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

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 a new month of Watch the Space. Hi, Jon. Been a busy month, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, sure has, Chris. And welcome everybody to our podcast. It's one of those rare occasions, Chris, where we can talk about having just seen each other - which is not the norm, but that's what happened for us at the IT Expo last, well. I shouldn't say last week, just say last month by the time this podcast was published in Fort Lauderdale, the regular home of IT Expo. And yeah, we'll talk about some highlights from that.

But you know, straight off the top, there's always new stuff happening in our lines of work and things tend to kind of go in bunches, at least for me as an analyst. I'm going through a stretch of five industry events in four weeks that I'm traveling to. So it gets to be a bit of a blur after a while. But when you see how various companies are messaging things about technology, you get an appreciation from a distance of just how, you know, Chris, how dominant AI has become for everything now. And it's taken such a short amount of time to kind of take over everything, but it doesn't matter.

You just spin the wheel and whatever it lands on, that vendor is leading with an AI story. It's getting hard to think now of who isn't talking about AI. And that's a little bit worrisome, I guess, for something that has captured our imaginations and our wallets in such a short amount of time in something that's so fast moving and so unregulated and so unproven. But here we are.

Chris Fine

That's true. Before I comment on that, I just also wanted to say that the reason we were down there was really for your Future of Work Expo track. as well as the overall IT Expo conference. I just wanted to extend my compliments to you for organizing that. It was a super helpful program. Very, very interesting. I think you got a lot of good speakers. So, you know, props to you for doing that. I just wanted to put that out there.

But on AI, you're absolutely right, because what's going to happen is even if the company doesn't or the speaker or the panelist doesn't lead with AI, at some point they're going to get asked about, you know, how does it relate to you? What it reminded me of was another time when there was a buzzword that was that way, which was internet, right? There was a huge amount of actual value created out of the internet. But there was a time when no matter which business you were in, they would ask you about the internet. Are you going to sell online? How are you connected? What's going to happen when the internet grows to what you do? If you're an enterprise technology company, let's say, if you're a carrier, what's the internet going to do? And I think that's the same now with AI. So it's something that is a gigantic thing, but you're also, it's such a huge context that no matter who you are, you're going to get asked about it. Do you think so? Yeah, I do.

Jon Arnold

And for our loyal listeners, if you've been with us since day one, which is probably not a lot of people, but the common thread to our conversations here on the podcast is this perspective of us, two of us are being coming out of the analog world and looking at the digital world through that lens. And when you mentioned the internet, Chris, I'm glad you connected that dot because the internet boom, I guess you'd call that what, mid 90s, early 90s?

Chris Fine

Up through 2001, really.

Jon Arnold

That was the great leap forward for kind of, I don't know, our whole evolution into the digital world. Whereas you say, everyone's got to have a pets.com, cars.com, the mania around that was this gold rush about, oh, once you get online and go into the digital world, it's everything is new and different and this is the future. And yeah, you're right. I mean, everybody had that feeling of inevitability about it and who's going to get there first and who's going to make the most money and all this stuff. And it's largely borne out, right?

We are completely dependent on the internet now and mobility has a big role to play in that. But I think AI is just as big and profound of a shift that is just really cementing this almost like, I wouldn't call it the break from the analog world, but within five years, AI is going to just redefine everything. And I think it's going to be pretty damn hard at that point to find real vestiges of the analog world at that point.

Chris Fine

I agree. I also was thinking about what influence the internet had on the infrastructure. I don't remember all the companies we used to cover who were either positively or negative impacted by the growth of the internet. So it wasn't even just software. It wasn't even just end user businesses or e-commerce or anything else. It was just all the way down to the chips, and down to router chips and ASICs and all of the things that ended up powering the internet. And now if you look, like if you looked at the NVIDIA blowout on quarterly results just the other day, unbelievable. You know that now this is drawing infrastructure too. It's not just the software and the algorithmic techniques and the potential end user applications, but now AI really is going into the hardware as well, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, just everything is going to be AI from the ground up. I mean, it will be virtually, I say virtual, that's a good one. There'll be just no connection to the analog world. it won't be relevant. And much like the way cash is disappearing, we're doing everything digitally, electronically now, all those physical artifacts of the pre-internet world, are, unless you go to a museum, they're going to get harder and harder to find.

Chris Fine

Well, there is a funny thing about cash. Cash is coming back because people have started, merchants have started charging the 4% if you use a credit card. I wouldn't say like it's a gigantic, massive rebellion yet, but I definitely see people going for the cash. And there was a funny article I read about two weeks ago that like younger people don't always know other than just the ATM, like how to get cash. And they hardly ever even go to the ATM to get cash. And now if they decide they don't want to be paying the surplus, the premium on this, the tax, they really actually have to manage cash. So I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's, maybe it's like the return of vinyl, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

You know, it's going to be bigger. It's going to be way bigger than it was for the last 40 years. But cash is not dead, is all I'm saying.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I don't want it to go away. But I think that blowback is going to last as long as until the banks decide, what, getting cash from us is going to be a privilege now, so you're going to have to pay for it. And I have no doubt it's going to go that way because they're, it's much like, the PSTN, right? I mean, the telcos want to get out of that business, so they're just going to make it so expensive for you to have a landline, you will just, the economics just won't work and you'll just have to capitulate and go digital and VoIP and wireless and everything else. If they don't want you, remember that episode we did when customer service is bad?

Chris Fine

Hit customer triage. Yeah.

Jon Arnold

I think it's going to be, we'll see strands of this. If it's not worth their while to have you doing things the analog way, they'll just make it expensive and difficult and you won't have much choice at that point.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I was thinking about the effect of Hurricane Sandy in this part of the country where that was the gigantic catalyst that really caused the abandonment of the copper phone plant in this region. They just didn't rebuild it. They just joked it because it was cheaper for Verizon and some of the other companies to just run fiber or run some digital technology to replace it. And they just literally abandoned many, many, many thousands of endpoints and just said, no, you can't have it anymore. Or they'll give you something that seems like it, but it isn't really.

Jon Arnold

Well, everything works well until it doesn't. When electricity goes out, power goes down, we are totally paralyzed. There's nothing we can do.

Chris Fine

Yeah, there was an interesting outage of AT&T yesterday.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that was a big story, right?

Chris Fine

It was a pretty big story, but it looked like it was some kind of failed software upgrade. At least that's what you're saying now. It doesn't look like it's something malicious, but it certainly caused a lot of concern.

Jon Arnold

Keep those backup batteries charged, folks, and keep cash stashed away somewhere in your basement, because there's going to be a time when you won't be able to do anything, you know, and that, as you say, that's when it really comes back. And then we'll be, you know, we'll be reduced to being a barter-based economy, just like the good old days.

Chris Fine

You think so? I mean, that's even before analog. I mean, I hope not, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, these Mad Max scenarios may not be that far off. Who knows?

Chris Fine

Well, there were a lot of postings on the, I saw from the amateur radio operators, the hams that said, you know, we'll get a license and you could communicate.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, the whole underground economy will just boom, right? Yeah, just boom. All right, let's get back to Florida.

Chris Fine

Okay, we're switching back to IT Expo. So go.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, let's go. So this is, I think, 6th year for doing Future Work Expo that I've been a Chair of. It's been around a little longer than that, but, you know, it's kind of come into its own as a pretty, I think, a pretty well-defined show. The future work concept is always a moving target, so we have to keep coming up with new things to cover. But under the big house of IT Expo or one of many sub events and anybody who attended there would know that.

The first thing I'd say right off, Chris, is it was good to see a lot of new faces in the crowd. Our event is pretty much geared to thought leadership. Our panels are all moderated discussions. So there's no pitches, no real selling going on. And it's just talking about the topics that are defining future of work. We covered a fair bit of ground as we always try to do, and I think the audience took some good input away from that. We had good conversations and questions during the talks, which is always a good sign. And the rooms weren't totally full all the time, but there was enough traffic in there to keep it, keep the energy good. And all the speakers were great.

I thought, as you mentioned earlier, Chris, about having the good variety of topics and speakers, and that does make for a good program. And then when people get going and we have our sessions in play, it takes a life of its own. There were definitely highlights I think that both of us saw. My key role once the show started was to just keep it all moving. I moderated most of the sessions, but definitely had help. And so thanks to you, Chris, you moderated one of those panels. It was the second last one. And so why don't I hand off to you and maybe share some of your takeaways and I'll throw in a couple more and then we'll move on.

Chris Fine

Thanks, Jon. I think we definitely need more input from you because I got stuck in a snowstorm or I got my flight bumped and I missed the first day of session. So you definitely have to comment on those. I was really sorry to miss them. But my two sessions were basically the one I moderated and the one I was on the panel were about the workplace and kind of the macro future of work. And it was a super, you really got some great speakers for my panel. So, thanks for that.

I kind of jotted down 3 takeaways that came out of both discussions, none of which is necessarily new. My point to make here would be that these just kind of keep getting reinforced. And so people need to think about it this way.

One is that the forced return to office is not the way, right? It may work occasionally, but fundamentally it's a coercive policy when companies just say you have to return and they don't do anything to make it worth your return. Again, we always have to emphasize that we're not talking about every slice of the workforce. We're talking mostly about office workers of various kinds and subject matter experts and, professionals and all of that. But within this segment, you got a lot of people saying, I'm perfectly able to do my work at home, you know, two, three days a week. And It's a bear of a commute to get wherever I'm going. So why am I coming back? And companies have kind of pulled back a little bit about the culture argument. You know, culture requires togetherness kind of stuff. You still hear it, but they've started to take a bit of a harder line. And I think the view of most of the speakers was that, yeah, this is happening, but this is not really the way to go. So that was #1.

Number 2, the real estate cycle that you and I have talked about a lot, where it's measure, reduce, and refactor or reformat the space is happening. It's going to take some time to play on and to play out, but it's definitely happening. And when you look at the number of leases that are coming up over the next two, three years, it's going to be a really interesting picture as to how that gets renewed or replaced.

My third point is that this is going to produce some real opportunities. We had some panelists from areas like next generation interior architecture, redecorating, and also for flexible space, who were quite positive about all of this. And this is a point that we've also made before, but just continue to reinforce, which is in the midst of change, there really is opportunity, and especially for technology vendors, because technology just gets to be more and more important, the more distributed and virtual work is. So every aspect of the technologies that we cover, if you try to keep playing the old way, you've got a problem. But if you try to take a look forward and utilize some of the new technologies that are coming out, whether it be augmented reality or AI or whatever, you do have an opportunity. So those were my three. I mean, what did you think?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, those sum up a lot of the messages that came out of those sessions. The other thing I wanted to touch on was in terms of the specific topics, the idea here with the programming is to show future work is more than just about technology, right? We addressed other things too when it comes into like, employee engagement, what it means on a human level for what the next kind of generation of work environment is going to be. So much of it's about not just AI, but the data.

We looked at the implications for cybersec, which just continues to get more and more challenging. And that's a problem that just never goes away, and AI is just redefining everything. Just as you can use AI to kind of up your profile, not your profile, your posture for authentication with biometrics, right? With video, like facial biometrics and voice biometrics, you'd think, okay, this is a pretty good way to make sure you are who you say you are. But then the bad guys are always a step ahead and they're using this technology, you know, to defeat it. The same technology we're doing to make our security perimeter stronger; they're taking the same advantage.

So, using deep fakes to imitate who your identity says you are, because they only need a little snippet or two of your voice to now create synthetic variations that can sound very credible. And so it just never stops. They're always gonna be one step ahead trying to come up with something even more nefarious, whatever. You can just never rest on to say we have two factor authentication now. We don't have to worry anymore. Well, no, you just have to make it harder and harder over time. It just doesn't end.

That's, as you say, opportunity, Chris, it's certainly opportunity for the vendors to get people up to speed. Another related idea, of course, is that we're talking mostly here mid-market and some SMB. This is not a large enterprise show. So you're dealing with an audience that is probably not as sophisticated, doesn't have the resources that enterprise IT has. You always have to be mindful in your vendors how far and fast you can go with this stuff in terms of getting it introduced for what future work is going to have to mean for these organizations. Some of the small ones, of course, are very agile and they're great. They adapt very fast, but a lot of them are still just coming to grips with these technologies. And when you start thinking about, you mentioned, Chris, you know, AR, VR, you know, Metaverse, we had a really good session on that, I know you didn't get to. It's just showing you what's possible and what's coming.

Like I, always say, you know, the consumer leads, and enterprise follows. When you see Apple and Meta making very big bets on immersive experiences, when these big consumer brands start to push these things out there further into our consciousness, we start to ask more questions now, well, why can't I work this way at work, right?

It's going to seed demand, even though like the Vision Pro is a very expensive, headpiece, there'll be workarounds for these things. The important thing is to show that there are lots of use cases and good experiences you can have in a work-related environment. And when the big guys like this get behind it, it's coming. You know, it may not be this year or next year, but it's definitely coming. And we had some really good examples of that at the sessions.

One last thing I'll mention, Chris; it came actually in the last session that you were on with Jeff Pulver and a few others. One of the comments from the audience, I can't remember if you remember this guy, Chris, but what he was getting at is what does this do for productivity? We were talking about how organizations can adapt. And I think he kind of opened up a theme that we will probably explore more next year, but it became very clear to me as we worked through it, that session, that the idea of personal productivity has been the benchmark that businesses look at when they evaluate your worth in the organization.

As you said before, Chris, you can't force people back to the office. There's so much flux around the hybrid work model. I'm really starting to think that we've got to move off of this concept of personal productivity. I think there's just so many variations of how we work now. Coming up with a universal standard or a metric that allows us to be fairly evaluated in our jobs and our contributions, I think it's going to be just a losing battle.

It came out on the panel, one of the people said, probably a better indicator of productivity is your stock price, of your collective productivity rather than your individual employee-based outputs. And I think there's something to that; organizations are going to have to rethink what's important, what matters, how do you create true value How do you keep your employees happy and engaged, all that stuff. So I just want to throw that out there as a bigger idea that I think has merit to this moving target we call future of work.

Chris Fine

Well, I agree with part of that. I think that we do need to reconsider how we measure the impact of people's contributions in a world where you're not supervising them all the time. or where it's, they execute in different environments, more virtual. I don't think that stock price is as conclusive an indicator as it might be because there are just so many factors around that. It's not just productivity. I mean, that's an absolutely true, you know - productivity is one of the variables and an important one, but it's not the only one with stock price. But what I do think is that historically, a lot of organizations have had a very functional view of productivity, right? You're sort of an F of X. I used to joke about this when I was an engineer, you're kind of an F of X. And it's like, how good a function are you, right? So if you were a math function, you know, minimal distortion, maximum gain, you know, right?

And that's just not that applicable to a lot of jobs. When you look at a more modern way of evaluating, you sometimes see 360-degree reviews and you'll see more about like, well, let's agree we're going to try to do X number of things this year. So it's kind of outcome based, right? You could work standing on your head, but if you achieve what we've agreed you need to achieve and if you play this role with the team that enables and enhances the team and the firm, then okay, right?

That's really kind of what you're rated on. And I feel like that's the overall trend. You can't do it in every job, obviously, right? If you're going to be a call center person, then there's all kinds of very fixed metrics that could be applied to you, which part of how efficient an F of X are you because you're answering input all the time, generating output.

Jon Arnold

Everything is measured. Everything in their job is measured. So it's easy to do that.

Chris Fine

Yeah, but if you think about the many other jobs, you can really get a sense of what people are doing without focusing on, potentially, an outdated version of productivity. But that's a big change in thinking. The other comment I had on what you're saying is that I do think that one thing that came out of what I heard, and sounds like you did too, was the importance of immersivity, if you want to call it that, right? Like we do immersive, where by whatever means, wherever they are, everybody pretty much sees the whole picture. It could be a real breakthrough.

Because it doesn't mean that everybody's sitting in the office wearing glasses, right? It could be that the people who are in the office have an immersive room with displays and other technologies getting so cheap. And then maybe the remote people have a smaller version of that, potentially with glasses or whatever, to be able to participate and not be cartoon characters, but just everybody kind of seem the same holodeck, if you want to call it that. I do think there's a future in that.

Jon Arnold

Yep, And again, having 2D versions of immersive working where you do not need an interface, again, makes it a more amenable way of doing things that aren't clunky, don't require the expertise of manipulating a headset and of course the fatigue that comes with wearing those headsets for long periods of time. So there's a lot there. And when I mentioned the big brands earlier, by the way, Chris, I just mentioned Vision Pro in passing. We did one surprise nice thing that we did see on the show floor was a small tabletop there from Apple. who was, I'm sure, never been to IT Expo before. And we never see Apple at events. They're very guarded. That's their culture. And it was kind of cool to see them there.

Chris Fine

It was, it was. They were trying to build their Apple Consultants Network to give more help to, I think in that case, small and medium businesses who wanted to go with Apple Enterprise technology, where they wanted to go with Macs and iPhones and whatever else is involved with going Apple. And that's extending the kind of support or looking for partners to extend the kind of support that they historically have given to larger businesses.

But when you look at Apple retail, Apple stores have taken over almost all of the Apple retailing out there, a very big chunk of it. And the old, there used to be stores, particularly in markets like New York City where you had a lot of Apple customers that gave a higher level of support. My takeaway from talking to them was that they want to extend more of that out there in a network of VARs and integrators and consultants to try to enable small, medium businesses to adopt an Apple IT environment. Was that what you felt?

Jon Arnold

Well, yeah, So, you know, I mentioned earlier when the big vendors get behind these things, I hate to call Apple a vendor, but that's kind of what they are. They all have designs on the enterprise market. Meta, Apple, they're not players in these spaces in a big way, but they have kind of avenues. There are pathways for them to do that. And when we talk about getting immersive into the future work conversation, it's a different experience that people have to kind of, get their heads around and it's got to be a good experience. It's got to be easy to use. It's got to be better somehow, and who creates better user experiences than Apple, right?

They have that kind of DNA going for them to say, if we can only find a value proposition here that will resonate somehow, there's no reason why they could not be an enterprise player. If we're going to define enterprise as immersive virtual experiences as one slice of future of work, there's no reason why they couldn't be successful doing that.

Chris Fine

I think their market share is growing anyway, to be honest, with end devices. Maybe they're not part of sort of the core IT. You know, IT is much more friendly to Apple than it used to be, but they're still kind of like the end users want them, so we support them, as opposed to, we've taken a strategic decision to go with Apple.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, because so much of it's closed and controlled, right, by Apple. It's not friendly.

Chris Fine

Yeah, and for a long time, Apple really was actively not courting the enterprise market. It's been relatively recent, but I think they woke up and noticed that it's a multi-billion-dollar market that they could have more of a play in, and so they're doing it.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. And I mean, and the iPhone is a very mature product. I mean, how much more can you do with a phone now? I mean, what hasn't it conquered? If you're thinking longer term, much like my view of Microsoft getting into Meta, sorry, into getting into Metaverse and going down this road in such a big way, because I think they're looking to what I call the post-PC future where the PC is going to basically go away.

To keep their dominance, they have to be at the front of the next interface, and the next generation is going to succeed the PC. That's where the immersive worlds are going to really come into their own. So their investments in metaverse are very expensive, but it's a big bet. But I think they're thinking about their future too.

Chris Fine

I agree with all of that. I think, though, that in the world of hybrid work, arguably laptops are more important than ever. I don't know how the sales figures are; I should probably look at that before I say that. But if you're really working on the go, you still need one. I wouldn't go out with a Chromebook, although a lot of people do go out with iPads to work, right? I've just never been in a job where I didn't have to do some level of production, a PowerPoint or, something that involved you needed the keyboard and you needed the other things that, or you're working where you're not connected to the network all the time.

But I know there's a strong argument on both sides that, you know, the lighter weight devices, the iPad being basically an iPhone with a big screen, and the Google equivalent, maybe that's where it's going. But anyway, I do think it was interesting to see Apple there. And it was just a little booth with, a couple of Apple logos pasted to the felt and back. Yeah, brought back a lot of memories about Apple, you know, really far back.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and doing it very much on the quiet. So I think it was just an experiment for them. I'm trying to connect with one of their people on LinkedIn now, so we'll see. Okay, I know we're running a little long here, so I think we'll just wrap up with a little bit of what's coming, because I know we've got stuff on the go, both of us, for the rest of, certainly the rest of February and going into March. So Chris, you've got one big event for sure coming up.

Chris Fine

Well, it's a one-day Worktech that's focused on financial services, which is a segment that I spend a lot of time with and I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be in New York next week. The Worktech events tend to be pretty interesting. They have a lot of content. They do these worldwide. So the team that runs them gets a lot of input from a lot of different markets. It tends to be a combination of real estate and technology focused, which is also an area that I find fascinating right now. So that's what's coming up next for me. And then there's other stuff, but I'll talk about that next month. But what about you?

Jon Arnold

When this podcast runs, I'll have gone through my run of travel for February, so at this point I'm 3 down, two to go. I'll very briefly mention I was at Cognigy's Customer Experience Summit in Dusseldorf, Germany, which is their headquarters. I got back last night, and they're showing the way with the really purpose-built AI applications, mostly for contact center, but the advances companies like this are bringing with conversational AI are pretty impressive, and not so much because of the technology, but the proof points that they show when they bring tier one airlines, insurance companies, car makers, I don't want to name the names, but they're all household names and they're all showing tangible results because of the way they've been deploying AI to make processes more efficient, to make agents more productive, all the things you want to do with AI.

These models keep getting better and better and smarter and smarter. While the concerns for AI don't go away, when the focus is on the good things, you have an easier time making a business case for it. We could go on longer about this, but one of the customers, one of their presenters, I should say, gave a very interesting presentation about the other side, which are the challenges of getting large enterprises to embrace change. And just because the technology comes out as really great, someone's got to advocate, someone's got to build a business case, someone's got to sell it internally.

When you're in a large organization with all kinds of layers, the realities, the complexities of all the politics and the competing priorities, you realize just how complicated it can be. And with new technology like AI that no one really owns, this is part of the future of work too, since it's not the using of the technology, but how do you sell it? How do you support it? How do you get it into enterprises? And that's a whole other layer of this stuff, but I thought it was a very good way to kind of make it real.

AI can be for good or for bad, but on the business level of how you get it sold into organizations and actually get it used where it can make a difference because it's a threat for a lot of people, right? You're displacing jobs, you're displacing processes, So there's a lot to it, the deeper you get into the kind of analysis of what it takes to be effective.

Chris Fine

Here's my suggestion, Jon. I think we need to do a whole episode about enterprise adoption. So let's hold that for a whole episode of Watch the Space because that is actually a huge thing. You bring up a very good point. But are there any last-minute things you want to say about what's coming up the next few weeks?

Jon Arnold

For what’s next, I'm traveling to RingCentral and 8 by 8's analyst events, which are both the same week, same location. So it's a back-to-back deal. And after that, Enterprise Connect is the next big one for me and for many listeners out there. That's like what I call the Super Bowl event for enterprise communication. So that's late March and I'll be out there. I do an annual talk on the state of speech tech for enterprises. So I'm working on putting that panel together and it's always good. It's always good.

Please don't ask me about taking a meeting there because my dance card is pretty full. That's the craziness of this type of event. Everybody wants to meet with the analysts and there's only so many time slots available. But with that, yeah, that's my story for now, Chris. So, we'll have lots to talk about coming up next episode, right?

Chris Fine

Absolutely.

Jon Arnold

Okay. So that is time for today, folks. So thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed it as we continue here exploring the future of work on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. And if you like it, as we always ask, leave us a review, a rating, suggestions for future topics. We'd love to hear from you. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks again, everyone, for listening to another episode of Watch This Space. We'll be back again next month. So see you shortly.

Companies mentioned:

Apple, Meta, Verizon