Here comes the smart office of the future

The intelligence revolution is upon us.

For much of this year and last, I’ve been working with one of my teams focused on workplace transformation and the smart office of the future. This is a space which is going to take off soon in a big way, and I’ll tell you why.

We’ve been researching, meeting with customers, holding strategic planning sessions, focus groups, product development, testing – you get the picture. Now I want to explain where all of this has led us as we enter the next smart office-fueled phase of technology development.

We’ve recently announced a related product in this space, available first quarter of 2018, developed in cooperation with Microsoft. The Lenovo ThinkSmart Hub 500 is a Skype Room systems device to tackle conference room complexities and help companies embrace the digital transformation of modern workspaces. For us, this step is a productivity play – its premise is to eliminate the hassle of sharing personal laptop screens and messing around with cables. That’s just a start point in this shift, so let’s examine what’s driving the smart office, and what the user and customer experience will look like.

Creating better workplaces

A more intelligent future will dramatically change the way we live and work. For our customers, it’s about solving problems and providing a different and better way of doing things. Information used to be passive but those days are long gone. We’ve entered an era where information is everywhere and easily accessible. The next stage will be about bringing information to life in new ways, so it becomes an extension of our very senses – and the smart office is driving that.

Of course, this will play out with vast consequences in the workplace. There are several key drivers for the smart office of the future. First we know the workspace is getting smaller – since 2010, office space per worker has decreased by over 30%[1]. We also know that by 2020, millennials will form 50% of the global workforce[2], and that one third of this group prioritize the mobile work environment over salary in accepting a job offer[3]. Lastly, we know that today, 20% of meetings that overrun do so because of equipment problems[4].

This confluence of data points to an opportunity to do things better, and to create a better user experience in a “smarter office.” To help create the workplace that appeals to incoming generations, and to make our collaborative time in a smarter office more productive, efficient and enjoyable. It’s not just about “smart,” it’s about “better.” And better means addressing typical problems by more easily finding space to work, helping to ensure technology works so meetings start on time, and having more deeply effective remote collaboration between colleagues and partners.

Our enterprise customers are very eager for this to happen. A bank I spoke to recently in Europe told me their 2020 workplace program was underway and that the smart office is top of mind for executive planning, especially in the areas of lower power consumption, accessing more intelligent devices, improving online meeting experiences affordably, and achieving a better unification of physical and digital environments. A U.S. multinational firm echoed these sentiments, adding their strategic focus around reducing desk cost, simplifying device management, and using more intelligent devices to assist with delivering more productive tasks, business processes and team collaboration.

“We’re planning on making every room video capable.” Fortune 500 software company CIO

The common factor among these two businesses, and many others I speak with, is a desire to create a smarter, better office. In fact, workplace transformation is the single biggest theme that has come out of enterprise customer conversations for me this year. Organizations are calling for high-quality hardware such as speakers, microphones, cameras, displays, new forms of sensors and physical interactions. But all of this hardware also needs to work fluidly with the personal devices people carry, along with hardware embedded statically in spaces around us. I’ve never seen enterprise customers care as much about the PCs and smart devices they buy as they do today. And I know why that is – it’s about an acute and increased focus on workplace transformation.

The message is: transform the workplace and you’ll facilitate the styles of work people love most. I strongly believe the companies which best deliver the office of the future will appeal most to new generations of workers.

A changing commercial landscape

It’s clear the way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding and the user experience is morphing yet again. Conference rooms are being reimagined. Huddle spaces are being born. Even phone booths are returning to the office. Video, screens, audio, whiteboards and adaptive technologies are popping up everywhere to change the way we experience work.

Various leaders in technology have made themselves clear. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says we’ve entered an artificial intelligence (AI) “golden age” as elements like machine learning, machine vision, and natural language processing help us to achieve breakthroughs previously only imagined in science fiction.

Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding and the user experience is morphing yet again.

Lenovo’s CEO Yuanqing Yang (aka YY), recently said that, ‘IT’ is no longer just ‘Information Technology.’ It is Intelligent Transformation… driven by big data, cloud and artificial intelligence. Almost everything around us will become smart with built-in computing, storage and networking capabilities.” The smart office will harness all of this.

Accenture’s CTO Paul Daugherty imagines a near future where more intelligent workplaces will change “not only how business is done, but the kind of work we do – and unleash new levels of creativity and ingenuity.” Furthermore, research from Accenture expects labor productivity to increase by up to 40% as a result of AI and related technologies. Finally, the Harvard Business Review describes how digital assistants will perform increasingly complex tasks as human usage and algorithmic sophistication increases over the near term. We’re certainly racing toward an interesting and exciting near future.

Welcome to the smart office of the future

The journey to the workplace of the future is underway now, and we’re just getting started in terms of new smart office devices that will improve the user experience, combining digital assistants, more seamless collaboration tools, and intuitive user interfaces which respond even better to voice commands. Very often, elements of the media and business sector paint a dire picture of incoming AI as something people will need to compete with. But humans and AI will work together, creating and harnessing new tools which result in greater productivity, automation of dull tasks, and more informed decision making.

Corporations are increasingly looking for on-demand computing to more easily predict costs and fluctuate infrastructure in line with a more flexible and mobile workforce. PC-as-a-Service models will help facilitate this. PCs that self provision, self diagnose and remotely repair themselves are all becoming increasingly standard in a cloud-based world.

In the commercial and enterprise computing space, the PC will become the center of your device universe, not just as more advanced digital personal assistants proliferate, but also as a tool to synergistically allow a multitude of different devices to work together better, integrating devices for greater simplicity, security, data management and user efficiency.

The smart office is powered by a significant global shift toward workspace transformation. Businesses will soon deliver an updated employee user experience via more flexible and collaborative work environments – regardless of where a worker sits, performing on site or remotely. This is a critical and fundamental shift for employees (and their bosses) who no longer wish to be tethered to a particular workspace or conference room.

Welcome to the smart office of the future! Let me know what you think in the comments below! Or connect with me over at Twitter: @dilipbhatia.

[1] CoreNet Global, 2013

[2] U.S. Census Bureau data by Pew Research Center, 2012

[3] Kenan Flagler Business School research, 2013

[4] Barco’s survey Meeting rooms of the future, 2013