Your employees need to be individually productive wherever they work from, but business leaders must also consider the bigger picture with future of work. Supporting the hybrid work model requires agility across the organization that goes beyond what each business unit does on their own. Conventional, hierarchical structures will not be effective in today’s fluid environment, where flexibility is the key for getting the most from employees. Just as work itself is being transformed, so is the organization, and this session will explore new models along with successful approaches where only small changes are possible.
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ChatGPT has suddenly become the hottest trend in tech, and for good reason. While the novelty makes ChatGPT irresistible, there is much more to consider, not just for building a better search engine, but for the future of work. ChatGPT marks the latest iteration of conversational AI, where instead enabling meaningful dialog between humans and chatbots, this new type of chatbot generates its own response to your queries. Related to this is DALL-E, where images can be generated based on just a few text prompts. If you want a safe space to learn more about ChatGPT, and how it could impact how work gets done – and by whom – you won’t want to miss this session.
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These needs have always been important, but never more so than now, as businesses become more decentralized, and the preference for home-based working increases. Coming out of the pandemic, a full-on return to the office remains unlikely, and IT must recognize how this amplifies the risks around both data security and privacy. While many such risks are well-known, a distributed workforce creates more points of entry for newer threats, not just from work-based exposure, but from personal online activities as well. Vendors have responded with more sophisticated solutions to both mitigate data security risk for the business as well as protect the personal privacy of your employees. By attending this session, IT leaders will come away with a better understanding of what’s needed to address these needs, both of which are critical to the success of hybrid work.
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The Future of Work will be transformative in many ways, and IT must adapt to keep pace. As businesses evolve from analog to digital technologies, IT has needed to shift from managing hardware to software, but also now to cloud-based architectures. This is far-removed from legacy environments, and with the emergence of hybrid work, cloud has become increasingly critical to support distributed operations. IT is under constant pressure to do more with less, and this doesn’t leave much room to stay on top of what’s needed with Future of Work. Digital transformation and AI are giving rise to new streams of data that networks that IT will need to manage, and this won’t be possible without a good plan. This is one of two panel sessions focused on helping IT leaders develop effective strategies in this new era, and the focus here will be on data networks, with a particular emphasis on SD WAN.
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The Future of Work will be defined along many vectors, and immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) are among the most interesting. As digital natives come to dominate the workforce, the possibilities for these technologies beyond gaming become more compelling. Adoption of all new technologies is driven by use cases, and with Future of Work, there will be many. As businesses look to find new ways to engage employees with hybrid work, as well as to create deeper connections with customers, this brave new world has much to offer. Much has changed since we examined this topic in 2022, and we’ll provide an update on both where and how these technologies are being deployed now in the workplace.
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As businesses become more customer-centric, the hybrid work model must extend beyond the office to the contact center. Supporting your customers is just as important as supporting your workers, and to do both well, agents must be part of the equation. Just as a good employee experience translates into better collaboration outcomes, the same holds for a good agent experience leading to a good customer experience. Contact center agents are now working from home as often as office workers, so they are very much a part of the Future of Work story. Contact center agents need a strong supporting cast to be effective, and with so many now working remotely, the hybrid work model presents some big challenges. To better understand those challenges and how to approach them, you’ll want to attend this session.
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The Great Resignation reflected a re-assessment of priorities for many workers in 2022, and with that, a new social contract is emerging as part of the Future of Work landscape. Both workers and management have had to re-think their relationship with one another, and for 2023, there’s a new attitude on both ends of the spectrum. With today’s tighter economy, workers are more likely to hold on to their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they’re all-in with your company. These dynamics are new, and for the hybrid model to succeed, you need to understand what’ going on. If “quiet quitting” and “quiet firing” are new terms for you, this session will be a must, as it’s defining the latest chapter for how the workplace is evolving.
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Without an engaged workforce, no amount of technology will help your business adapt to the Future of Work. The right technology is essential, however, especially to help workers manage the vast volumes of data coming from a dizzying variety of digital sources. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed, and won’t have the tools to convert information into knowledge. This is where AI holds great promise, not just to make workflows easier, but to help employees work smarter. While AI is getting better on this front, workers must feel a sense of agency and being valued for their humanity. Too much focus on automation and efficiency will lead to disengagement, and undermine the benefit of investing in new technology. There is a difficult balance to strike here, but it’s critical for Future of Work, and this session is where we’ll find that balance.
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Technology is a key driver for Future of Work, and AI may be the most important type. AI is transforming all types of work, and that includes what goes on in the contact center. Agents need all the help they can get as today’s digitally-savvy customers have new expectations that legacy-based contact centers cannot meet. Adopting cloud-based platforms is the starting point for contact centers, and the next step is deploying AI-based technologies. Customer service automation may provide a strong rationale for AI, but the real payoff comes from its capabilities to capture and process massive amounts of data coming from the various digital interactions you have with your customers. Contact centers are quickly learning that this is the best way to get on a level playing field with customers, and to do so while providing personalized service. That’s a winning formula, and to see how it’s done, you won’t want to miss this session.
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Hybrid work is a cornerstone of Future of Work, and with most teams being decentralized, collaboration efforts must not be location-dependent. With today’s cloud platforms – namely UCaaS – employees can work just as effectively from home as in the office. Businesses that remain tied to premises-based tools will be challenged to support the hybrid model, especially when it comes to working in teams. This challenge will only intensify if more of your workers elect to prefer working from home, in which case there will be more urgency for cloud adoption. Not only is this the best way to provide a consistent collaboration experience regardless of where workers are based, but this capability will make them feel more connected to the rest of the organization. Keeping workers productive is important, but so is the need to build culture and a sense of belonging that keeps morale strong. In this session, you’ll hear from leading collaboration providers and how their technologies are helping make hybrid work.
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Contact centers have lagged in adopting the cloud, but now they can’t migrate fast enough. While all businesses are on some form of a Future of Work journey, few have gone through a total re-think like contact centers have been trying to do. Many businesses have made becoming customer-centric a strategic priority, and this entails a clean slate approach, both inside the contact center and across the entire organization. That process usually starts with the contact center, and aside from investing in digital technologies to improve customer experience, a similar effort is needed to improve agent experience. Change is never easy, but it can be done, and this session examines what contact centers are doing right, and how these efforts can serve as a FOW template for their broader organizations to follow.
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What are the critical factors that organizations must prioritize in order to underpin a flexible and virtual culture in a post-pandemic hybrid workplace? This session will reveal the latest findings that detail key factors that will strengthen and motivate workforces and drive sustained business success. A panel of experts will provide commentary on these critical success factors and their value to today’s business leaders.
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Our Part 1 session looked at the foundational technologies for this brave new world – augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. This might be enough new technology for some, but if you want to explore the next frontier, that would be the metaverse. Whereas the use cases for Part 1 are episodic in nature, the metaverse represents a continuous state of being. Nobody is ready to inhabit the metaverse full-time, but as gamers know, these virtual worlds feel more real the more time you spend in them. This is a different kind of brave new world, and while clear use cases haven’t yet emerged for hybrid work, it’s really just a matter of time. Even if you can’t make the Part 1 session, you really need to be here, if only just to imagine what’s possible.
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Our Part 1 session focuses internally on IT’s primary need – to manage the data network. This is a key Future of Work need, but IT supports more than just technology. Workers are the end users of those technologies, and with hybrid work, IT has never had to support such a broad range of needs and endpoints for them. Not only is there a wide range of endpoints to support – PCs, tablets, desk phones, smart phones, video hardware, headsets, etc. – but also network environments. Creating a consistent user experience across all of this requires careful orchestration, and with home-based workers providing most of their own endpoints, this can become a difficult challenge. For ease of management, IT might be considering a virtual desktop, so many types of approaches are possible. Every situation is different, but this will be the session where you’ll learn best practices from IT leaders.
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Future of Work is very much about using the right technologies to support employees from wherever they are working, but another important component is the workspace itself. As the nature of work evolves, so do the spaces where work gets done, and this is happening in a big way as businesses try to entice workers back to the office. Today’s technology has made work from home very manageable, and many see no reason to become office-based again. This has led business leaders to re-imagine the workspaces they’ve been using for so long, focusing more on specific use cases than just being a generic place where everyone simply goes out of habit. There’s a great opportunity here to show employees that you’re thinking carefully about the Future of Work, and in this session, you’ll learn what some of that new thinking looks like.
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