is fine. I mean, health competition is a sign of a healthy market for sure. And yes, a lot of the technology that is in our world is, you know, largely unregulated, right, Chris? I think there aren't too many constraints on what's happening with these technologies. And so, when big news happens, it gets a lot of attention.

And companies like, for example, like Nvidia are just setting the bar so high now for the impact of these technologies. And the reason I'm mentioning that is because I may not be going to a lot of events this month, but I'm certainly following the news. And when companies like that and Microsoft and Amazon make announcements and releases that It kind of like you can't ignore it and you have to respond somehow because the pace, and this is the underlying message for all of this, is just the pace of change, especially with AI driving things now, is so fast that you can't stand still.

So, the vendors have to stay kind of top of mind with you as much as possible because you need to know that they are staying on top of things. Because if you don't hear from them, then you may not think that they're staying on top of things. And if they don't, others will. This is kind of the state of the market. It's kind of like a heightened form of competition where you can't afford to make mistakes, which is why this is so difficult because it's just as risky for the buyers as it is for the vendors because these technologies are so transformative and they're happening so quickly and you can't afford to miss the boat, but you can't afford to make mistakes either. Everyone is struggling with what's kind of the right level to be playing this kind of, I wouldn't call it a game, but to kind of, is there any kind of status quo anymore? And I'm having a hard time seeing that where there is one.

Chris Fine

That's an interesting point, Jon. I mean, because if I interpret what you say correctly, essentially, the media strategy is the product strategy, because... there's so much noise out there and the channels are so fragmented. They're not fragmented and it's almost a monopoly or duopoly and then there's two giants competing with each other or three or four. It's all about who gets the word out right and who connects with people because the technologies aren't always ridiculously differentiated.

You pick almost any category of anything you want to do with anything in technology and you're going to find as you would in many other industries, I suppose, a lot of competitors. And so it's a question of how you get to the market and how you sell. And in today's environment, to your point, it's all about how much noise you make and how successful your branding is, I think, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I'd hesitate to use the word noise, although there is truth to that.

Chris Fine

Well, let's say music then.

Jon Arnold

Music, okay.

Chris Fine

Or information emission, use of social media, all the channels, you know, you're surrounded by a lot of noise, I guess, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I guess, yeah, the wheat from the chaff thing is, you know, we can only process so much information. And frankly, a lot of what we need to do is be better educated about these things and understanding these things. And that's not so much what the vendors are really focusing on. Like you say, it's all about sales and customer acquisition. So it's like, where do you, how do you make informed decisions now?

And with the stuff changing so fast, it's like, okay, well, What's your kind of foundation? What's your ground zero for knowing or true north, where you feel you're going to make the right decisions? And I hate to say it, but increasingly, AI is going to drive those decisions because AI is the only set of tools that can actually process all of this stuff that humans just have a limit for how much they can absorb. And that's a darker conversation, I know.

Chris Fine

Well, let's hold that thought, because I think we're going to talk about AI in a bit. But I guess, so was that your where have I been update?

Jon Arnold

That's, yeah, that's about it. So, the short answer is nowhere. I've been here most of the time, but, you know, so I'm working virtually, but I'm still seeing a lot of stuff. And next month will be interesting, though. I will say as a preview for next month, I got three events I'm going to be at is Global Relay. This will be my first analyst event for them. And that's going to be in New York. That's where I'm going to see you.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

And the week after that, I'm going to Infobip, which is a very interesting company. They're in Croatia. And they are one of the leading players in the, what we call the CPaaS space, programmable communications. A lot of it's about messaging and RCS and very interesting stuff. And because they're non, US-based, they're not as well known or understood. And it doesn't help to have a name that doesn't really say very much, but Infobip is the name. So, I'm also attending their analyst event in Croatia, which will be pretty exciting. I've never been to that part of the world. So, I'm pretty keen to go to that.

Then in mid-June, I'm going to be at the NiCE Interactions event, which is their big customer event. And the customer events are where the vendors put their big money to really put on a show and impress their prospects and customers and channel partners and everybody else about how good a job they're doing. And in NiCE’s case, actually, it's for real because they just had some really strong quarterly earnings. And I wrote some analysis about that recently. So, they have a lot to celebrate. They're really executing well. I'll have a busy June, but we'll go quiet after this month, so you won't hear from us about the event for a while, at least on the podcast. You'll have to follow my blog.

Recapping Recent Industry Events for Chris Fine

Chris Fine

Yeah, you'll have to follow your voluminous writing on all of this, right? Well, I guess on my side, I really want to talk about just one thing and not take a lot of time on it. But I remember being quite intrigued when you talked about Zoho, which is as we recall, as this big Indian software company. It's actually not that well known here and right now, but I think that's going to change. Very closely held private company that makes enterprise software, and they make really a gigantic array of different enterprise software applications. Anything from the world of SAP to the world of Microsoft Office 365 and all in between, you know, Salesforce, ServiceNow, you know, all of these domains, Zoho was in with some form or another.

And so, I went to Zoholics, which I found, which is their user conference in the United States. It was in Houston. And I really was intrigued with them. They're an interesting company. And one of the areas they're going into, which brings me into the game, is intelligent buildings, smart workplace, IoT. They're already quite engaged with that in the manufacturing and industrial spheres. They have a large IoT project at the biggest, apparently the largest maker of wheels for vehicles in the world, which is in India.

And a number of other customers where they're connected to sensors and they're connected to their software and All the stuff you and I have talked about where I spend a lot of time trying to make happen with an ecosystem about connecting to the physical environment and controlling it based on input from sensors, and then taking that data and passing it to more traditional enterprise data analytics and process applications so that you can add that dimension to the way and enterprise functions. And so, I think this is a watch this space.

I mean, Zoho is a watch this space in general. They seem to have quite a loyal customer base. And at this point, I would say they're not necessarily Fortune 50 companies, although they probably have one or two, but I think they're an up and comer and their approach is generally quite innovative. They chase markets when they find them. They'll add a module very easily. They have very, very large software development resource and people who work hard. And so, it was just very interesting to get to know them better. That was kind of the highlight of my month.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I'll just say ditto to that. Like you say, it's not often you and I get to attend conferences from the same vendors. So, I'm glad to hear your take is pretty similar to how I've talked about than before. And so, it's not just me. It's a very different kind of company doing things that everybody uses in the workplace for sure. And if you just look at their logo, I mean, you'd say, oh, aren't they? look like a Google copycat because they have the same kind of color scheme.

Chris Fine

Interlocking shapes.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, in the logo, you say, oh, aren't they just ripping off Google? Well, no, but you could probably go up and down the line of every application Google has. You know, they have pretty much all of that and Microsoft as well. And so, yeah, but there's a, it's just a validation that there's a, like you talked earlier, Chris, about, you know, maybe a duopoly or hegemony of just a handful of companies, and that's always been true in tech, but it's just great to see that there is someone else out there that's an alternative to the big giants that dominate these spaces. And it's obviously, they've found... a very healthy market for this. And because if the functionality is there, then the value is much better because it's a lot less expensive. So, they know the formula in this SaaS model business, right? They've done it very, very well.

Chris Fine

And their barrier to entry is low too, which is interesting. It's very easy to become a customer. Very easy to sign up, doesn't cost a lot of money. And it's very easy to add on things as you need them, especially if you're sort of a medium-sized business. You know, you want to automate your accounts payable, but you're using them for, you know, service tickets right now. It's easy to add it.

The other thing I just said, and then we'll move on, but I just wanted to mention, I think I've watched this space with Zoho is AI because from the top down, they're investing in trying to embed that in all of what they make because they see that as being the unifying factor across all the different functions that they serve. And I actually think that's one of that type of application where you unify across different dimensions and spheres of data and functionality is one of the biggest promises of AI.

You would certainly say that a Google and Microsoft and everybody's investing in that too. I just think that like everything, Zoho has their own flavor on things. And it's going to be interesting to see what they come up with over the next 12 months or whatever and what they have now with the unified AI and the ability to follow and coordinate across all the different modules that they make. And that they have committed to doing.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and executed on. Their roadmap is full of a lot of promising things for what's coming, but they've also, when I've seen the roadmap presentations, it's, they're very clear on the things that they've brought to market. already and then the things that are coming to market, which all vendors do. But I don't get the sense that they're a company that has really messes up on their schedule. I think they're pretty good about keeping to market for bringing stuff out when they say they're going to bring it out. And like you say, they have a lot of resources on these things.

So, they run the business, I think, very well. And the culture there is really it's very strong. And it's, like you say, a lot of people have been there for a very long time. I've certainly seen that too. And it's also interesting to see how they've attracted a lot of people from other companies to be there. It's not entirely homegrown, but also shows that some people kind of have hit a wall with some of the larger tech companies that they have more opportunity at Zoho because they're, they kind of be a little more hands on with the innovation.

Chris Fine

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to follow them and potentially to work with them. So that's my highlight of the month. But I think given that where we are in time, we really should think about how do we put a conclusion on this chapter of us doing this. Like, and I think what we talked about was we were going to talk about a couple of things that have struck us the most, or impacted things, we've seen them the most over the years that we've done this. And then I think we're going to talk about, where's the junction between that and moving forward, right?

Impact of the Pandemic on the Future of Work and Technology Evolution

Jon Arnold

Yeah, we've stayed true to the name of the podcast, the Watch This Space, you know, idea. And I think it's held up for us pretty well. We have been, when we say watch this space, it's mostly about future of work, but because so many other things are connected to it, really is a broader, broader theme. But yeah, so I'll I don't mind kind of starting with probably the most ahead thing we've all had to live through, which was the pandemic. You know, when we talk about future of work, I don't think there's been any bigger kind of jolt to the status quo I mentioned earlier, which is now gone than hybrid work. Right. I mean, no one asked for this, no one was planning for it, and no one was ready when these changes were forced, right?

And I can't remember living through something that was that like external forces created so much disruption that had nothing to do with technology. And that's what I mean about status quo. Like when you kind of know where all the levers are that affect change, you could plan for that. But you mentioned earlier, Chris, you go back to the First World War when the influenza epidemic was also around. No one can plan for that. And when it hits, it hits everybody. And that's what happened here. So, when we talk about the future of work, whatever future we were thinking about completely went out the window with the pandemic and that forced a reset for everything. And we're still trying to figure it out, right?

Chris Fine

I mean, I think it was an intensely traumatic event that happens, I would say on average, once a century or so, hopefully not more, something like that. But I think to your point, I don't think the dust has settled, to be honest. And I think we're seeing a lot of things on all dimensions of the world right now that are either a result of, or we're in the process and then we're shaken up by the pandemic. So, my view is that the pandemic was essentially, with respect to work and style of work, was a massive catalyst and a forcing of something that was already potentially in the works but was never going to happen without some kind of a massive disruption.

It would have taken a lot longer, I think, to get where we are with hybrid work. I'd been an advocate for it for a very long time. Some others have too. But I think that there was just a very, very entrenched level of resistance. And it also took the technology a certain amount of time to develop to where you really could do it. And so, I think that hybrid work is still rippling through the ecosystem of office space and real estate and technology and work content and many other things.

But in terms of disruption of how work is done, I think the pandemic induced changes and the technology underneath, the only parallel I could think of in my life really was the transition from primarily industrial to information-based work and the economy. And that's the only thing I think that was on a par, when computers really dropped in cost in the 70s and 80s and how it just became where most people, not all people, as we always say, we always try to make this point, that there's still many who are not in that sphere. But if you look at the majority of the workforce, people end up being information-oriented work.

And I think hybrid work is as big as a shift, because it was ultimately the embrace of information-oriented work, but it had so many other aspects as well. It was like, I'm working on information all day, so I don't have to be in a very specific place, but very specific facilities. But yes, I think during our tenure of this broadcast so far, it's really been hybrid work, and the pandemic would be factor #1.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and just to connect the dots on that, Chris, from industrial to informational, again, it's one of the core motifs that we have here is this idea of analog to digital. And that's exactly what that's about. When you move away from mechanical, you know, production-oriented, manufacturing-oriented kind of environments where most work was around supporting those things and everything that went on in the office was done on mechanical devices like typewriters, whatever. It wasn't about information per se. Whereas now, as you say, information is very mobile, it's very nomadic, and you can do it anywhere.

All of a sudden, the need to be in a physical space to do your quote unquote work now changes. So again, that's because we have gone from this shift from analog to digital technologies that have given rise to the idea that data is the thing now. And I think it's easy to you could argue today that every business is a data business because that's where the value comes from to do just about everything.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I agree. But what has happened though, is I really feel like there's starting to be some stability around hybrid work. There's still more to come. You know, if you listen to smart people in the industry like Leesman or Unwork, you know, they still see, or the major real estate players, you know, CBRE, JLL, Cushman and Wakefield, you read the research. There's still more to come in terms of shifting of how space is deployed and how space is used. and what facilities are configured in workplace. But the way seems a little bit clearer.

There are still some companies that are going to try to force people back to work five days a week and they may succeed. They think they will, because in a current economic downturn, companies always think they have all the power - and sometimes they do - and they're going to try to, they get less sunshine and roses and more show up or lose your job, you know. But having said that, I just think for the point of view of productivity, there's probably a happy medium of, you know, whatever it is, the three days a week or whatever the right thing is in any given enterprise. And that's where we've gotten to and I don't see radical changes coming. to that.

I think remote work as a whole it has consistently declined and it's probably the rate of that decline is lessening but you know there's relatively few jobs that are 100% remote and remote work was great to be able to try it and for a lot of people and you know then to reach some compromise with it but 100% remote work I think is not always healthy for people in many kinds of positions and You know, I speak as somebody who does almost 100% remote work. I can see the big advantages, but some disadvantages of it too. And that's where I think it's drawing to kind of an equilibrium, don't you think?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. Yeah. There's just say we and if you want to take AI to a very long conclusion where it automates virtually every element of work, then it really doesn't matter where you are anymore. But again, as long as work is a human endeavor, it's not fully automated, then, you know, we are still humans. We're not machines. And I think that's easy to get lost in the equation about you know, why the environment of the workplace is so important, whether it is a home-based environment, but also for, you know, these third spaces like WeWork.

That's an important part of the equation because it's that kind of happy medium between being stuck in a, you know, cramped apartment and working in a sterile, you know, noisy office environment. So there, as you say, we have evolved into some kind of equilibrium of what mix of spaces will work best.

I also just want to mention, on the technology front, I've long said that the pandemic was the best thing that could have happened for UCaaS and UC, because it was exactly the technology we needed at the time to enable remote work. If we didn't have these tools, like let's say, Chris, the pandemic happened 5 or 10 years earlier, businesses would be paralyzed. They wouldn't be able to function nowhere near full capacity. They just couldn't. So that you talk about a disruption. I think we're just very fortunate in a way that we had enough maturity in those technologies that we could function working remotely or some kind of a mix. And if anything, it validated the value of the cloud, right?

Because again, many companies, were and still do sit on the fence about using the cloud, all kinds of reasons to not use it. But I think the pandemic put the cloud through tests that, you know, I think it pretty much passed everyone. I don't think, you know, if you're looking for reasons not to use the cloud technology wise in terms of performance, I think the pandemic forced adoption for the cloud and it found that it actually did hold up well and did make remote work possible and kept people collaborating and kept businesses moving. And so, for the most part, I think we have to give a nod to the technology that it was in the right place at the right time, so to speak, for the pandemic, because where would we have been if we didn't, as I said, if the pandemic came 10 years sooner?

Chris Fine

Oh, completely, completely. In fact, I was thinking the other day, wearing my various hats over the years, I was involved in a number of jobs where, and pretty much any time you're in IT, you have to think about disaster recovery and business continuity planning. And I tended to be on sort of an innovative edge of communications and various technologies we might deploy for various things. And I just was thinking about the difference between a discussion about that topic, pre-internet, internet, but no, you know, voice over IP. Internet with voice over IP, but no multimedia and collaboration and sharing, and then versus today.

I agree with you 100%. I'm just thinking about how that evolved. For example, the discussion that we had to have on the back of the Northridge earthquake in California during the 90s. If you're a financial organization or some other company that depends a lot on communications, what happened, what we needed to do with that. And then what needed to be done after 9-11, and then what needed to be done after Hurricane Sandy in New York, and then versus how technology addressed the pandemic, and... boy, you really can see, right? We did benefit from the fact that the right technology was in place at the crucial moment, right?

Why There’s No Status Quo Yet with AI

Jon Arnold

For sure, for sure. And yeah, yes, it has benefited companies like Microsoft tremendously. So, you could argue that they probably had more upside to this than other companies. But no, it did raise the tide, I think, for all boats, made this industry very viable. And, you know, you come away with a deep appreciation of, when the technology works well, it can be really great. And there's no doubt about it.

But I think that will also maybe push us to the flip side of this, Chris, about the watch this space for what we should be thinking about. After this episode today, where are the themes that we should be looking at? And you can't get away from AI being the thing that you have to be watching right now. And it just touches everything in such profound ways. We're so far away, I think, from understanding what it all means. And of course, there's opportunity in that. But as I said earlier, where is the status quo right now? And I don't think there really is one.

Chris Fine

Status quo with AI, I feel like it's still really early days. Moving at a rapid breakneck pace. But, you know, again, just as a preface, when we're talking about what happened since we started this podcast, the breakthrough in AI is as big as anything else we've talked about. Because remember, for decades, AI just wasn't much, right? It was very limited in its application, took forever to do, to make any breakthroughs with it. But then the combination of technology, capability, processing, GPUs, all of that, and breakthroughs in the algorithms and software really took off like a rocket in the early part of this decade.

And we're just, I think getting started with that. But all technology's two-faced. And the bigger the bang of what you're talking about, you know, an AI, let's say, the more you see the two-faced nature of it, right? I told you earlier, I was thinking about the Roman god, Janus - you see the picture very often of the two-faced god, right? And, you know, he's technically the god of beginnings and endings. It was the god of the doorway and the gate, sometimes construed to mean the good and bad face, right? The mirror and then the funhouse mirror or the black mirror.

But boy, if you think about a technology that has that aspect to it, AI is the one. It's not without parallel, right? So, you look at most major tech breakthroughs, and they had, you know, I kind of jotted down. You think about the development of nitroglycerin, which led to high explosives. And, you know how much awfulness that wrought in the world and continues to. But nevertheless, it's also a key drug in treating cardiac arrest and heart attacks, et cetera, right? And all of the organic chemistry that derived from all that work on explosives, that's the basis of modern pharmacology, right? And a zillion other industries.

Similarly, atomic energy and really understanding quantum physics, think about how that started - not so well, but then there's a whole plus side of that too. And today there are many things that benefit from that. I was thinking about cancer treatment and chemotherapy, which basically was developed as a result of a horrible accident with chemical weapons and poison. And, you know, modern cancer treatment was really born from that. So, you could just keep going on and on, right? You could say that about the internet, you could say that about everything, social media, collaboration, communications technology. But I do think AI really has this in great quantity, that ability to be good or bad or both at the same time, right?

Quantum Computing – the Next Thing After AI

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's kind of like a qubit, right? It doesn't have one constant state. It can be in multiple places at once. That's kind of what makes me think of that. And that actually is a big one because I don't understand much about quantum computing, but I do know that it is one of the space races we're on right now with China. The ability to have that level of computational power to, again, with all the data that we are creating and trying to harness in the world, that's the stuff that matters because whoever has the best technology for that is kind of going to rule the world because they have, if you can't protect your data, it doesn't have any value.

And that's the threat that quantum poses because if the bad guys get there before the good guys, then we have no protection against our sensitive data that drives everything. That's a little James Bond-ish sounding stuff. But I think as part of the watch the space idea, Chris, I think the spirit of what we're talking about with technology change and the foundational pieces that make it all happen. Yeah, of course, AI has got to be the thing we watch.

But just coming back to the world we come from, having been through the evolution of going to VoIP and you coming with your background coming out of the Bell system, these foundational technologies that made modern communications possible, we've kind of lived through, but also studied their rises and falls. And they all follow a similar arc, right? That they have this moment of, you know, when something that starts out being disruptive, when it matures to a certain point, it becomes innovative.

That's where it creates the long-term value. And we've seen that with those technologies. And I think the patterns do hold in a lot of ways for what we think will happen with AI. So, I think there's value in having that historical perspective of having seen these kinds of movies before and trying to apply that to how we follow and interpret what the changes are that we're going to be seeing over the next while with AI.

Chris Fine

I'm glad you mentioned quantum computing, because I do think that's the other one and they're tied together to a certain extent. But I do think that if we were to go on this hiatus and then come and talk to each other in a year or do another broadcast, we would say, you know, AI is really the thing. The amount of advance that it's making on the future of work and on society as a whole and on science and technology and politics and everything else. It's rare that you see something with that much potential for harm and whatever we think the potential for good is. And we don't see a lot of efforts to understand it or regulate it. And the ones that do happen get thwarted by large forces that are out there to make sure that limits don't happen. So, who's to say where it goes, but I do think that's going to just become a bigger and bigger part of the picture, don't you?

Revisiting With Folded Hands and the Future of AI

Jon Arnold

For sure. For sure. And that takes us back to a recent episode we did about the novella With Folded Hands.

Chris Fine

I was going to mention that too. Yes, go ahead.

Jon Arnold

So, if there's one episode, folks, you really should check out if you want to go through our little archive is the one we did on With Folded Hands earlier this year. I can't remember which month it was, but I think that will be a good starting point to kind of bridge the worlds of analog to digital and pre-big tech thinking about technology, which is where that comes from. Yes, there's certainly some cold war thinking in that story. But, you know, it's interesting to read science fiction from a time when, you know, it was all human driven. It wasn't computers, there wasn't technology driving things the way they are today. But when it's a very human-centric form of perspective on the impact of technology, I think it's very different from the way people would write about it today.

Chris Fine

Well, the story has many themes, but I think the one that made it spring to mind for both of us was that it's a story about humanoids, you know, that are essentially robots that the man who invents them in the story really invented to try to stop war and suffering and death and to, as they say, serve and obey and guard mankind from harm. And yet it turned into a disaster, right?

Because the humanoids did what they were told to do, but it turned out that was the worst thing for humanity to have, especially the way they did it, because it was all about control. And, you know, the only way the humanoids could fulfill their mission was essentially to control everything. And I think that's the future that we need to try not to have. Right. Because I think that there's always an inclination to say, oh, well, you know, technology can take their care of this better than we can. And it doesn't always work out that way, right?

Jon Arnold

Right. And then we like the book and the story goes, we're bored. We have nothing to do. We have no purpose. We have nothing to strive for. No inspiration, no need for creativity, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff that makes us human becomes less important. And of course, that's a warning for, because if you want to look at it that way, you can see signs now of how AI is starting to impact our lives and our mentalities and our values, et cetera. But I'll hold it at that, Chris, because we are pretty darn close to time for today and for our podcast. But that's a hook to keep them coming back, I guess. There's just so much to talk about.

Chris Fine

Well, Jon, I just want to say it's always a pleasure doing this with you. And again, thanks to our audience and our commenters, but it's really been a special experience to have these eight seasons to chat with you and to share thoughts and to try to prognosticate and review the things we've been involved with. So, thank you very much.

Jon Arnold

You're welcome, Chris, and a big thank you as well to you because, you know, we've had and do have a really nice partnership. And it's always better than just doing the one. We work well together because we like the same stuff, and we think about these things in similar ways. So, yes, thank you, because otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. I just wouldn't be talking to myself all day.

Chris Fine

Neither would I. It's certainly not a gold mine, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, we're not getting rich doing this, folks.

Chris Fine

It's been fun and we'll see where it goes, right? Rethink everything and see where it goes.

Jon Arnold

Yes, yes. So, a big thank you for everybody who's out there listening or discovering us and maybe pick up a few of our earlier episodes. So, with that, yes, thank you until we sign off here. And so you don't get lost in space, you can find our episodes at www.watchthespace.tech. or wherever you subscribe, and we're on all the major platforms. So, with that, I guess as one last time for this iteration of the podcast, I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks to all for everything. And at some point in the future, we will be back with either Watch This Space or the next generation of Watch This Space. And thanks all, and we will see you in the future.