The ‘Future of Work’ Opportunity for Channel Partners
The 21st Century will see dramatic changes in what we understand the workplace to be, and when and how we work.
A massive driving trend opportunity for channel partners is defined by an evolving, accelerating ‘Future of Work’.
With the advent of the Metaverse our futures may see the emergence an entirely immersive virtual environment for our office work, and the accelerating capabilities of Generative Ai will dramatically transform how work is performed, augmenting human capacity in ways never before imagined.
The ‘Future of Work’ is such a potent topic as it spans and intersects multiple dimensions of disruptive change, of a major evolution of cultural, business and technological trends.
From the immediate management challenges that work from home policies have presented, to a futuristic Metaverse environment where the office has become an entirely immersive 3D world, our experiences of work will change profoundly over the coming years and decades.
This presents product opportunities including:
Unified Collaboration
UCCaaS (Unified Communications and Collaboration) provides the core building block tools for embracing these new ways of working.
Service providers like Verizon are leveraging the operator integrations to offer a fully integrated suite of Unified Communications and Collaboration capabilities, and marketing this via a powerful theme of enabling The Future of Work.
Increasingly virtual and real worlds will blend together, creating a fully immersive experience for employees that radically enhances collaboration and learning methods. Microsoft has launched Mesh to extend Teams into this space.
As they describe here Copilots are central to the AI-Powered Future of Work. AI in the form of Copilot companions for apps like Zoom and MS Teams will be one of the first and most common ways in which enterprise users leverage AI to enhance their work.
End User Computing
In the immediate there are practical and cultural challenges, as organizations seek to strike a balance between office and work from home regimes, with many struggling to adapt their legacy IT to enable distributed, remote collaboration, creating the need for ‘EUC’ solutions (End User Computing).
The most basic of modern work practices can still prove a challenge for many organizations, both in terms of IT capabilities as well as management culture.
The Future of Work is characterized by remote and flexible work arrangements, digital transformation, and the integration of emerging technologies. End User Computing enables organizations to seamlessly transition to this new work paradigm by providing the necessary tools and infrastructure to support remote work, collaboration, and innovation.
Conclusion
The size and depth of the opportunity for the channel is massive. All organizations form the smallest to the largest will seek to adopt these new tools, and will require advisory hand-holding services to lead them along the journey.
