A few other trends that are top of mind for our customers:
Recreating watercooler moments
Our lives are so scheduled around our virtual meetings. So how do we recreate serendipitous moments or ad hoc conversations? Steve Jobs believed serendipity was important and that it could be engineered. A lot of execs are embracing this idea as they look for new sources of innovation in a hybrid world. In early 2023, we’re introducing Zoom Spots, a sort of virtual coworking space, to help with this very idea. Zoom Spots provides a space to “work alongside” your colleagues and encourages free-form video conversations outside your meeting schedule.
Metaverse
Ah yes, the metaverse. While virtual reality is invading parts of our lives, the metaverse as a concept — a digital world parallel to our physical world — hasn’t quite arrived. But it’s on the horizon. Look for more metaverse innovation from leading tech organizations, and I suspect a new wave of disrupters will enter the market as the demand to elevate how humans interact with each other and the world around them increases.
Some interesting areas include more use cases for specialized job training and even in immersive digital spaces, including dating apps and social media. I see an opportunity to augment these experiences by adding your voice or personality to digital profiles.
Hardware
The hardware we use today is pretty much the same stuff we left the office with three years ago. Monitors, laptops, keyboards — they’ve all been working pretty much the same for 25 years. Monitors should have cameras built into the center and things like teleprompter capabilities built into the core.