Watch This Space Podcast Jon Arnold

Having returned from Enterprise Connect the night before, the time was right to talk about takeaways from the 2024 edition, of which there were many. Before talking about how AI has now become the main focus of the event, we felt compelled to put things in perspective first. This conference used to be solely about PBXs – hardware-based telephony – and we reviewed how the communications technology space has been radically transformed in very little time by AI. Digital natives may not find this perspective relevant, but trust us, it is, and we’ll leave it for you to decide after giving our latest episode a listen.

 

For this episode, Chris and Jon reflect on key highlights from the recent Future of Work Expo, where Jon serves as event Chair, and Chris was both a speaker and a moderator. The event provided much food for thought, with insights from an eclectic mix of speakers from both mainstream and lesser-known companies. The overarching theme for this episode, however, was AI, and we explore why it’s become so pervasive, and why it’s on par with the Internet as being the most transformative technologies of the digital age. We further explore AI’s impact on FOW, along with the fit we see for big consumer players like Meta and Apple.
 

We continue with Season 7 for Watch This Space, where the focus is my upcoming Future of Work Expo in Ft. Lauderdale. Our sessions will cover a lot of timely topics that should be familiar to our regular listeners - but some new ones too - including privacy, identity, immersive tech, large language models, endpoint usage, evolving role of IT, collaboration trends, agent experience, organizational structures, and workspaces for FOW. To set the stage for all this, we took a broader view for FOW through our analog lens, raising fundamental concerns about the very nature of work as our world becomes more digital and more virtual, and as we work increasingly in isolation from each other.
 

This episode marks the start of Season 7 for Watch This Space, and as always, is our look-ahead into the coming year. With AI becoming ever-more pervasive, Chris and I focused on how IT and business leaders need to be thinking for 2024. Never before has a technology emerged so quickly with such far-reaching implications, and we examined not just the undeniable benefits of AI, but also what will be required from IT to effectively deploy it, along with maintaining trust with employees. With our deep roots in the analog world, the perspectives we offer may be unfamiliar for digital natives, but perhaps exactly what they need to hear.
 

Our discussion for this episode centered on Big Tech, triggered by the recent rollercoaster with OpenAI. Aside from exploring concerns and implications about Big Tech’s market power, we parsed out the different frames of reference between analog and digital generations about using AI, along with why we should expect some backlash in 2024. Wrapping up, Jon shared his thoughts on Verint’s analyst event, which will close out his travels for 2023.
 

Before getting to Jon’s travelogue of industry events, we reviewed how businesses are still facing challenges getting hybrid work right, and what vendors are doing to make the in-office experience more compelling, especially for meeting spaces. We noted how this theme will be further explored at Jon’s Future of Work Expo in February, where many of the leading vendors will be speaking. From there, Jon recounted highlights from his extensive October travels – UC Expo in London, NICE in Peru, Avaya in Dubai, Cisco WebexOne in Anaheim, and SCTC in Raleigh - including a SIPtones gig. Finally, we did a brief mention of Jeff Pulver’s VON Evolution event in NYC, where both of us were speaking, and we did a special edition WTS segment specific for the event.