I do love a good keynote, and that’s a good thing because I hear a lot of them. I attend numerous events across enterprise communications to keep abreast of the changes in voice, meetings, messaging, contact center, and APIs as a service. I look forward to these events as each helps me crystalize what’s truly important to each company and what it believes is essential to their customers.
Keynotes are made for specific audiences. Industry events like Enterprise Connect have a broad audience of customers, prospects, competitors, media, and analysts. Keynotes at a customer event tend to go longer and deeper.
A good keynote presentation includes announcements and demos, highlighting the why and how a vendor, product, or feature can enhance workflow. Keynotes convey our current challenges and how each vendor can improve our workflows and abilities to communicate and collaborate. The presenters are passionate and credible. A good keynote is well-organized and flows smoothly. The speaker should have a clear structure that tells a broad story. Humor and personal anecdotes engage the audience, but visuals have become key to conveying complex thoughts.
Visual aids, such as slides and videos, help illustrate key points. And this brings to NICE Interactions. The CX provider’s annual customer and partner event. Last June, NICE made several announcements at this event (previously covered here and there). In this post, I want to illustrate how NICE – led by CEO Barak Eliam – has been pushing the limits with keynotes for years. This year, the company set a new high bar.
This year’s event involved two very wide screens: one in front and one behind the speaker. CEO Barak Eliam presented from between two screens in what was the most effective keynote I have experienced.
Credit the visual strategy: Since the beginning, humans have been using pictures to tell a story — whether caveman paintings or silent films. The power of visual storytelling lies in the ability to elicit emotion and action from a visual, be it a graphic, a chart, animation, video, or product demo. Visual storytelling makes a story come alive. The basic keynote formula, presentation + PowerPoint, has been the standard for nearly 30 years. Eliam’s immersive storytelling set a new high bar.
The NICE keynote took place in Las Vegas at the new Fontainebleau Hotel, and an encore performance was held in London two weeks later for a European audience. The Las Vegas presentation involved a 25-meter (82’) wide LED background. At times, a mesh screen was lowered in front of the stage to present images in front of the speaker. This put Eliam inside the different scenes and created an immersive 3D viewing experience.
After a brief tribute to the hosting city, the keynote began with three vignettes about invention. Each was a tribute to how a change in perspective can ignite imagination and breakthrough growth. In the first story, we were taken to the Swiss Alps and joined engineer George de Mestral walking his dog. After the walk, we joined Mestral picking burrs from his dog’s fur. Eliam was there, in the living room alongside Mestral and his dog, explaining how this event inspired the invention of the hook-and-loop fastener system that most people know from the Velcro Companies’ product Velcro.
We also witnessed inventor Percy Spencer testing tubes at Raytheon when he noticed his chocolate bar melted. As he did more testing, we saw kernels explode into giant popcorn from a box in his lab to the stage. That metal box was cooking food with magnetic fields. Later, it was introduced as the RadarRange, the first microwave oven. We also joined track and field coach Bill Bowerman in his kitchen, eating waffles for breakfast. This inspired a new waffle design and patent for outer soles, the invention that put Nike on the map.
The screen effects and storytelling were mesmerizing. One section that stood out for me started with Eliam on a city street with other pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. We met Steve, one of the pedestrians, and examined how enterprises store his interaction history. We saw departmental silos tracking slivers of data, such as specific conversations and his purchase history. These discrete experiences get grouped into engagements and disjointed journeys.
Conversely, Steve has a unified view of the enterprise or brand. We saw how his brain uses over 100 billion interconnected neurons to translate all of his memories into a continuous experience. He doesn’t have the view of scattered dots the enterprise had of him. Instead, human awareness connects those dots into a grand narrative, informed by every interaction he’s had with the brand.
Eliam was explaining the “experience perception divide.” It is difficult to describe in writing, but the visuals were natural and intuitive. He was covering biological, scientific, and psychological concepts easily and naturally. This divide is not a fair match, so a new approach is required. He then dived further into the new AI solutions announced at Interactions with the goal of “supercharging” agents with what he called “memory-based augmentation.”
Eliam took the audience on a relatable, educational, entertaining, and informative journey. It did include product demos that illustrated the vision — they didn’t come across as a sales pitch.
“We aimed to create an experience our audience had never seen before and keep raising the bar in every event. This required a creative process that took our content to create memorable visuals,” said CMO Einat Weiss. “We are lucky to have a production partner that enjoys turning our vision into reality. They have created immersive presentations before, but our projects push them in terms of scale and technology.” This was a 50-minute presentation.
The content creation was impressive, but this live production required tightly coordinated timing between the on-stage presenter and the on-screen elements. Eliam moved around the entire stage but had to be in specific locations for many of the special effects. This extraordinary keynote was probably the last we will see from Barak Eliam, as he intends to retire at the end of the year.
I was thoroughly impressed with the presentation for its storytelling effectiveness. It’s also a powerful reminder of just how important multimodal communications are. In the demos within the keynote, we saw customers using voice, video, and text in their interactions. In other words, NICE is practicing what it’s preaching, which makes it even more effective and meaningful.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
