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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During September, Chris and I both attended industry events in New York City, and we had lots to talk about. First up was the Cloud Communications Alliance Financial Summit, which I attended for the first time and spoke on the analyst panel session. We discussed how the current state of things – crowded and very competitive – is impacting valuations and growth opportunities. Bottom line – cloud providers need to expand beyond UCaaS into CCaaS and CPaaS, and be ready for what’s coming with AI. Chris recapped two events – CREtech and WORKTECH23, reviewing how today’s office spaces are adapting to bring workers back to the office. This is a key element for anybody’s future of work plans, and Chris also shared first-hand takeaways from tours to Cisco, Google and WestCap’s state-of-the-art facilities. Buckle-up, as we covered a lot of ground on this episode!

We usually cover multiple topics on Watch This Space, but my recent trip to China was so fascinating – and touched on so many tangents – that we didn’t talk about anything else. The main topic was my experience at the Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, with some sidebars to my broader impressions of going to China for the first time. Technology-wise, 5G is the big story here, and not many Westerners have seen what I got see, so if you want to know what’s coming in the wireless world, this is the episode for you.

Our May episode started with my takeaways from Five9’s analyst event in Porto, Portugal, with a parallel discussion about how they’re using AI to transform customer service, along with how broader generational changes are increasingly AI and tech-centric. Our analog lens pre-dates these changes, and we explored how digital transformation is taking automation to new levels. We don’t know where it’s heading, but there’s a big difference between automating tasks and processes, and automating thought and emotion. The singularity could be closer than Kurzweil predicted – 2045 – and we left off with the robotics of the mind for our listeners to ponder.