Artificial intelligence in workplace AV

Artificial Intelligence is big news globally and a key trend at this year’s ISE. Naturally, we hear a lot of concerned voices expressing concern about the impact of AI on employment, but when combined with workplace AV, AI can result in enhancements to employee creativity, and productivity and expand their team skill sets. We look at the positive impacts of AI in the workplace.

The rise of generative AI in the workplace is inevitable. Artificial intelligence has been around for years, but scarcely has it found itself in conversation as much as it has now. The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT rocketed generative AI onto the radar of many people who hadn’t been paying much attention – or didn’t feel it was relevant to their lives. ChatGPT uses machine learning to respond to user prompts and helps workers write form letters and generate ideas and communications in the workplace. It’s already impacting on recruitment. Recruiters have already found they need to adapt to the new technology. And as competing companies rush to launch similar tools, the technology will only get stronger and more sophisticated.

Supporters of AI take the view that the technology can benefit workers’ daily lives and skill sets, and even improve the overall work economy. ChatGPT, for example, can function like a personal assistant. Given a prompt, ChatGPT can generate text using natural language. Along with providing information and answers, it can also assist knowledge workers to analyse and expand their work. For these knowledge workers, this could mean creating an outline for a blog and an accompanying social media post, distilling complex topics for a different target audience, planning a business trip itinerary, or predicting a project’s cost and timeline. For many users, ChatGPT functions as a sounding board – a tool to bounce ideas off, rather than create them.

AI can also broaden our thinking by introducing new approaches and raising new solutions to problems. AI also has the power to catch some issues people might overlook. This can mean a range of things – for instance, correcting inaccuracies in text, checking code, or even circumventing biases and prejudices against workers with unintentionally biased views. An analyst interpreting a set of data, for instance, might be able to identify a confirmation bias in their work - meaning they look for evidence to support an outcome they already believe exists. AI can interpret data impartially providing a more detailed, big picture analysis.?

Far from perfect?

OK, so we know that AI technology is far from perfect - but even in its current state it can, at least, lay the foundation for workers to see outcomes and solutions outside their personal experiences, thereby opening up opportunities for impartiality across myriad fields and sectors. AI will only get better at this. This ability to more quickly, and better, diagnose problems won’t replace expertise. While AI can identify problems, humans still need to correct them. Generative AI can identify these issues faster and often more accurately than humans working alone. Plus, ChatGPT, and other machine learning models, are constantly updating and advancing as their datasets become broader.

AI can distill complex topics for a target audience, plan a business trip itinerary in a location unfamiliar to the user, or predict a project’s cost and timeline. Traditionally, automation results in a lot of chaos in the short term, and then more jobs in the long term. 60% of jobs done today didn’t exist in 1940. Industrialisation and automation have led to entire new industries from cars to computers and added new jobs from drivers to web designers in the process. We don’t know if the trend will continue, emerging data is beginning to show positive signs for new positions and even entire careers. The proliferation of AI is already increasing the demand for jobs including data analysts and scientists who work with the technology to create best practices in the workplace.

While some workers are diving into the technology wholeheartedly, others may find it scary to begin engaging with AI. (Remember the user adoption debates over collaboration tools in the pandemic.) Yet like collaboration, generative AI will be in the workplace – and experts say its prevalence will push workers into using the technology, so they don’t fall behind. As workers get increasingly fluent, they can find themselves ahead of the curve, and even at a distinct advantage in the workplace. Workers resistant to AI could be seen as unwilling or incapable of adapting. Workers who don't work with AI are going to find their skills become obsolete quite rapidly. So, therefore, it's imperative to work with AI to stay employed, stay productive, and have up-to-date skills. As AI becomes a more core part of the workday, the push into fluency means workers will be better equipped to utilise it as a supplement to their current skill set. Familiarity with the technology also sets them up to grow and develop those skills quickly.

Enhancing AV experiences?

It is a truism to say that AI is growing fast, and its full potential has yet to be realised. But, many are hopeful there’s a big upside, enabling workers to innovate quickly and evolve their skills. Innovations like Chat GTP have been described as democratising content creation, giving virtually anyone the ability to become a creator, regardless of their technical knowledge. New tools and devices break down the barriers that once reserved innovation for those with specialised skills or technical knowledge. With generative AI, intricate and complex ideas can be transformed into tangible digital creations through intuitive interfaces, making sophisticated design, animation, and virtual experiences accessible to a broader audience. Spatial computing devices then allow users to interact with and shape their digital environments in a more natural, three-dimensional, and human-centric manner. This democratisation not only fosters a rich diversity of perspectives and ideas but also heralds a new era of inclusive innovation, igniting a global renaissance of digital artistry and invention.

However, enhanced creativity is not the only benefit of AI. On the ISE show floor, the prevalence of AI within AV applications was clear to see. Going back to user adoption and collaboration, for example. Zoom has released a new generative AI assistant (AI Companion) - see below for details - to its collaboration platform; Crestron’s new 1 Beyond PTZ cameras with built-in Visual AI to frame in-room meeting participants; and WolfVision’s Cynap Videobar which combines BYOD wireless presentation technology with a 4K AI camera and beamforming array microphone. Scott Norder, chief operating officer, of RGB Spectrum said: “AI is revolutionising the industry in various ways. Our main focus of video processing solutions, it enhance content creation and consumption. AI’s integration into video processing within the AV industry has led to more immersive, efficient, and personalised content creation and consumption while also reducing production costs and expanding accessibility, making it a crucial driver of innovation in the field.”

Collaboration with AI

Zoom’s unveiling of its AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace, goes to the heart announced of many workplace applications. Zoom Workplace is an AI-powered, open collaboration platform, that introduces new AI Companion expansions to help reimagine teamwork. “We have seen the positive impact that Zoom AI Companion has had on our business and our customers, transforming how we work by freeing up precious time for collaborative teamwork,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Zoom Workplace with AI Companion will help solve real customer problems by bringing the core collaboration solutions into a single AI-powered platform to help improve productivity, efficiency, and the overall workday, all within the Zoom experience users trust and love.”

Zoom plans to help users harness their productivity directly within their existing workflows, enhancing employees’ skills, and empowering teams to focus their time where it matters. Zoom’s latest AI Companion innovations will include an Ask AI Companion - an enhancement of the digital assistant that will help users prepare for their workday across Zoom Workplace, plus an AI Companion for Zoom Phone and additional capabilities for Team Chat and Whiteboard. The Ask AI Companion will provide a new way to interact across the Zoom platform. Users can enhance their productivity and be better prepared for their workday with Ask AI Companion, which will gather, synthesise, and share information from Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, Docs, and more. Ask AI Companion will also help prepare users for and recap meetings, show relevant action items, draft agendas, and summarize chat and email threads, as well as documents. In a later release after the initial launch, Ask AI Companion will be able to pull relevant content from select third-party applications (if the customer chooses to enable them) to be even more helpful.

Other AI Companion innovations across the platform will include new Team Chat and Whiteboard capabilities. In Team Chat, AI Companion now helps users save time with smart scheduling that automatically detects the intent for a meeting in chat and suggests a meeting time, in the future will provide sentence completion and will expand to support 38 languages for the chat compose and thread summary features. Zoom Whiteboard users are now able to generate and refine whiteboard flowcharts and mind maps using a simple prompt to kick-start ideation and creativity. Zoom Workplace will elevate the Zoom experience with Zoom AI Companion so that all employees within a company can be more productive, collaborate better, and enhance their skills. With the introduction of Zoom Workplace, Zoom is unveiling a refreshed user experience with more choices, including the ability to choose from four colour themes within the Zoom app, so users can make the app their own. Hosts will also have the opportunity to add customized virtual meeting backgrounds to tailor the feel or focus of the meeting.

“With Zoom, there aren’t any challenges with implementing complex tools, so we can focus on engaging our employees and collaborating on the work that matters,” said Diofanto Rosales, vice president of digital workplace and IT infrastructure at Flex. “Zoom Workplace will bring all our essential work tools together in a single app, making it easier than ever to get work done.” For Zoom Meetings, users will see a new Meetings tab within the Zoom app that will allow users to collaborate before, during, and after meetings. It will support traditional calendar views and will serve as the central place for agendas, recordings, and other shared assets such as documents, plus AI Companion smart recordings and meeting summaries. Last year Zoom introduced continuous meeting chat, which helps users continue chat conversations so collaboration can continue outside of meetings asynchronously and throughout the life of a project. With the new Meetings tab, users will be able to access continuous meeting chats from the Meeting card before and after the meeting. During meetings, the new multi-speaker view will automatically adapt the video layout to highlight active speakers to help attendees follow the discussion more easily. AI-powered portrait lighting will help illuminate users’ faces in poor lighting, and generative AI virtual backgrounds will allow users to create custom backgrounds.

Additional new features for Meetings will include a customisable toolbar that will allow users to pin their most-used features, multi-share, which will allow multiple participants to share their screens and documents, whiteboards, and notes simultaneously, and document collaboration that will provide the ability to select documents, streamline document access permissions, and co-edit right from meetings with documents from third-party apps. In Zoom Team Chat, asynchronous communication will be boosted by Team Chat tabs that will help users stay organised by keeping channel-related assets like links, whiteboards, and resources in a single view, shared spaces that provide a shared grouping of channels to help users better organise conversations and improve discoverability of relevant project or team-based topics, and workflow automation, a powerful, no-code workflow engine, will be easily configurable to automate business tasks in Team Chat.

For hybrid and onsite organizations, navigating the office will be easier than ever with the introduction of a Workspaces tab, providing access to Workspace Reservation with wayfinding and Visitor Management directly from the Zoom Workplace app. To help make meetings more inclusive, Zoom Rooms will include the option to enable new smart name tags, which will be able to automatically apply name tags to people in a Zoom Room during a meeting. When one screen isn’t enough, users will be able to expand Zoom Rooms with a companion device for an additional screen to collaborate with audio and video. “Businesses are looking for AI-powered solutions that will help them move the dial by boosting employee productivity and team collaboration,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “Zoom’s newest innovations, including its release of Zoom Workplace and Ask AI Companion, demonstrate its commitment to deploying AI that is intuitive and effective across one platform to improve productivity and collaboration.”