The Future Of Work And How UC Can Help You Adapt
By Jim Machi - CMO
From my perspective, the Future of Work in today’s era involves four fundamental areas:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Hybrid Work Environment
- Utilizing Global Work Resources
- Going Green
The rise of AI is a topic all unto itself and cannot be summarized sufficiently in a small blog. But I will try. As AI enters the business world, either we figure out how to use it to help do our jobs better, and help make our products better, and go learn about it, or we ignore it and end up getting displaced by it, or those that know how to use it for their jobs. Just like similar game changing technologies like computers, the internet, etc.
From a UC perspective, AI in UC can absolutely help us do our jobs better. We have already seen instances of AI being able to summarize a meeting into a one page or two page or whatever size document you want. Or being able to summarize the action items from that meeting. This saves a lot of time and thus enables better productivity. There will be many many more instance of AI coming into UC products that will enable better productivity. You had better learn how to use them because all the new younger employees certainly will.
Hybrid working – that is, working part of the time in the office and part of the time working remotely, is also here to stay. And as we have seen, the collaboration tools in UC are fantastic for enabling this. I will even say if it were not for the UC tools, this “hybrid working” would not even be a thing. Just being able to have video calls, share documents on these video calls, having team chat rooms, etc. has made and continues to make this a reality.
Related to the above is utilizing global contractors, or what some may call the gig economy. Your company may need a simple video done, or may need someone part time to work on your Salesforce instance, or someone part time to help with your website. But your company does not need someone full-time. With the rise of easy communication (some via the UC tools above I mentioned) this is easier than ever. In fact, in Clearspan we do this in places, and we use Slack and Google Meet to communicate easily.
And then there is Going Green. While this may not be a huge initiative now, I predict this will become important to companies once people making buying decisions make a big deal about this. And UC does have a role to play. For instance, with mobile clients this enables physical phones to “go away” – or at least use less of them. This means making less of them, using less resources, using less energy to make them, using less energy to power them up, etc. And with UCaaS, having less on-prem resources overall uses less energy than the respective cloud version would use.
As such, UC has a role to play in the future of work. A key role in fact.
