I was absolutely thrilled to see that Steph Beckett from rAVe and several other well-known AV companies were represented at Microsoft Ignite 2024. I don’t think this type of AV representation would have existed even five years ago at a conference such as Ignite. After all, back then, Microsoft was an IT company, and we were the AV industry. Obviously, all that has changed.

I was not able to attend in person, but I did attend several sessions online. During Satya Nadella’s keynote, my mind shifted yet again to think about AI. If you have read any of my blogs, you know that I have always been bullish about AI and its potential. Every few months I go through a transformation that ends with a new understanding of its power and capabilities. At first, it was amazing that it could write a poem about sailing, and make it sound like a pirate. While that was cute, it was not really useful. Then a few months later, I started to realize the power of generative AI. I could type in a prompt asking it to create a Python application to do XYZ, and a minute later it gave it to me. That, indeed, was a game-changer. A few months later, I realized I could upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT and ask it to perform specific analysis and output them on a new spreadsheet. Again, moments later, I had my product without ever typing in a formula.

During Ignite, I realized that I was still behind the learning curve. It became clear to me that Microsoft’s view of AI is not as an add-on (even though, for the time being, they were charging it that way) but as THE product. In a few years there will not be an option for Excel with Copilot. Rather, Copilot will be Excel. The tools will completely have merged. This is true for every single product in the Microsoft line. If Ignite did not convince you of that, the fact that the BlackRock financial firm and Microsoft are developing a $100 billion (yes, with a B) fund to develop AI, ought to signal their future.

There is not a product in the Microsoft lineup that does not use Copilot, including the one most near and dear to the AV community, Teams. AI will quickly change everything we know about meetings and how they operate. I think we have all considered how AI can be used to automate cameras and microphones. That is the old news. The new news is how it will be used to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings. As we know Zoom currently has an AI companion. The biggest problem with AI companion is for hybrid meetings where one side has several people in one meeting room, the AI clumps them all together as the user who is logged into Zoom to join the meeting.

AI will soon be able to determine there are different people in the room, and based on how people are referred to, the meeting invite and response to the invite, along with past knowledge of the meetings be able to differentiate who is speaking. This will allow AI to create a very useful summary of the meeting, including tasks for participants (even for participants who were not in the room). By simply saying something like “let’s assign that task to Scott Tiner” the AI will know to email me and tell me what my task is, along with putting a reminder on my calendar for when it is due.

The interaction with the computer will mostly be by voice. A person will likely log into a cloud device via a biometric login. They will then ask for it to bring up the presentation, the Power BI report, the spreadsheet or whatever else they want to review. Then, in conversation with Copilot through the meetings they will be able to edit those documents, ask for charts or graphs of different examples, etc. We won’t have people changing formulas in spreadsheets anymore to see the effect of changes, Copilot will be doing that for us, and recording the various iterations for notes of the meeting. Meeting spaces will be a truly frictionless environment.

Many companies, including Apple, sorry to say it, continue to treat AI as a gimmick, a toy. It is as though they have not quite figured out how to use it well. At Ignite, Microsoft showed they are on the forefront of what I would call “functional AI.” They not only know how to use it, but they actually have current, powerful uses for it. Remember back when we used to call rooms with technology “smart rooms?” Well, today the rooms are beyond smart, they are thinking and generating. We should all expect to start seeing requests for these truly smart rooms in the near future.