All Seeing, All Hearing
Barcelona hosted some of the biggest brands in the world to show off the best the AV industry has to offer.
No conference has had it easy in recent years. Without dragging up the past, the appetite for a global international event may have been subdued somewhat for want of a better word. But ISE 2024 felt like an official “we’re back” moment from a show that, on reflection, couldn’t have chosen a worse time to move from Amsterdam across Europe to the 500,000m2 facility in the Fira, Barcelona in 2021. I happened to have been in Amsterdam in 2020 for the last show at RAI, and have fond memories of diverted planes due to Storm Ciara and wheelie bins of hand sanitiser dotted all over the place as the COVID-19 pandemic began its intrusion into our lives. In those days the show was between the 10th and the 14th of February so, I’m obliged to say “more important than all of that I ruined Valentine’s Day because I didn’t want to go to dinner when we came back and I’m very sorry.” A lot has changed since I last went to ISE. Front and centre that year was a huge curved display rigged up to a Play Station for anyone who wanted a go at playing FIFA in between meetings. This year, while the hardware was as impressive as ever, a handful of exhibitors were reticent to use the topic of the
for Machine Learning or Analytics. “The challenge in a way is that AI has become a buzzword that overshadows
everything you do,” said Holger Graeff, General Manager EMEA, Vivitek. “Businesses can say today ‘We are working on AI features’ but we should ask what is it? What does it mean? “Internally, in Taiwan, we have built a booth that considers artificial intelligence but these advantages happen at different levels. So I’d like to see more before commenting on it more.” “You walk anywhere here and the stand says that they have something with AI but that of course means something different to everybody,” said Nicole Corbin, Vice President of Operations, at Utelogy “Of course, we are looking into it. There are things that we can do with data and analytics in our platform, and we’re always looking at gathering even more insights we can present to our end users. “We can provide self-healing services already, but I wouldn’t necessarily call what we are currently doing AI. Maybe in the future, we will look into machine learning and predictive analytics so that nobody needs to analyse the analytics.” Despite a little scepticism, Richard Trestain, Product Marketing Manager, EMEA at Jabra showed that the AI installed in systems is making meeting room experiences better. “We have a lot of work to do before AI has the ability to direct the meeting,” said Trestain. “We already have AI-based chips on
Rob Smith Senior Director, Strategic Market Development
day, Artificial Intelligence, opting instead
shure.com
ISE is a very efficient way of meeting a very large, large number of people in a short space of time. We also believe in being good corporate neighbours and supporting industry events, and more importantly, it is a good place to exchange views, see where the world’s going and catch up with people.
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