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