Well, we may have come full circle. A company founded out of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision that found a home in the world of AV – is now launching what can be viewed as an Analytics and AI engine. Kepler launched recently – after more than a year of design and development – and our user community will be able to monitor, manage, and understand their Solstice-enabled rooms like never before. Kepler will allow users to capture usage statistics in real-time in fine-grained detail that goes way beyond the red-light/green-light AV status dashboards.
Kepler captures behavioral trends about how we work together. As an example, Kepler can give you a breakdown of what mobile device is most popular by room type. Or how often collaborative, multi-source meetings occur inscheduled spaces versus unscheduled rooms. The marketing team will no doubt let the world know about all the great things you can do with Kepler, but I wanted to focus on the bigger picture here. If you thought that AV/IT convergence is still underway – I’d argue it already happened. In fact, some of the most important trends and topics in IT are being brought to AV in parallel with or even before they have taken hold in other markets.
Kepler is representative of how AI will impact AV over the next few years. I’ve been invited to speak at the ISE 2019 conference on AI and AV. In that talk, we’ll cover more about how AI works with big data to generate insights. If you want to see how all this operates without any need for mathematics past high-school, I will encourage you to attend. For now, assume that with large sets of data and the right training algorithms, AI can be very good at both classifying patterns and even predicting trends from historical data. Given that many of our customers have well over 500 Solstice enabled rooms – it’s only natural, then, that Kepler can capture meeting data that helps our customers understand where their meeting culture may be headed to support better planning and purchasing decisions. This is exciting stuff – our customers have pushed us to not only help them make their meetings more enjoyable and productive but to better predict where all these trends are taking us.
In light of the imminent Kepler launch, I asked our beta customers what insights they have already gained from Kepler. We’ve had over 5,000 rooms subscribed to the Kepler Beta program across both corporate enterprise, and higher education spread all over the globe for about four months – so you can imagine there’s a lot of interesting data to parse through. Here are my favorites:
- Per hour of use, 22% more content sharing takes place in huddle spaces compared to conference rooms.
- Meeting length falls largely into two statistical spikes – around 60 minutes or 23 minutes across all room types.
- Meetings in huddle spaces are 34% shorter than those in conference rooms.
- Early morning and early afternoon are the busiest meeting times, but this is location based. (The customer who shared this insight is using Kepler data to better schedule Flex IT staff to their various locations.)
These insights are obviously just the beginning. Once Kepler is launched, one of the first features we’ll add to the cloud portal is a messaging queue that automatically provides these types of insights to Kepler users. We’ll be adding learning techniques to mine Kepler data for even deeper insights about their meetings spaces. To paraphrase the woman who first talked with me about the importance of analytics around Solstice meetings “How great would it be to find out why my best meetings are happening on the 6th floor? Or even to predict where my support incidents are likely to occur.” Very cool.
Why does this matter to AV at-large? It matters because AV is at the forefront of a major change in how users can understand, predict, and design based on real insights produced by artificial intelligence. I hope our AV partners embrace the trend – so far, so good. When’s the last time AV could claim early-innovation and adoption that may even outpace traditional software? I know we’ll work to keep AV at the crest of the wave.
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