 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for tech, telecom and data center professionals. I'm Buffy Herakitas coming to you from fabulous Las Vegas for Channel Partners 2022. And joining me today is John Arnold, principal of J. Arnold & Associates. John, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks Buffy, really glad you could have me here on your podcast and it's good timing, right? Perfect, perfect. The door just opened. Yeah, the show floor just opened and you are fresh off of the Thunderdome panel. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the key takeaways from that panel, John? Sure, Buffy. So we talked about how the channel has needed to pivot, right, since we had the pandemic and we were all forced to work from home. It caused businesses to accelerate their plans to adopt the cloud. And from there, the channel has now what I call new opportunities because with cloud-based services, they can get beyond selling kind of commodity-based telephony and voice services. So now they can enter this newer world of cloud applications like unified communications and contact center and the whole new kind of family of applications that you really can only do with cloud technologies. Yeah, the cloud is definitely where it's at right now, especially when it comes to the channel. And thank goodness for the cloud, right? For helping us empower that digital workforce hybrid environment that so many enterprises, small businesses, medium businesses, and the channel rely on nowadays. So, John, why don't you give us a little bit more insight? What's the latest acronym out there, the hottest acronym in the channel today? Okay, there's a lot of them folks, but I would go with CAI, which is conversational artificial intelligence. So just like cloud, AI is a big trend driving all kinds of innovation. It's maybe a little ahead of where most channels are selling stuff today, but conversational AI means, like when you call for customer service and you start dealing with a chatbot that's actually talking to you, asking questions rather than yes or no things, but what can I help you with today? Well, that's what we call conversational AI, where chatbots are starting to talk like people, but also inquire in the way we speak. So in other words, it's more natural form of communication. And when chatbots are easy to deal with and you trust them, you're gonna be more inclined to use them. And that's really important in contact center where call volumes through the pandemic have really gone through the roof. So one way to manage all that, you can't just keep hiring more agents. You need better technologies like chatbots to take some of the load off of the agents and contact center to conversational AI is now getting good enough where you can trust it. And now that's big news for contact center. Now they can deal with those hire volumes in an intelligent way. That's an example of how the future is changing because we have cloud and AI technologies. Conversational AI, love it. Thanks for sharing that great insight. Can you tell us a little bit more about J. Arnold and associates and what you do? Well, sure. So I'm an independent technology analyst and I've been following the collaboration technology work world for about 20 years now. So I cover things like VoIP, unified communications, contact center, future of work, a lot of AI now, speech technologies and I help companies, mostly vendors, but I help them with what we call thought leadership to help educate their customers about why these technologies are important and how they can benefit from using them. So the role of an analyst is that we're independent, we're objective and we're not touting vendor sales, but rather educating the buyers about how to use these technologies to make the businesses better. And what vendors do you work with? You name it, just about all of them. From the big ones, the Cisco's, Microsoft's, the Ring Central's, Vonage's, right down to the smaller independence and there are a lot of them out here, quite a few of them here at the show. So it's an open kind of idea that an analyst can work across big and small vendors, across all verticals and countries too. I have clients in the UK and France, Canada, the US. So kind of the sky's the limit, which is good for all of us with these technologies. It's all borderless, which is good. And one of the best parts about being independent is I get exposed to a lot of new technologies early that don't hit the mainstream for late to later on. So I'm a good resource to know what's happening with these trends. You just talked a little bit about some of the markets that you're working in or that you're seeing. Is there any market in particular that you think is emerging in today's space? Well, in terms of like a vertical market, for example, so healthcare is a big example. It's probably the biggest sector of the economy, especially in the US, and they have all kinds of challenge areas that these technologies can really help with. When you think about how do you deliver healthcare to patients these days? There are so many steps along the way in the workplace, we would call them workflows and processes. They really aren't much different in the healthcare sector, but it's a very regulated sector, has a lot of very specific language, medical language. So for that reason, it's like things like speech technology are really important because when you can get the lingo right, people will use the technologies more. And that's a space that really needs more automation of workflows to really kind of handle, again, the load of, you know, we had COVID, we have the systems are overloaded, whether it's to provide care, to process insurance claims, you name it. There are a lot of kinds of opportunities. You think about telehealth for people working at home, they're gonna use video, right? They're gonna use chat. Well, all of these tools are fairly new for healthcare. They see the value, but it just has to now be brought to market in ways that are easy for healthcare providers to use and kind of get used to because it is a new way of doing things, but this is the new world we're in, right? Digital technologies are replacing analog technologies and healthcare is really no different in terms of communications, sharing information, all that kind of thing. Well, thank you so much, John, for joining us on JSA TV. It was such a pleasure to have you and also for your great insight. So we really do appreciate that. Where can viewers go if they wanna learn more? Oh, thank you. Thank you, appreciate that, Buffy. Well, I have easiest ways to find me. I'm on Twitter, at Arnold John. I have a fairly active profile on LinkedIn, but the main thing is my website, www.J.ArnoldAssociates.com. And if you go there, you'll see I publish a monthly newsletter and a monthly podcast that are all free and accessible to anybody. Make sure you sign me up. Yeah. And thank you again, John, for joining us for another episode of JSA TV and JSA Podcast here from Channel Partners 2022. And thank you viewers for tuning in. Happy channel networking.