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