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. Hi, Jon. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Watch This Space. So what is new? You've got a big story this month because you've been to the mecca of enterprise communications, Enterprise Connect. Sounds like it's a really exciting event.

Jon Arnold

Yes, Chris, that is the story. And just so folks, the way we do our podcast is we record it a little before the end of the month and then it's ready to go for when our newsletter goes out, JAA's Communications and Collaboration Review. And we release them usually on the first Tuesday of the month. This is a month where the dates line up nicely for me to just get back off the plane at 1:00 in the morning yesterday to record today. So we have it ready to go.

This will be a very timely podcast to talk about, while the highlights of Enterprise Connect are still fresh. So for those of you who do not know, as you heard off the top, I'm an independent tech analyst, and communications, collaboration, contact center are the themes that I touch on in my work as an analyst, and Chris is not that far off that either, right?

Chris Fine

That's right. I mean, my topics tend to be workplace technology and the tie-in between technology and real estate and things like that, which is a major area of which is communications and collaborations technology.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so not only do we follow these things closely, but we've been living it for the past 20 plus years. So there is definitely a large cohort of people who have been in the tech industry a long time. And where we're at today, it is really all about AI, but the pace of change and innovation now is so much faster than it was in the past. So for example, this show, which is called Enterprise Connect, used to be called, I think, PBX Connect or something like that in the early days when the field of communications technology was largely about phone systems. The PBX and right, Chris, that's so much out of your DNA, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, absolutely. And people who don't remember that or didn't experience it got to remember that was a huge business and it imploded. The traditional PBX business imploded within five years with the advent of IP technology, internet technology. But when you go back, if you think about enterprise IT, you would have a whole group that was basically in charge of running, installing, maintaining that equipment, right? I mean, that was a distinct group. And it's now all just blended into the other aspects of networking for the most part, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's like what you take for granted - I mean generally our listeners, but especially anybody under 40 - you can very easily take things like click to call, web chat on your PCs and your phones for granted. I mean, who dials a phone number anymore? But that's how big telephony used to be. It was such a fundamental industry. And interestingly, Chris, because so much was tied up into that technology, and as you say, the manpower and resources required to support it was really extensive. Interestingly, this is a technology that basically remained totally static from the day you installed it to when it basically died 20 plus years later.

Chris Fine

Certainly in terms of the fundamental way it worked. I mean, you could argue that there were generations of the equipment that went from electromechanical essentially to purely electronic, but it was still basically doing the same thing, which was what we would call circuit switching. It would connect one endpoint with another endpoint by essentially directly connecting it wires became digital forms of this for sure, but it was still basically doing that direct connection as opposed to using a generic type of network like IP networking to convey this kind of information versus any other kind of information.

I don't know if that's clear, but that's a basic change that it went through. And when it was dedicated equipment, it was always expensive and that's pretty much all it did. Whereas today, the equipment, with the exception of literally a telephone on your desk, such as that remains, is not always dedicated. It's, you know, the equipment you and I are using right now to record this, could be the equivalent of a telephone, or it could be recording a song, it could be recording a podcast, it could be doing anything, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's just digital inputs. That's all it is now.

Chris Fine

But it's still a big industry, right, Jon?

Jon Arnold

I mean, the footprint is still so large. And yes, there are Nortel phones out there that are still working as they should. And this is kind of the, you know, the double-edged sword of when back in the day when hardware was built so well, it really was built to last. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why it was such an expensive form of investment. But of course, that is totally out of line with how things work today. And honestly, Chris, and we've said this before, I can't think of any other form of technology today since then that has remained so static for so long. Nothing stands still anymore, right?

Chris Fine

Maybe electric power.

Jon Arnold

Well, I'm talking about communications.

Chris Fine

No, I think that's true. I think that's true. Although it's funny about communication. Sometimes it has a very long tail on it, you know, but this is the classic example. Like it takes a long time to go away, like fax machines, right? And teletype machines, which believe it or not, there are still banks out there that communicate that way, like for wire transfers and things like that, although they get less every year, but it's like a really long But when you were talking about the phones, I'm thinking, yeah, they're out there, but I see less and less of them. Sure.

Jon Arnold

And used less and less even when they're there. That's a lot of generational changes there. But this is just a bit of a long preamble to what was going at Enterprise Connect this week, which is now this show has become increasingly defined by AI - and forget about a product that lasts 20 years or an application that is basically unchanged over that amount of time. That whole concept is so unthinkable with today's technology. And more than ever before this year, AI has been the story. And it's very clear now that so much so that my understanding is that the producers of this event, Informa, are looking to do a standalone AI event in the West Coast later this year.

And so it just shows you as we started off, Chris, saying how this used to be a show just about the PBX. And I say it's not just about AI, but it's AI through everything now. We're so far beyond telephony being enough to build a business around. I mean, it's like a third or fourth string concept today - there are so many other layers of communications that are driving the workforce today. And when we talk about, future work and hybrid work and all that, you got to communicate. I mean, this is why this industry is so important because at the heart of everything we do is communication. You know, what we do is important, but communication is what is the glue that allows us to work independently and of course, in groups and teams. And that's why shows like this are so important.

Chris Fine

This is intriguing. So for the listeners, when you say, a separate AI show and it's all about AI, can you help us understand what is so big that's transforming this particular industry? You know, that's what you said about, they want to do a separate show, and it was the main theme of the show. That says to me, there's a lot of market cap in this. There's a lot of revenue in this that; there's a lot of competitive necessity in this. So what is the this for AI in communications? It doesn't have to be one thing, and I don't want to put you on the spot, but that's a big thing to say that this show is basically about AI. So what is that really?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's the way that AI is transforming how communications applications are built, what they do, and how they're used. So AI, as we've talked about in other, earlier episodes, AI is about data, right? So the more data you have, the more you can basically build and fine tune your models that are built on machine learning and natural language understanding, all the building blocks of AI that allow you to basically, at the heart of it is the idea you're allowing human communication to interface with machines and machine-based communication. And ultimately, this is really driving organizations to do more things with AI to automate. That's really at the heart of everything.

So when you ask, what is the this in AI, I really think it just comes down to automation. And I hate to be cynical, but cost savings is a big part of it. And this is the kind of double-edged sword of AI because a lot of people see that and say, oh, this is about cutting jobs. In the end, for certain functions, that is what's going to happen. But on the other side of it, of course, is when you're using AI in a more effective way, you're allowing more things to be automated so people can do their best work without being weighed down with all of the mundane things that really can suck up our whole day, whether you're a worker inside an office, whether you're a frontliner in a hospital, or of course, whether you're an agent in a contact center.

That's really the central message for what AI is being viewed as. I hate to say it, for some people, it's a big silver bullet idea. It's going to solve all our problems. But the smarter people are looking at it very strategically, but also tactically to say, there are specific use cases, things we want to automate to make our workflows better, to make our employees burn out less, that kind of thing. So there are very good, practical use cases where AI can really help.

But you know, the gap between reality and expectations, you know, is still a thing. We haven't got to the top of the mountain yet by any stretch. But clearly this is where the vendors are going with this. And when I say the vendors, when it's we're talking Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, that's you want to swim upstream against that. Good luck.

Chris Fine

I don't think you can, but I also think there's two main branches of AI that are involved in this picture. Interested what you think. One branch is a better version of what AI has been doing for a while, which is essentially responsive, I call it, where it's going to allow you to look up information better. It's going to correlate things better. It's going to do all of the things that, you know, as a radically improved statistical machine, which it is underneath, probably people disagree with that. But, you know, this traditional form of just connecting information better and, for example, in a contact center, helping solve problems better, that's one.

But then the other is generative. which is, in most other fields considering AI today, that's the huge area of interest and where people think it really is going to be a breakthrough. And did you see that at Enterprise Connect? Like was it had vendors and products made the breakthrough to having AI generate the communications as opposed to just better respond to things? Do you see the difference?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, that was one of the core messages. I do an annual talk on the state of speech tech in the enterprise. And that is one of the big trends or kind of shifts that's happened now. We've gone from what you'd call a first-generation model of AI, where it is about what you've just described, Chris. It's actually giving the inputs that the machines can understand and do something with. Now that it's improved to the point where it can now give us stuff back. So rather than feed the machine, which is what we've been doing, now it has enough, whatever you want to call it, critical mass, intelligence, quote unquote, to do feedbacks. And that's the generative part of AI. And that part gets to be interesting because now, yeah, not only do you get literal transcriptions and translations of real time communication, but now it comes back to you with summaries.

This is one of the big features that all the collaboration vendors were touting. Now you get meeting summaries, right, where it will distill the most important things that came out of a meeting that are relevant to you. And it uses AI to, it gets to know your work style, your needs, your team members, all the things that it knows to look for that apply to your job and your milestones and whatever. So there's a lot of efficiency that comes from that. And of course, you're using the generative aspect of this to write memos for you to dictate, you don't even have to write them anymore, the emails. You can just give a few cues to an engine and it will write your emails for you in a certain tone or style.

I talked about this yesterday, actually, where if you have upward communication to your boss, you need to say things a little differently than maybe to a junior who you're just training now, right? So tone, intent, all of these things that make communications a very human thing, AI has to understand how to do that. And that's going to take a lot of training, a lot of horsepower, a lot of money, but that's the road it's going down. So I agree. It gets very interesting outside of workplace stuff when you get into the areas like medical research, where you're looking to solve diseases and things.

AI can be very, very effective in terms of aggregating information from all kinds of sources and identifying those patterns and picking out the few pieces and then generating knowledge from that. That's kind of the ideal where we're trying to go with this. But boy, Chris, we could mine this a long time. But I just hope our listeners get a sense of why AI has kind of been taking over everything now.

Chris Fine

Maybe here's an example that, I mean, you cited, I think, a very good use case of taking notes and summarizing meetings, which I'm starting to see as well, meetings that I'm in. So if you think about it, if the generative AI understands what's going on enough to create a summary, then I think a day is coming very soon where you're going to have attendees at meetings that are not people, more like the computer on Star Trek or I mean, not a good example, but an evil example, HAL 9000, right?

Where from 2001, where computers listening to everything. And you could be in a meeting in Star Trek and say, computer, find out anywhere in the galaxy that we found these two coincidences. And maybe that relates to the situation we're in. And It will have been listening the whole time, so the computer knows exactly what context you mean, and it's going to come back with an answer. And I think if I were to predict the next step here from what you're saying, I think that you're going to have some helpful presence in a meeting that is not a human being. And the other aspect of what you said, which I thought was really interesting, is taking notes on meetings is incredibly onerous and it's notoriously unreliable. And nobody likes doing that.

And it's been probably 40 years since the loss of the kind of staff you used to have, like they would take notes in shorthand and then type them up and send them out. We haven't had that for a really long time. So it's up to the hapless participants to try to take notes while they're trying to participate at the same time. In this case, the AI really does help and it probably increases the accuracy and it helps for people who couldn't come to the meeting and it helps memorialize follow-ups from the meeting, right, which is a key aspect of notes. So it hasn't really taken anybody's job away there. It's made things better, but the next step is where the computer is actually going to be in the meeting

Jon Arnold

Yeah, for sure. We're going to have my bot talk to your bot and, we'll have bot farms and all this stuff. And each one, by the way, will be infused with whatever persona you want to give it, right? So this is where we're edging into the metaverse territory here, Chris. I'm going to I want to cut that off because we're never going to get out of this.

Chris Fine

So what else do you need to say? I'm going to shut up at this point.

Jon Arnold

No, this is all good. And we, you know, listeners, this is just scratching the surface, but it's very interesting stuff, even for people like me, and we've been doing this a long time. I will just say very quickly that, because Enterprise Connect is what I call the Super Bowl of our industry, this is where all the vendors make their big announcements, and there is a definitely kind of an arms race going on with everyone, all the big guys trying to match each other with feature for feature. So, you name it, all the big players, both in collaboration and in contact center, all had, this is where they make their big announcements.

So, Microsoft, their big thing is Copilot and that's their kind of, they used to have the paper clippy guy right in your Outlook and all your Microsoft applications. Very annoying, right? But this is like paper clippy 2.0, but far more advanced, I think far more intrusive. And the messaging that Microsoft is pitching, it's very compelling, but it's like they're trying to make AI kind of, they're trying to infuse it in everything you do. They want Copilot, like tracking everything in your workday and your workflow.

The other vendors aren't going quite that far, but interestingly, Microsoft is charging $30 a month per user for this capability, whereas a lot of the other vendors are giving it away at this point. We'll have to see on the business level how this all plays out. But Cisco, Zoom, they're all the big guys. Amazon are kind of keeping pace with all of their announcements. which is all interesting to see. The contact center space is absolutely no different with Nice and Genesys and even Talkdesk and RingCentral. I can't overlook these guys. They're still very much a key player in this space. All of them, Five9, it's like go up and down the line. They all made very big announcements at the show and they're all more or less along the same lines, Chris.

The common thread is they're all trying to show you how far along the curve they are with AI enablement. And that's the story people want to hear. But the flip side is, how much of this AI messaging can you absorb? And do you really want to hear? Because we all know AI is still a work in progress. It hasn't conquered the world yet. So it's back to many other generations of tech innovation where the vendors are kind of leading the charge. And frankly, at this point, I can't imagine how customers have little alternative to do this.

Yes, there's a lot of prem-based customers out there and that doesn't go away. Avaya had a very interesting announcement partnering with Zoom and that's a great example of how prevalent premise-based technology still is because what Avaya is seeing that a lot of their customers who have not gone to Teams already Zoom is kind of becoming the second, I wouldn't say the consolation prize, but they're certainly becoming like the second mainstream alternative. So when their customers go to Zoom, what they've done is they're partnering now with Zoom where they have some kind of a hybrid offering that their Aura platform for desktop, for prem-based telephony can stay integrated with the desktop applications that Zoom is running.

That allows their install base of customers, of course, to migrate to cloud, but also, they're not going to get rid of their prem-based infrastructure just yet. So this is kind of a bridge to kind of keep it all going. Like you were saying before, Chris, when they've built up these really expensive, complicated premise-based deployments that need a lot of care and feeding, well, you can't innovate off of that anymore, but you can't throw it away yet either when it's still working.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, but I would go one step further. I'm thinking about what I see out there in my world. I see a lot of companies really struggling to understand the role of the office and how to get people in it and what do people really want to do and what's the most effective use and how much do you need. And I got to tell you, one of the most common things that comes up in these discussions actually is what is often called AV. Which is how do you really manage communication collaboration when anybody could be any place and where some people are together and some people aren't?

I still think that that's a big frontier. And I think AI can be applied to that, for example, in working to promote more of what is called meeting equity, like where the remote people get the same presence as the local people. And I'm not necessarily talking about metaverse because I don't think the answer is necessarily to just throw everybody into a cartoon universe. Because that's not going to help people get back to premises and to the office. If they can put the goggles on anywhere, they are, it's kind of what's the point of being there.

Jon Arnold

Yeah.

Chris Fine

You know? But I feel as though, you know, it's everybody's talking about the cloud and AI, but you just, when you're trying to actually do this, if you're a designer or an architect, or workplace technology manager or a subject matter expert, you're very often just dealing with what's happening in the physical space where people are supposed to work, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, a lot of that. And I was on another panel as a panelist instead of the leader where the topic was employee experience and how AI is impacting that. And that's exactly the kind of thing we were talking about, Chris. How do you create an environment that brings people together? And it's really, really hard. One of the things I was pushing back on, they were asking about productivity, how you use these tools to keep people more productive.

I'm becoming more and more of the mindset that measuring personal productivity, the way you measure effectiveness of agents in a contact center with KPIs, I think it's really, really almost impossible to do now because there's such a non-standardized environment for work now, whereas contact centers are very kind of controlled, strong set of metrics that everybody uses and adopts. It's very easy to measure performance for contact center agent, but workflows are so fluid, it's so hard to standardize. I'm just wondering if it's a viable concept to keep kind of building solutions around this idea of personal productivity. This just speaks to how the whole concept of work and workplace is really being impacted big time. And AI is, you know, kind of facilitating to make it happen faster.

Chris Fine

Yeah, I think it's a tough question because, there are some personal productivity, as you mentioned, is a different flavored question depending on the nature of the job, right? A lot of call center productivity, I would argue, is similar in nature to factory productivity. It was the idea of Taylorism and scientific measurement of throughput on an assembly line, which caused a massive rebellion ultimately and was proven not to be that effective, right? Measuring individual operations, and it led to a lot of mind-numbing jobs. that were just, you're in charge of tightening this nut on a transmission, for example, and you just like you could go completely insane if you have to do that.

And in manufacturing, the Japanese and some other leading voices really revolutionized a lot of that and led to different productivity measurements that were not just about how many bolts did you screw on in an hour. And I think there's some of that in knowledge work too, right? There's one question about operational measurements like call centers where you really need a lot of them, but you don't want to make them like Taylorism was.

But I think when it comes to more work process, white collar type of jobs, knowledge worker kind of jobs, you're right. You need to have some idea of how things are going with people because otherwise you could get surprised in a negative way. Like if you just said, all right, go ahead, do whatever you want, do however you have to do it within guidelines, and then you have to deliver objective X in three weeks, right?

You probably need some ability to monitor how that's going. There are some people where you know that if you send them, they're going to do it and you're not going to have to worry, but that's not always the case. But you don't want to do that in an onerous way. I think it's a tough thing to get just right. but I think to your point about productivity, it probably does get more goal-oriented versus individual action-oriented over time when you're not all in the same place and nobody can look over your shoulder, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and the response I gave with Microsoft with Copilot and the other vendors have similar capabilities, they're saying, you know, here are the tools. We can measure everything, right? How many meetings you attend, how much time you spend on the phone, how quickly you respond to emails, how engaged you are with your teammates. So the two pieces are there, thanks to AI, I guess, to capture all of that in very fine detail. If you use those as your criteria to define productivity, much like as in the contact center, the tools are there and the pieces are there to do that. Now, but is that what we really want to be doing?

And is that really how we want to leverage this these wonderful new capabilities? We're bordering into sowing the seeds of mass rebellion and, of course, surveillance and privacy considerations. This is a whole can of worms here, but we're gonna have to cap on time here, so will leave this as food for thought because there's so many avenues here to explore.

Chris Fine

Yeah, but I think the headline I'm taking out of what you've been saying, tell me if this is right or not, is that AI is really becoming an integral part of communications and communications technology. It's going to be everywhere, including consumer, you know, your phone or your smartphone or whatever. But when you look at the world of enterprise connectivity, and collaboration. What I'm hearing is that you just see AI driven developments as being really where the main focus is in that industry right now. Is that right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah. And what we're hoping for is that not far behind will be more push on, you know, responsible AI and the guardrails and all the vendors say the right things about that. A big takeaway I took from Google, both in seeing their keynote and getting a personal briefing with their team, they make it very clear that they do not use workplace data, they do not use customer data to build their models. So they're putting some lines in the sand that if you take it at face value, that's what you should be doing. Every vendor with an AI story, that is part of the story about being transparent and accountable. And so you have to hope they have the right intentions for this, but we still don't really have a well thought out regulatory framework yet.

We've always talked about this, the balance between innovation and regulation, but clearly, we need some guardrails and we're moving that way. As usual, Europe is ahead of the pack and I've been looking closely recently at the EU AI Act. And there's some very good pieces coming out of that I'm going to be writing about. The US is a different environment altogether. And I don't know if we're really going to be getting anything like that here in the near future. But we have to have something there because if we're just saying, oh, AI is running the show now and that's sure what it looks like, do we really want to give the keys and everything, the car, to just leave it to the AI vendors to do this.

Nobody really wants to see that happen, including the AI companies. I mean, that's the issue, some of the stuff with OpenAI and all the dissent that they had there and, they're not, it's not alone. That's not isolated. So everybody is thinking about this. How do we do this right? Because we're only going to get one shot at it.

Chris Fine

So Jon, do you think, this is my final question, because I know we're going to run out of time here. Do you think there's a product cycle coming? We talked about how long some of the product cycles had been and technology cycles had been in communications, although there have been disruptive ones, as we mentioned with IP. Where do you think the industry is right now? Like if you were going to put your hat on and say, do you think in three years or five years that we'll be communicating very differently, do you think? Enterprises are going to spend on new stuff that really works differently in this area. Is that where we are or are we just improving kind of what we have but no fundamental changes?

Jon Arnold

Definitely improving what we have. I do believe there's got to be a point where the enterprises and IT, I'm sure new divisions or new layers of management are going to emerge that are strict or simply about AI. But the investment, getting an ROI on AI, I think it's still pretty early to demonstrate that. Contact center is a space where you can show an ROI. And so that's always why it's been like the hot area for AI, because you can generate a tangible return. But in the workplace, I think unless AI really performs well in a short period of time, I think organizations will hit a wall in terms of how far they want to go with this because you've got to spend a lot of money and resources and find the expertise if you start getting into this area of building large language models and extracting value from it and actually finding a way to transform what you're doing to truly be a better, more competitive business.

I still think that's a little ways out because organizations don't move fast enough to keep pace with how AI is moving right now. I think the more digital-based businesses that have maybe only have a five-year history, they're probably much more agile and digital friendly to pick this up and run with it. So it's very possible we could see some new, you know, unicorn type of successes for businesses that really figure this out and go to that, you know, they don't have a lot to lose by going all in, but most businesses are not in that situation.

So they're going to have those hard decisions, as you said earlier, about keeping, labor components going, paying fair wages to people and having working conditions that people are happy with. You know, and AI can't solve all of that. It can force a lot of change, but do you really have a better organization because of it? Those are tough questions and I don't think we're going to solve those anytime soon.

Chris Fine

So maybe we haven't found the killer app yet.

Jon Arnold

But it's out there.

Chris Fine

It's out there.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it will come. And like a lot of these new technologies too, we only know about the use cases that are obvious or are becoming obvious. But once AI starts to filter down into the masses and all the layers of the workplace, there's no doubt all kinds of new applications are going to kind of emerge right from the people who are living it day to day. And I think there could really spark a lot of innovation for sure.

Chris Fine

Well, there's a long history of combination of overhyped and underhyped transformative technologies, right? I mean, the famous prediction of 10 computers in the world and all during the growth of the phone network, everybody said there'd only be like a million more phones. or 100 more phones from where you were, right? And they're right for a certain period of time because exponential growth takes a while to really get going.

But if it's transformative, you do reach the point where you've got an iPhone on your hands, right? Or you've got what Polycom did to speaker phones. Let's take a smaller example, right? And what Zoom did to teleconferencing. So maybe that's where we're headed, right? And what I'm hearing is we're definitely heading in some direction. We haven't identified what this killer app is yet, but this is a classic watch this space writ large.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, good way to end it. And as often happens, there's no guarantees it will come from the usual suspects, right? A new company could emerge out of nowhere. It could be a company that's maybe in another part of the world that is just ahead of the curve. And all of a sudden, it lands here and we can't get to it fast enough. Very possible. So yeah, and the global implications of this are a whole other thing, by the way, but another time.

Chris Fine

Looking forward to the next one, Jon.

Jon Arnold

Okay, me too. Me too. So with that, by the time you're listening to this, you will probably have seen or hopefully seen my newsletter, which will have more recap of Enterprise Connect, both in written form, and I was posting constantly during the event with commentary and photos on LinkedIn. So, lots to follow. And yes, even for Informa, the company that puts on the show, they have all kinds of day-to-day coverage. So easy to find out what you missed, but just as you say, Chris, watch this space.

That brings us to end of time, and we want to thank you for listening as always. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and that you'll stay with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access all of our episodes at the dedicated website is www.watchthisspace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts and all the kind of the usual platforms. If you like what you're hearing, we'd love to hear a review, a rating, suggestions for future topics. We'd love to have that input from you as always. Comments are very welcome. And that's it, so I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thank you, Jon. Always a pleasure. Thanks everyone for listening and sticking with us. And we will return next month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Amazon, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nice, Nortel, Polycom, RingCentral, Talkdesk, Zoom