Our
Advance Rate expires today, Jan. 24, so now is the time to get your best rate — and with this year’s event shaping up to be bigger and better than ever, you’re not going to want to miss out. Consider our keynote lineup alone: a bang-up collection of industry executives who are propelling next-generation developments for enterprise communications and collaboration.
In order of appearance on the keynote stage, you’ll hear from:
- Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365 (Tuesday, March 31, 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.)
- Amy Chang, executive vice president and general manager, Cisco Collaboration (Tuesday, 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.)
- Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO, Slack (Wednesday, April 1, 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.)
- Eric Yuan, founder and CEO, Zoom Video Communications (Wednesday, 10:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.)
- Pasquale DeMaio, general manager, Amazon Connect (Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.)
And what’ll you be hearing? While I’m not privy to their keynote presentations, I’ve no doubt that improved meeting experiences, ease of collaboration, and more fruitful interactions — employee to employee and contact center agent to customer — will be consistent themes, with a liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and integration sprinkled throughout.
The “future” is getting real, it seems. And even if the technologies pinned to the visions shared aren’t perfect yet, they’re “good enough to warrant consideration,” as industry consultant Jon Arnold told me in a recent discussion about
AI and speech technologies.
With these keynotes sharing their visions and, perhaps, treating the EC crowd to some cool technology demos, you should walk away with some ideas for how to move your organization forward. Some of these takeaways may be more aspirational than practical for implementation today, but the important thing is to get the ideas flowing.
I don’t think you can understate the importance of this. In a hyper-competitive market, it’s incumbent upon companies to meet the expectations of the modern employee, one bent on having a very consumer-like experience with their work technology. That means touch-of-the-button communications and collaboration, medium of their choice. Likewise — and some might say even more importantly — when customers reach out to companies, they expect to get their issues resolved pronto. Loyalty can be fleeting when the employee or customer experience is found wanting.