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

Chris Fine

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

Jon Arnold

Yes, okay. Yes, I'm doing fine, Chris. And I worked that in there. And you are Chris Fine doing okay, right?

Chris Fine

Oh my goodness.

Jon Arnold

You've never heard that before, right?

Chris Fine

Never, ever. That's completely original. Okay.

Jon Arnold

All right. I'd like to think, folks, we are sitting dockside. It's the height of summer in our Algonquin, as you would say, and in Canada, as we would say, Muskoka chairs, having some beers, looking out at the sun and recording our podcast. That would be the way to do it in the summer. But here we are stuck in our home offices working like we always do, right?

Chris Fine

No, it's true. Well, I can't see the sun out the window. And if I tried to record outside, there'd be the leaf blower factory here in the suburbs. But yes, you're right. So we're in the home offices as usual.

Jon Arnold

That's okay. It's a cinema verite, right? We're in the moment, we're in the elements, and that's just part of the experience. But yeah, so this is a little more scaled back, but it's how we do things. And here we are. So it's August and we're heading into September. So the summer still feels great, but we know it's not going to last, at least in this part of the world. But that's okay. And we keep doing what we're doing. And I think for both of us, Chris, we're a little on the chill side right now because we have been light on travel and that is okay. It is summer. And we don't have to work 24-7 all the time.

And it's also been good, I find, for certainly recharging psychologically and mentally and as we both have been talking, getting stuff done around the house. But that doesn't stop the wheels from turning in tech as we know. So there's always things happening. But I don't know, maybe before we kick things off, this will be our last summer edition. Maybe just out of the blue, Chris, any like highlights worth noting that has been good for you during the summer? And I'll do the same and then we'll move on to the world of tech.

Chris Fine

I've had a pretty good summer, Jon, I would say. Been able to work on some of my retro tech projects. There has been a fair bit of work. I've been able to spend some time with the family and by the pool without quite as much traveling since June. So I can't complain. I'm sure that we'll pass Labor Day at the beginning of September and get fired out of the cannon as usual, right? But it's nice to have a relatively quiet summer, get some stuff done, as you say, and have a little bit of time to think, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, exactly. I've certainly been going at a bit of a slower pace and have had some short getaways throughout the summer and we've got one coming up later this week. We're going up north to Halliburton, which is kind of the hinterlands in Ontario here and just a total change of pace and getting off the grid for a bit. It's always good. And I've done that a couple of times this summer. And it's funny how when you are off the grid and you get into a groove, you don't miss it. And it makes you wonder sometimes, you know, we're so saturated with around the clock tech and connectivity and stuff. And And I don't know, we morph into this more relaxed state of being zen about things not so scheduled and rushed and feels pretty damn good.

Chris Fine

Not bad. So since you asked me the question, I actually have something technological to bring up and I had forgotten about it earlier and it's not a long thing. But you know, I think this is the summer where streaming broadcasting of events really got good finally. And the example that I would cite would be the Olympics, which was a nice highlight of the summer. I think they did it really well. But they streamed it in the States on Peacock and NBC owns the franchise, right? And it was edited so that you could really watch what you wanted to watch. If you paid up, you really didn't get commercials. And it was organized so you could kind of find things relatively easily, which has been a problem in the past with streaming.

So it felt like a threshold was passed. And of course, now we're having the Democratic National Convention and it's all on YouTube, on a YouTube channel that's specially designed for this where it's cut up into very consumable pieces and easy to find. Like you want to hear a particular speech or you want to see highlights. It just reminds you where things have advanced since the old real-time network type of media. And I felt like there was an inflection point for the first time, really, that real professional techniques that were developed for this new medium were really used effectively. And so to me, that's kind of a milestone that happened this summer.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm glad you brought it up too, because yeah, Olympics is just, there's nothing bigger or better in terms of drawing a big audience across the board, which of course, that's what the US TV networks lost when cable came along and it became narrow casting instead of broadcasting. And it just reminds you that we can live in our silos, but there are things that bring everybody together. And It's the technology that makes it possible. And DNC is the same example. Yes, it is just the Democrat kind of vibe and audience, not the whole of the country, but it's accessible to anybody who wants to watch. And I think that's really cool.

So to me, that's to me a bit of a pendulum shift back to the broadcasting concept, where it is something that everybody can take part in. drop in or drop out. And again, when you think about the old days of having three networks and everybody watched the same shows and everybody was connected to everything that everyone else was doing. And now a big event like this, now it's come and gone and we've gone back to our little shelves. But it was a nice, it was a good moment that way.

Also, Chris, too, fair to say, all of these advances in technology and as you say, the professionalization of the whatever you want to call it, the viewer experience. Most of it is not really driven by AI. It is there in the background and it's doing other things, but for a change, it is nice to talk about where tech is actually making things better that isn't a story about AI.

Chris Fine

That is correct. I agree with that 100%. But you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of other things we either happened before us or we saw during our lives, like the adaptation that companies and publishers made to the web when that came out, right? Like for the first few years, it just was basically whatever the prior type of medium was, just published in web format. It was kind of crude or it looked like a newspaper on the screen. wasn't really taking advantage of the technology. The technology hadn't advanced quite to a certain inflection point.

What really struck me, and has over the past year or so really, but it culminated this summer, was that the forces that design and create and manage and direct programming have adapted to the new medium. Right? Like if you look at the first television shows, they were really radio shows with pictures. Very static, it was like kind of a fake set. People didn't move around much. There was a microphone hanging above, but it might as well have been just in front of them like it was in radio.

Again, you look at the early days of the web and you look at all these years of streaming where if it was like a real event that would have been broadcast in a traditional way, it was usually really botched up on streaming. It didn't take advantage of the streaming. the potential of what that can do with the metadata and the way to divide things up that felt natural in a streaming medium. And I feel that over the summer, particularly with the Olympics, they kind of passed that threshold. And I'm sure there are other examples I'm not citing here, so I'm not trying to just focus on what I watched. But it felt like it was the web in 1997 before versus the web by like 2008. You see what I mean?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, And this is like for all to see and experience and it's going to come into its own and find its voice. And I'll take it a step back further from TV and radio to the invention of what we now call the movies. It used to be called moving pictures and the very first kind of productions that were created. This is back in the very early 1900s, even late 1890s. But All those, they didn't have a vocabulary. They didn't have a way of telling stories

All they did was basically recreated theater and just did moving picture adaptations of Shakespeare and opera and all the things that people were used to seeing because that was the entertainment of the day. and they didn't have to worry about sound or music or any of that stuff. And it was all, as you say, kind of corny sets and costumes and stuff and wasn't very sophisticated, but at the time it was, cutting edge.

Eventually, cinema found its voice, created a whole new way of storytelling and entertaining and immersion and all that stuff. And TV's gone that route as well. And here we are - I'm totally with you, Chris. Streaming is kind of maybe we're watching the early days of the movies in the streaming world. And I think that's going to, it's finding its voice now. And when you can do it on scale with a big global audience like the Olympics, that goes a long way, I think, to validating that model and that way of communicating, entertaining, informing, et cetera. And yeah, certainly for the digital generation, we're going to see a whole lot more of that. And that to me is a good story for how tech is making our lives better.

Chris Fine

I mean, it's a watch this space, right? But if I look at that, I think starting now, but certainly going forward, that the days of the anchor people commentary, you're forced to watch the commercials, whether you pay or not. You know, they own everything. There's no other perspective kind of watching events. is limited, right? It's just, this is just another hit on that, I think.

Jon Arnold

And well, I'll tell you in our space, and this is the long-winded tie-in folks, vendors like Cisco and RingCentral have in recent times made acquisitions of platforms for events. And they recognize there's an opportunity here for businesses, for enterprises, to do not just conference calls with one or two people or 10 or 20, but they're talking about being able to run events that are for 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. So they have these event platforms now that run off the same platforms as UCaaS does. and they're all about organizing end-to-end experiences, but on large scale.

When you have large organizations that have 10s of thousands of employees and obviously global footprint, these event platforms are actually a new way and probably a better way in some ways of engaging large populations. And we're just talking about internally for employees, but when you start extending that to partners, suppliers, and of course, customers, and yes, prospects, the capability to have these like mass scale, almost like broadcast quality capabilities gives them another way to engage. This is not about collaboration and meetings and stuff like that, but this is really probably more like brand level, corporate level stuff. But the tools, again, are there now for them to do this. And the more I'm learning about what these vendors are doing there, I kind of get it and say, at first I thought, well, who the hell needs to broadcast to 10,000 people or 100,000 people?

But, there are use cases for this. And it's not just purely for marketing and branding purposes, but you know, when executive teams need to make big messages, to employees or maybe it could even be like product recall updates for your customers. There are occasions where using video-based forms of communicating. Yeah, they're there. And again, it will create new opportunities to engage - I think that's the interesting part for them. And they are getting traction with customers. So people are seeing the possibilities here.

Chris Fine

I think there's just going to be more of it because it's advanced to the point where it works reasonably well. I mean, it's not perfect, but this kind of mass broadcast, I think it's a great point that private sectors emulating some of the developments that are happening in sort of commercial media sector because technology is getting more broadly available. It's not as though there hasn't been examples of this that have been around for a long time, like quarterly earnings broadcasts, for example.

Jon Arnold

Exactly.

Chris Fine

But look how expensive they are, right? And look how many people are involved and the specialty platforms. And it's not sort of the equivalent of corporate social media, right? It's not like social media, like a TikTok where you hit the record button. There's a huge, had traditionally been a huge infrastructure around it. And now I think it's going to be sort of more mainstream.

Jon Arnold

And just to maybe raise an eyebrow or two, and this is just only one area of this private enterprise for-profit sector, but governments can use this, municipalities can use this. When you think about education, the globalization of university experience. There's a lot of use cases when you have these large kind of scale needs, when you think about what governments could do for more citizen engagement, making government services more accessible to certain segments of the population.

Now, there are tools for that already, yes, but this is just another way of doing things. And because of the quality and the accessibility and affordability of video, it's just a more interesting way of doing things. who knows, maybe down the road, like the RNC or DNC won't even be in-person events. I'm sure they will be, but you could replicate almost anything there on some of these large platforms.

Chris Fine

Well, I just feel that the transition from kind of DVR or some long YouTube of the whole evening, which is basically a DVR, to be able to say, I want to see speech X, or I want to see, the volleyball match that was this, and not to have to be doing the equivalent of fast forwarding and rewinding or trying to, or getting the other, the curse of streaming used to be just little chopped up garbage that didn't really convey, like it wasn't divided up into the way people would naturally think of events. Like this is the game, right? You play three sets of volleyball. This is a broadcast that comprises the two or three games that you play, depending on who wins the second one or the first one, right?

And you start it and you stop it and that's what you're going to see. so it's kind of like the ultimate, the way that you would wish that DVRs had worked. it's not just a serial medium, it's a random access medium, but the random access makes sense. Enough on that, I guess. But I just felt like, you asked about kind of what made anything make a transition this summer. I felt that Olympics was really television of the future.

Jon Arnold

What a point on that. Well said. Okay. All right. On that point, let's get back into what happened, at least in my world last week.

Chris Fine

Yes. Where in the world was Jon Arnold?

Jon Arnold

So of all places, Wilmington, North Carolina, which was a new one for me. And that may not mean much to anybody, but as soon as I say it's on the Cape Fear River, All of a sudden, the first thing that's going to pop in your mind, of course, is the movie, Cape Fear. And we're both movie guys. And it's so, oh, that's all I was thinking about while I was there. But I did not run into Max Katie anywhere. But I was thinking about it. So yeah, but that's what it was.

Chris Fine

But we had a good time anyway.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. First time being in that part of the world. It's I don't really, I haven't been in the Carolinas a whole lot, but it was a little challenging to get there with connecting flights and stuff. But the reason for being there was an event I was actually at last year as well, which is the NCEC, which is the North Carolina Electrical Cooperative Utilities kind of industry group.

This is the power sector, the smart grid space. And this is where the rural utilities in North Carolina do their thing. So in that part of the world, for anyone who lives near there will know that Duke Energy is the mega utility that services the big urban markets. And everything else is what is that's kind of the domain of the rural guys. And so they're called cooperatives - they provide power to the rest of the state. So they cover a lot of territory.

There are some really interesting parallels, as I know you would seek to, Chris, between the, obviously the telco space and the power space. Both the utilities, largely for the same reasons, they're providing essential services that everyone needs to have. And so there has to be some regulation, of course, and oversight to make sure that happens and it's done safely and blah, blah, blah. Anyways, it's a very interesting history and they are as much a prisoner of the need to be in the AI space as anybody else, not surprisingly.

So, there are really very interesting use cases there for AI, mostly on the operational side. When you think of all the physical assets, they have to, manage and service and all that stuff. But also, of course, for us as consumers, businesses and residential for getting power. And, if I was imagining our audience sitting in a big room and I said, how many of you have had your power go out recently? I think every hand in the room would go up, right? So we all know what it's like to have the power drop on us and you wouldn't want to be on an operating table in a hospital when that happens. But, they do have generators. So there are backups for these things.

Anyways, Chris, it was an interesting space and I was there and I'll just stop in a moment, particularly talking about the opportunities and the use cases for AI, particularly conversational AI in the contact center for utilities, because this is a space like the old days of telco and you can, you can imagine Lily Tomlin commercial, right? Of being in a business where customer service really isn't that important because your customers are kind of captive to you. But it's a more competitive market now, and there's more reasons to communicate with customers. So they have a big gap to close in terms of raising the bar for customer service. It's one of those like, high leverage use cases to say, this is a vertical that really needs to kind of uplevel what they're doing.

Chris Fine

Absolutely. I can think of a couple of things there. One is that in a deregulated world of power, one threat in a lot of states almost independent of the size of the utility is that some marketing organization goes and becomes the face of the customer rather than the utility gets wholesaled, just like the carriers that they worry about that, the telecom carriers, right, where the face that the customer sees is, Friendly Joe Energy, but it's really being supplied by the co-op. So the co-op essentially gets all the blame loses the relationship with the customer, right? Because then the actual producer has to depend on how good friendly Joe's relationship is with the customer and also takes a hit on margin, you know, since the utilities were deregulated. And the other thing I think is there's a couple of low hanging fruit there. Like for example, you mentioned interruption of power. The biggest frustration I think that utility customers have is I don't know anything.

Jon Arnold

Exactly. Exactly.

Chris Fine

Right. So I can't imagine it would be pioneering rocket science to put an AI based monitoring system in there that would do all kinds of good things, including have a very good way to talk to customers. Like, you know, the utility that I have, which is not a co-op, has a pretty good way of telling you what's going on, but you got to go look for it. They actually have a map. that will tell you where they think the source of a problem is. if a tree was down on this block or that block, but it's not like they're going to come to you and offer that information. It's like pulling teeth.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's like when power goes out, it's a whole chain reaction of anxiety. especially if you think about, seniors and disabled people and whatever, there's all kinds of scenarios where it's a shock. And as you say, you're literally there in the dark. You don't know. So that level of anxiety just gets higher and higher because sometimes outages are only a few minutes, but they can be days.

You know, here we had an ice storm several years ago. We lost power on our street for 9 days in the middle of winter. Think about that, okay? I mean, all the food that gets, spoiled and the whole domino effect of when you don't have power, especially in a cold climate, what happens?

On the tech side of things, I did a presentation, as I did last year there to kind of update people on what's happening with these technologies. So it's very, you know, educational for this audience. And then I also had at the back half of my session, I had a speaker, Hardy Myers from Cognigy, who we did a fireside chat where he talked a bit about the use cases and successes that they're having with their utility customers to show this audience that this isn't fantasy.

This is actually happening today and talking about the benefits that come when you do this stuff right. And the key message for a lot of this stuff is this kind of iteration of AI, what we call conversational AI, is basically good enough now that you can trust it more and more to handle self-service inquiries. So you don't have to put all the burden on the agents to handle more calls than they can possibly do. And part of my presentation was explaining and breaking down the typical reasons why customers call utilities for service.

You go up and down the line, most of the inquiries they have are, like in other industries, are fairly routine, simple things. So they can all be, many of them can be automated, right? AI has a role to play here to, you know, to explain things like, you know, my meter reading, what is it? I'm changing, I'm moving, I have to change my address, I have to port my bill over. endless variety of these routine things. So what we're trying to show is AI as an automation tool can help you manage the call volumes you're getting without having to hire more agents and let the agents handle the more personal kind of inquiries. So this is all new for this audience because they're not used to having to be customer centric. So it's, I know as it was last year, very well received messages and they're just good examples of here's a sector that is in the early days of looking at these technologies and the time is right for them to get serious about this stuff. So we're bringing a good message to that audience.

Chris Fine

Yes. And also, I suspect, I mean, you know more than I do. So you tell me that your average co-op doesn't have like a giant customer service budget. It's hard to scale that, right? Unless they do it, but if you could provide an automated service that really worked and didn't impact their customer satisfaction scores, that'd be pretty attractive, right? Because you just basically pay for some kind of SaaS product to do that, right? then you just factor that into the rates.

But I imagine with utilities, they're going to be really interested in this because if they really start suffering in an event like that they really mismanage something like a power outage, that actually affects their bottom line, not only the cost of that should be higher of repairing it or that should be lower of repairing it. But if they really get people mad, people start writing in and the next time there's a hearing in front of the Public Utilities Commission to get a raise in rates, there's going to be a problem, right?

Jon Arnold

Oh, for sure, because they cannot just pass on costs to the customers on their own, right?

Chris Fine

They can't randomly raise rates. It's a whole process.

Jon Arnold

The whole business model is affected by this. And when you start looking at the bigger picture, like handling outages is one thing and routine inquiries. But bigger picture is when you start getting into, leaning into, well, where is all this going with this whole drive to, you know, zero emissions, green energy, sustainable energy, the rise of electrification of vehicles, it's changing the dynamic because now there's more than one source of power. So they're trying to push renewables.

So, there's so much education that's needed. And so that customer service kind of role is also kind of like an educator in chief. Customers need to learn about, well, should I have solar panels in my home? Should I get an electric vehicle? How much is it going to cost me to have a charger in my home? You know, all of these fundamental patterns are changing now and they're trying to obviously move away from fossil fuels. There's all these existential things because the utility market is so unique because it's the only business I know of where they're encouraging their customers to consume less of what they produce. It's the only business I can think of that's like that. But they have this issue of we're here to give you efficient and affordable energy, but at the same time, we don't want you to waste energy.

And, the big challenge in this industry is that energy cannot be stored. So you have to be very efficient in your production level. So matching supply and demand is the name of the game here. That's where AI comes in at a different level to help them with predicting patterns and even like weather cycles that could impact the grid. And there's so many things. It's very, very complex world that way. And I'm just looking at a very simplistic side of it with customer service.

But you can see the dynamics of this space. This is just not stodgy, we provide power and that's all we do kind of business. There's a much more involved. And now you have consumers who are more like have a more of an activist mentality about climate change and conservation and sustainability that they look to their power provider through those lenses and say, what are you doing about it? You know, how can I be part of the solution? So it's huge opportunity here for sure.

Chris Fine

Agreed. That's a whole separate broadcast, right?

Jon Arnold

And, related topic just quickly, Chris. Outages is one problem where weather events trigger things. There was a whole other side to this event that we do need a separate episode on about cybersecurity threats and physical attacks on the infrastructure itself. We had, there were speakers there that just like, just blow your mind about how you have to think about these threats now that are also very kind of existentially focused on disrupting, again, from bad actors who view soft targets like utilities and water supply and ways to disrupt our life here. That puts them in a whole different mindset of how they run their business, protect their assets, all those kind of things. And AI has a very central role to play in a lot of this stuff.

Chris Fine

It's fascinating.

Jon Arnold

And that's where we should leave them hanging.

Chris Fine

As they used to say, the old clock on the wall is tinging pretty loudly right now.

Jon Arnold

The one you're building, right? The clock. Sidebar.

Chris Fine

Well, whatever it is, you know, the five or ten clocks behind me on my retro tech display rack. But they're all saying we need to say stay tuned for the next time, right?

Jon Arnold

Yes, there will be a next time and there'll be more to talk about. But yeah, folks, if you find this space interesting, I do have an article running about it on No Jitter. And also, oh yeah, I shared some photos of the event on my blog. And yeah, this is a really fascinating, as you say, space that we must watch, Chris.

Chris Fine

Okay. Jon's a very modest guy, but let it be said that he's been involved in thinking about smart grid for quite some time, even hosting a couple of his own programs about it. So this is definitely a topic where you have knowledge, and we can talk some more about it in the future.

Jon Arnold

Okay, good outro, Chris, for the future. So we are on time, as Chris said, so that's going to bring us to wrap. So we want to thank you all for listening today. Hope you enjoyed the podcast and you continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes at www.watchthespace.tech or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. And of course, we'd love to hear from you with a rating, a review, ideas for future episodes, all of that stuff. We are here for you. And with that, I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thanks, Jon, for another opportunity to work with you on Watch This Space. And thanks, everyone, for listening. And we will see you again or hear you again or broadcast again next month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Cisco, Cognigy, NBC, RingCentral