AVT Question: Below is an excerpt from Joe Pham’s keynote at InfoComm 2024, Everything Has Changed: AV’s Infinite Potential in an Exponential Age.
Thought Leader: Chairman and CEO of QSC | Q-SYS
We need our AV systems on a single platform and 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 going to go through six areas in our industry where we should expect to see AI. This list is not complete, and it’s the combination of these six where the magic really happens.
Even if an enterprise had a thousand people going through the data, human beings still won’t be able to pick out things that an AI can." —Chairman and CEO of QSC | Q-SYS
AUDIO AI You’re going to have audio AI in terms of quality: noise reduction, blind source separation, and studio microphone speaker focus. Then it’s also in context and awareness, event detection, etc.
VIDEO AI Quality in the experience. There are certainly a number of solutions today in terms of auto-switching, auto-cropping, and auto-tracking. Then it’s the quality itself you’re going to get into noise reduction, artifact reduction, and studio relighting. And then the context awareness of video is really important; scene analysis, gesture analysis, etc.
CONTROL AI Certainly gen AI in terms of control. I was a controls engineer, and so if you’re a controls engineer, you actually see the whole world in terms of the input transfer function and output, and sometimes you close the loop. It [control AI] is different than automation. Automation is a deterministic thing that someone programmed. And that’s why a lot of us don’t like automation, because it’s never programmed the way we intended or the way different users would intend. Intelligence gives you human intent, and that is not just automation.
DATA AI You’re going to see tons here; predictive analytics, self-healing systems, and then data AI. Even if an enterprise had a thousand people going through the data, human beings still won’t be able to pick out things that an AI can. We as an industry have talked about managed services for a long, long time, and to me, this is a real enabler for managed services.
WORKFLOW AI Does this sound familiar? “We cannot deliver a consistent and quality experience through design and commissioning and managing and monitoring to the user experience.” That has been a problem for our industry in my entire time. But now you’re going to get gen AI in the design because, remember, it is in the digital twin. This actually reminds me of a great Satya Nadella quote ‘AI will both lower the floor and raise the ceiling,’ meaning we’re going to be able to design much more consistent user experiences because we’re going to be able to leverage tools. And ‘raise the ceiling means’ we’re going to do exceptional things with it.
Generative AI I think this is another catalyst to really cross the chasm in the digital signage industry. I think there’s going to be amazing things. When you have this full-stack AV, you can use all this. We’re just speaking to and interacting with computers, and I say interacting because, remember, all the cameras are there, and you can interact with them. You’re going to be interacting with the AI very naturally. When we design things properly you can do this in any of the verticals in our industry, in higher education, interactive and collaborative learning, across geographies, in sports bars really building a sense of local community, in hotels, and a great area for personalized experiences is theme parks—shared immersive experiences. We can do this in any of the verticals that we’re in.
And then, you know the question is, what will you do?
