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.