COMMENT COMMENT
Embracing Intelligence
CEOs alike say that innovation improves the opportunities for employees. Being in the written field that’s a relief, although after playing around with ChatGPT I think my career in feature writing will be safe at least. But while building this issue, it’s clear to me that artificial intelligence has captured the attention of the collaborations market in particular. Even in the legal features that we have on page 21 and 31 this month, artificial intelligence was spoken about when looking at threat detection for employees working from home, and drafting documents. It’ll be no surprise that Artificial Intelligence was also a theme running through our Contact Center pieces too. Thanks to the cloud (p15) call centers can reduce churn by filtering bad tempered callers, and tools overlapping video escalations (p27) is actually increasing brand loyalty. On top of this we have a review of Yealink’s Customer Experience Center in Canary Wharf (p41), and Ian Aitken, Managing Director of Ingram Micro’s UC division was kind enough to sit down and talk about how he sees the sector, which can be found on page 12.
Looking back six months, we were ending the year with redundancies and cut backs in big tech, which gave the impression the sector was in decline. Everyone from Meta to Samsung seemed to be scaling back their research and development, and any hype around the metaverse or, god forbid, hardware innovation was duly put on the back burner. Today, we’re still seeing these cutbacks, the most recent being Vodafone cutting 10,000 jobs. But since the turn of the year, the miracle of Artificial Intelligence has been discovered, and the giants on the west coast are once again readying for a bumper quarter. Of course, a lot of these technologies have been around for a while. Natural Language Processing has been efficient in directing customer service queries for some time, GMail has been finishing my sentences for years, and I haven’t transcribed a word myself in half a decade. What has changed is where this intelligence is being applied. No doubt the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon would have ideally seen their artificial intelligent agents help consumers find a way home, message mum, and make dinner reservations, but it’s the corporate world where AI has shown its worth. Anyone who has the pleasure of sharing a video call with me will find an extra participant in the room transcribing everything that’s being said (providing everyone is happy with that), and any number of people I know confess to using ChatGPT to draft emails, write job descriptions, and help out with other pieces of written admin. Yet, as quickly as it came about, media attention is focussing on the post-apocalyptic potential of technology rather than the benefits in the workplace. There will always be concerns about jobs, but whenever I have asked that question, analysts and
Elliot Mulley-Goodbarne Editor
As always, please get in touch with any feedback you have, and look out for your opportunity to get involved next month where we’ll be tackling the Public Sector, Data Storage, and Corporate Social Responsibility. elliot@ucadvanced.com.
CALLING ALL BRANDS
Support your Channel Distributors and Resellers by using the new FREE Stock in the Channel functionality: “Authorised Distributors”. Click here to learn more
ucadvanced.com
03
Powered by FlippingBook