Joe Pham, chairman and CEO of QSC | Q-SYS, shared his insights on AI and its rapidly evolving integration into the AV world—and the world in general—in his InfoComm keynote, “Everything Has Changed: AV’s Infinite Potential in an Exponential Age.” Using everything from amusing pseudo Tweets from historical figures to cell-phone videos of his family’s adventures at a Taylor Swift concert last year, Pham’s hour-long talk discussed human progression through crucial eras of history—the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and more up to the current day—before postulating where we may be headed in the next 10 years and how the AV industry can not merely participate, but make a crucial difference in the burgeoning integration of AI into everyday life.
Discussing how the data that powers AI will in turn be able to be harnessed to aid AV, Pham explained, “We need our AV system in a single platform and [to] build an ecosystem around it because you need everything connected in a smart platform. And once you have this, that's really when you can enable data and AI.
“I'm talking about this grand vision in terms of what we need to do—what I'm really talking about is a full-stack AV platform. And that's three pieces. Multimodal IO, which connects the platform to the physical world. An Intelligent Data Pipeline that intel and routes intelligently to other devices and other platforms. And then a Cognitive Cloud that leverages the best in machine learning and AI to deliver insights, outcomes, and experience. So, what we're really talking about here is a real-time platform that integrates device operations, Edge processing, cloud computing, and AI in a unified and extensible way—real time and synchronous across devices, unified across applications and experiences, and extensible to other platforms. Once we have this, then we can enable all sorts of AI in our industry to serve our clients and just bring human connection and joy and elevate experience together.”
After discussing how six types of AI will integrate into AV work—audio, video, control, data, workflow, and generative—Pham closed the hour discussing the near-future in technology innovation, kicking off his observations noting, “When there is a time of change, there's opportunity—but in a time of exponential change, there's exponential opportunity, and then you grow on top of it. The AV industry? This is an absolutely massive opportunity for our industry.”
Pham went on to detail how there will be changes in education, with broad access to the best teachers and tutors; autonomous vehicles; health care that will see AI help discover drugs and cures; and similar advances in the ongoing development of agriculture and climate solutions, Smart Cities, quantum computing, artificial general intelligence, and far more. It was a lot to fit into one hour, much less in such an animated fashion, but Pham left the packed house with plenty to consider as they left to see the show floor.
