Work imitates life: AI and cloud solutions create a naturally productive workplace

So far in this series we’ve followed productive personal digital experiences to the office — where, by the way, I see visions of virtual assistants. Now I’ll share with you how all the pieces fit together so we can all live and work the dream.

Ambience hits home

As a CTO, I participate in evaluating our technologies and services before they’re made available to other employees or customers. In our work around modern management, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and Digital Workplace Transformation, I’m now getting hands-on experience with the ambience I was imagining in my previous post. It allows users to enroll multiple devices, which fits my lifestyle perfectly. (I’ve mentioned my habit of collecting different form factors and platforms in previous blog posts). When I step out of my home office for lunch, I’ll flip open a laptop that’s lying on the kitchen table, and everything I’ve been working on at my desk is there. After lunch, I close it and leave it there. Back at my primary station at my desk, all my work in progress is still up on my big monitor. Later that evening, I’ll check the tablet on my nightstand to make sure I’m not missing anything.

Clicking into place

Multiple device enrollment is one piece of a naturally productive workplace. Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is another piece that enhances context. All of Atos is already on Circuit for UCC, which does an outstanding job of following you around. You can start a meeting on your desktop and pick it up on your phone when you have to leave. Combine this with the always-there effects of cloud productivity solutions and Enterprise File Sync and Share, and you can really have your work available wherever you need to be productive. None of this is new, but there are a few elements being developed that will change everything yet again.

VAs will tie it together

The next evolution will come as virtual assistants move closer to those personal contexts that we create in these new cloud productivity scenarios in those shared workspaces, and on our own personalized devices. Just like we love our smart devices at home (the ones that brought the pizza that started this series), we will want these devices integrated into all of the workspaces we enjoy. But they’ll provide those VA functions via more inputs. Some directed, like voice, but some sensory, such as identity tagging, where the presence of a given user may shape things like two-factor security and intelligent collaboration capabilities we haven’t even imagined yet.