New Year, new focus on working smarter.
How will technological evolution support better business communication? How do IT leaders ensure they are enabling employees to fully leverage the benefits? And what tools (and trends) are likely to influence how the next 12 months shape up?
Here, Josh Blalock, Chief Video Evangelist at leading audio and video solutions provider Jabra, shares what he believes should be front of mind in 2025…
AI
The world is ready to move past the ‘hurrah’ moment – everyone knows this year will be about day-to-day adoption that address real world use cases. In the communication and collaboration space, the enabling hardware will act as the vital gateway to a high-quality experience. As the use of AI-powered companions such as Microsoft Copilot and others increases, there will be an enhanced reliance on the clarity of the data on which they depend. If those tools do not accurately capture the content of conversations, their output will be sub-par. A good example: in a test, we recently put our Jabra Evolve2 65 Flex headset up against a different brand’s non-certified equivalent, connected them both to an AI transcription tool, and read them the same script. The Jabra headset produced a transcript that was 95%+ accurate, the other delivered between 50 and 70% accuracy. To date, that kind of discrepancy hasn’t mattered too much because people reading an incomplete or slightly off transcript have kind of worked it out. However, when Copilot is being fully relied upon to produce fully-formed summaries, actions, and outputs – and the associated efficiency gains are a must-have – then small inaccuracies can make a disproportionate difference. In short, the value derived from AI will be directly linked to the quality of the ‘gateway’ hardware. Getting that combination right should be this year’s priority.
Return to the Office
For many businesses, 2025 will be the year in which many more of their employees go back to their desks and their meeting rooms. However, the lines between personal and workplace technology and tools are now very blurred and people returning to the office will expect the same frictionless experience they have grown used to whilst working remotely. Again, AI-powered virtual assistants are the perfect case in point. Meeting participants will expect in-room collaboration technology to be seamlessly connected to Copilot and Zoom AI Companion and the others. They will want to push a button to start their meeting and they will want a virtual assistant to also be present to record the conversation, kick-off workflows, create tasks and summaries, and attribute actions to people – all without having to touch a PC. Without those intelligent AI capabilities in a physical meeting room, an organisation’s wider AI strategy is fatally flawed. To provide a complete solution, it is not just a feature-rich communication and collaboration platform that must be omnipresent, but also the equipment too.
Security
With increased technological capability comes greater risk of a security breach. Businesses are understandably having a hard time keeping up with new concepts such as AI and many are likely to feel the need to bolster or even build out new security teams to focus just on that. Understanding the extent to which AI software is interacting with all their data will be key. For example, for Microsoft Copilot to deliver all of its goodness, users must enroll their voice and face and then that data is stored securely in Microsoft’s cloud. Jabra then ensures that this functionality stays safe and secure on the side of the devices by not capturing, collecting, or storing any user voice or facial data. The Jabra PanaCast 20 camera even blurs the background – when the background blur feature is used – before sending video, so users’ locations or environments are always protected. In short, our devices just do the analysing and the sending. It means that Jabra is literally a gateway, and that we stand guard to ensure that whatever comes in is accurate, premium, and fully secured. Also, in the contact center space, our Jabra Engage headsets come with military-grade encryption that provides an enhanced level of security whilst being simultaneously lightweight. 2025 will see communication and collaboration getting ever smarter – locking down the data is as about important as it gets.
- To learn more about how Jabra can help your and your customers’ businesses be ready for a smarter 2025, visit the website.
