Watch This Space Podcast

While not quite The Last Waltz, all good things must come to an end, at least for now. This marks the final episode in our eight-year run doing Watch This Space, not because we’ve run out of spaces to watch, but because we feel it’s time to do a re-set with the podcast. With future of work being a core theme, we feel we’ve covered the topic long enough and a new focus is needed. That new focus is TBD, and will take shape over the next while.

Until then, this episode reviewed current industry events, namely Zoho’s Zoholics, NICE Interactions and analyst events with Infobip and Global Relay. Most of our time was spent looking back on the most impactful technology trends since 2018, and we were in strong agreement that the biggest one was the pandemic and the emergence of hybrid work. We recounted why UCaaS and cloud were the right technologies at the right time to make hybrid work viable, along with why we think AI will be most important technology to watch going forward. While not a surprising perspective, we framed this as a two-sided coin, where we get both the good and the bad at the same time.

That provided a segue to a related topic that we also felt will be important to watch – quantum computing. Finally, we took things full circle to a recent WTS episode where we reviewed a classic sci-fi novella – With Folded Hands – a prescient tale of where blind faith in technology could take us, with another reminder why we feel our analog perspective is a valuable lens through which to see how digital technology is shaping our world.

April was a busy month for industry events, and the main focus for this episode was Jeff Pulver’s vCon event, held in Hyannis, MA. Chris spoke at the event, with the main takeaway being that vCon is a “watch this space” initiative, especially for using AI to derive new value from conversations, including unstructured data. With vCon being early stage, the focus was mainly on laying the groundwork to make this an IETF standard, and proof of concept interop testing. Chris explained how this was a different conference experience, with the participants trying to set the foundation for vCon before it gets on the radar of the hyperscalers. Following this, Jon added his thoughts on other recent events, namely 8x8’s analyst event, speaking at the Cloud Communications Alliance event, and Vector Institute’s Remarkable conference in Toronto.

March was another busy month, with Chris attending Leesman’s research event in NYC, and Jon doing the same for Enterprise Connect in Orlando, along with Cognigy’s Nexus event in Dusseldorf. On this episode, Chris explains the big disconnect between what management and workers want for coming back to the office, and how that’s impacting corporate real estate thinking. For Jon, Agentic AI was the big story at Enterprise Connect, and he reviews why it’s so important, but also how enterprises are struggling to find the best use cases. Another takeaway is why Jon thinks Google’s AI-first approach to CX could make them a dark horse player in the hyper-competitive contact center space. Finally, Jon shares how Cognigy is getting impressive results with Tier 1 customers using Agentic AI – mainly in the EU – and showing what’s possible when AI is deployed effectively.

February was a busy month, but the highlight was the Future of Work Expo, with Jon returning as Chair for the eighth year. Co-located with the big-tent ITExpo, the program covered a wide range of topics related to the future of work, and the highlights were reviewed during the podcast. One was from Jon’s keynote, citing industry research about how difficult hybrid work is to manage, and what attributes are most important for being in an office setting. Another main theme was how the future of work is being shaped now by AI, and how important it will be for workers to upskill to adapt. Bigger picture, Chris and Jon discussed how there’s a hunger for data now in enterprises, where everyday workplace communication is being mined to help train AI applications that will define the future of work.

With the out-of-nowhere DeepSeek news turning the world of AI upside down, we went into an extended discussion about what it is and what it means, along with concerns about a related topic, deepfakes. We reviewed many examples that make you wonder if today’s digital natives can tell the real from the fake with AI – and if they even care. For enterprises, we debated if AI is really headed in the right direction, and what it will take for them to realize an ROI to justify all of this spending. From there, we pivoted to another timely topic - the Future of Work Expo - where Jon discussed the program and how central AI has become to the topic.

Season 8 of Watch This Space began with our look-ahead to 2025, where the main topics were how we see workplaces and workspaces evolving, why small language models will have their moment, and our concerns about how AI is becoming baked into everything. On another tangent, we discussed how sensibilities in the digital age are so different from the analog world we are grounded in, and why that’s making it easier for AI to take hold. We also continued the literary theme from our last episode by revisiting some lingering thoughts from the sci-fi novella With Folded Hands, then veering into another AI-related must-read, Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC. If you’re wondering why DeepMind’s AlphaGo is a foreboding sign for how AI could reshape our very humanity, this is the book for you.

We mixed things up for the December episode, with our first-ever book review. A novelette, actually, from the sci-fi genre, that we found to be very timely. Written by Jack Williamson in 1947, With Folded Hands is a prescient story about a world that’s looking very familiar, and with Humanoids running everything, the parallels to the trend du jour – Agentic AI – are pretty striking. We discussed what it all means, and after you listen to us, we hope you’ll give it a read. In response to the conformity that comes with this brave new world, we raised the question about where is the next Bob Dylan to push back on all this? Following that, we reviewed our recent industry events – CREtech, ISC East, and the Talkdesk Analyst Summit. Being the last episode for 2024, we closed out with some big picture takeaways from this year, along with some things we’re expecting for 2025.

With travel to industry events in full swing during October, we had a lot of ground to cover. Jon recapped both events from earlier in the month – Verint, British Telecom and UC Expo – along with previewing upcoming October events that were to take place after our podcast was recorded, namely Cisco WebexOne and NICE Analyst Summit – which took Jon to Zambia. From Chris’s end, he updated us on VON Evolution (now vCon), where Jeff Pulver’s community explored the future of voice and conversations, then WorkTech, where the focus was on the return to office side of hybrid work, and how the corporate real estate world is thinking about these things. Things are never dull here on Watch This Space, and this episode will update you on the worlds of AI, customer experience and future of work in more ways than you might imagine.

October marks the start of the busy season for technology events, and we provided a preview of what’s coming, namely Jeff Pulver’s new-and-improved VON event, Verint Engage, British Telecom’s Focus analyst event, the UC Expo in London, and NICE’s analyst event in Zambia.

Ahead of that we introduced changes coming to the podcast, both for updating the format, and two new channels where WTS can be found – TMCnet, and EM360. On the tech news front, we discussed the implications of Amazon’s new mandate for full-time back to the office – definitely a Watch This Space topic.

Our September episode began by talking about the best things that came from the summer. In terms of technology, the highlight was how good streaming has become, and how great a showcase the Paris Olympics were for this. We extended this to the workplace, by noting how some vendors have been enhancing their UCaaS with event platforms that provide broadcast-quality communication for large audiences. These examples support our bigger-picture perspective about the ascendancy of video technology, and how use cases are growing, both in the public and private sector. From there, Jon talked about the recent NCEC Technology Conference for rural utilities in North Carolina, where he returned as a speaker. He reviewed the challenges and opportunities they face for adopting AI, along with highlights from his session on the use of conversational AI in the contact center.

Our main focus for this episode was on the recent Leesman Corporate Real Estate Poll, and the emerging need for enterprise leaders to develop a workplace strategy. Senior management has numerous priorities to manage for their organization to function effectively; such as employee experience, office utilization and cost management, but they lack the tools to develop an integrated strategy.

This where AI comes in, not just for integrating disparate elements across the organization, but also to provide the datasets management needs to make decisions and develop strategies. We discussed how there’s an unmet need here, and a possible opportunity for the UCaaS and CCaaS vendors, who are already capturing much of this data with their AI-driven platforms. Our topic was based on my recent No Jitter article, which includes a link to the Leesman research.

Ahead of all this, we opened the episode with a review of recent tech and AI missteps, namely CrowdStrike, Patagonia and Ticketmaster – not just for the risks we’re all exposed to, but also for how dependent we’re becoming on Big Tech.

Both of us attended major industry events during June, with Chris at HPE Discover, and myself at NICE Interactions – both in Las Vegas, as it turns out. HPE and NICE are different companies in different spaces, but both were showcasing how they’re pushing the envelope with AI.

Given our focus on future of work and digital transformation, Chris noted the impact of AI-driven network technologies on smart buildings and how that can support return to office. With NICE, I reviewed how their vision for AI is taking us to a world where live and virtual agents will work symbiotically, much like the Digital Centaur that may some day come to transform the workplace.

Aside from our take on these events, we took some side roads to expound on Vegas’s unique vibe, and how HPE’s acquisition of Juniper is another example of Big Tech getting bigger.

With AI moving so quickly - yet without much ROI to speak of – it’s fair to ask if we’re at the beginning or the end with this revolution. For this episode, Jon shared insights from recent events with Zoom and Verint – two companies going all-in with AI.

Both are aiming high, solving problems that only AI can handle, and we explore the bigger picture as to whether they will succeed. While they seem to be on the right track, there may be limits to how much automation workers and customers really want, making this another Watch This Space topic. Find out for yourself by checking out our June podcast.

For this episode, we explored what technology innovation looks like both in physical and virtual spaces. Just back from the ISC West event, Chris shared how technology is now being applied in the physical security space, and how commercial property managers are thinking about smart buildings. Following that, we reviewed a recent demo I had with Welo, illustrating use cases for virtual workspaces and new forms of visual collaboration. To better envision this, please see the visual in the Hey, Did You Know? section below. Welo isn’t the only player in this space, but this is a good starting point to re-think workspaces as the physical and virtual worlds further overlap.

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.