Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special episode of ProIV today. We've got an in studio guest today. Someone that I have already learned quite a bit from and someone that I've met at Infocon for the first time this year. That's George Clot from Corbett. George, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, pleasure to be here. Know, George, one of the things that I really enjoyed about our conversations when we met at Infocom is that, you know, we we talk about things like digital signage and our AV community tends to have a very, not a myopic mindset necessarily, but a very specific thought about what that means. And I think, you naturally folks wanna talk about kiosk, and, the holograms. And how can I, you know, do ad impressions here? But I wanna talk specifically about applications inside enterprise settings. So offices, even some retail locations that aren't specifically geared towards necessarily audience engagement, but more employee and internal engagement. And I think that's one of the things that really stood out about you guys at Corbett is that that need has existed for a while and historically you know, folks have been sticking raspberry Pies behind their TVs and saying, okay. This'll work, I guess. Right. But there hasn't really been a lot of intention reality to us. So we'll talk a little bit about the that today and and wanted to start off, you know, to to kinda get your thoughts on this, you know, when when you think about the enterprise and and I It's tough to even call it digital signage. I just I I I struggled even saying that, but we'll call it digital signage inside the enterprise. What are some of the things now that you're seeing folks demand maybe that they were even ten, fifteen years ago? Obviously, we got shifting, you know, work relationships with being an things like that. But we'll we'll get we'll get to that in a minute. But just from a demand standpoint, what are some of the things that that folks want to see inside their office? Yeah. I mean, I totally understand your viewpoint. Even even us when we describe our company and we do our our value statement, our value prop, I usually start with we're an employee engagement company, not we're a digital sign company, our heritage, individual signage, and the workforce over all these years, forty years. But really at our hardware and employee engagement company, And, obviously, we've seen a lot of trends change. We're in the who's who the fortune one hundred at their corporate campuses. We're talking to their employees on the brand's behalf. We're trying to create that bond between the brand and the employee. And, obviously, the that we've seen trends change in terms of the type of communication you have for your employees, but also the type of gear that's out there. So in terms of, you know, the type of content, yeah, that pretty much stays, the same thing. You wanna engage your employees across a bunch of categories. You want them to understand health and safety, wellness, as a brand, we care about you, we care about your career growth, we care about new hires. So everybody's got a different journey. So that cadence of messaging, that creative content, that, you know, is kind of staying the same. But what has changed, obviously, is the pandemic, changed all of our lives, and now this back to work idea is changing. And, what what's great about, you know, our software and having that communication, having those signs in the offices, it gives the company a chance to really get that message out there and not be quiet about this ever changing landscape that we're all going through right now. Well, what's interesting too, I I love that you you kind of mentioned that in in, you know, the idea of content on a screen has not really changed. Right? And that is that is there is something that's gotta go on a display, right, at the end of the day. But the data sets and the information has changed. Right? Maybe, you know, you we'll even look in the hybrid work schedule, Here are the desks that are available. Here's what the forecast is. Here's what today's work schedule looks like. Here's who who's in office today. Are some of those newer data sets that you're seeing, especially post pandemic that folks are asking for? Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, that's where we really think we've got a differentiator in the marketplace as we've got enterprise real time data adapters to things like calendaring, emergency notification systems, more boring things like supply chain and CRM and things of that nature. So it's really about, sending an entire stream of content to that employee, something that helps their performance like, hey, if you're in sales, this is pipeline, this is your weekly target, this is your monthly target, but not to just have that up there statically all day long, have that rotate in, hey, this is our wellness approach. Or, hey, you need to sign up for four zero one k, or there's yoga in the building. Just different categories of content, maybe even your favorite sports teams, different tickers. There's all kinds of things we can do with content. But the idea there is everybody has attention deficit disorder, Instagram, TikTok, things of that nature. So you really want that fresh new content up there for, you know, five to thirty seconds and then switching it around. But the enterprise real time data, that's part of that. Right? And it depends on the use case. Some of our use cases are if you're at a supply chain dock, for the most part, you're gonna have those stats up there all the time, they're real time. But the cool thing that we can do with our software too is we can orchestrate a different experience based on the data. So Again, if you've got too many calls in queue or your truck is late for the dock or something like that, we can change that entire screen experience alert the employee. And then when everything's going back to normal, we can go back to nice content like, hey, join the soccer team. Oh, right. Yeah. Well, and I like that spots of this too. And and I think, you know, one of the questions I hear IT folks yelling at me already is I've got my Salesforce and I've got my HubSpot, and I've got all these employee internets that I, you know, don't have APIs and can't figure out how to get data at them. Right? That even in our office. Right? That's one of the biggest challenges. We have so many different data sets that it's just as nearly impossible to get them all in one place. What would your advice be for somebody who's looking to roll out a solution like this and and find ways to actually actually implement real time CRM, real time. Yep. You know, call logs, things like that. Yeah. I mean, we've got close to two hundred real time data integration. So if it's got an API, if it's got some way to connect to it, even if it's a file, export. We can do that. And then the power behind it is like, hey, why don't I just put, Salesforce dashboard and connect that up to a screen? You get it centrally managed, and you also get, zone takeover. So you might not want your Salesforce dashboard to take up the entire screen. You might want it to just take up one part particular zone, you have other employee engagement content in another zone, another ticker, in another zone, gives you a lot of creative options. And then you get that true, enterprise experience when those zones flip and change based off that real time data. Yeah. And one of the things that that kinda jumps out, especially I'm gonna I'm gonna use, a four letter word for a lot of people in the industry. That's AI. You love it, hate it. You sort of adapt it. You don't there's there's a conversation to be had even beyond just real time data. What are some of the ways that you're you're seeing AI being levered? Right? That is a mo that's the most generic question I feel like I've ever asked in my life. But I don't have the answer for it. You do. Yeah. I I mean, Chad GPT set the world on fire. Everyone hears about generative AI. I watch a lot of CNBC. They're always talking about generative AI using it sometimes in the correct context, sometimes not. Not so correct. We were actually some pioneers. We created a recommendation engine based off of AI in twenty eighteen. We call that machine learning broadcast, but we're really trying to stay at the forefront of it. And our goal, our business goal with AI is really, you know, this stuff is hard to get employees to stay engaged, to get fresh content out there, to make sure that content's targeted to the right people, and it actually improves their performance, makes them feel better connected to the brand. That's really hard. You you do broadcasting, broadcast schedules, It's okay to do maybe your first week. It's pretty arduous. You start getting into a second week, third week, fourth week. That's really where we the promise of AI is we can actually let the machine go ahead and schedule content across categories, learn from how that employees interacting across channels, not just digital signage, and then change the content and learn to make content more appropriate to George, more appropriate to David, more appropriate to everybody. Well, how does that apply to personalization? Right? So I I think at least in my mind, I'm I'm thinking know, even an office like ours, you walk around and every forty five feet, there's a TV. Right? But how do we actually get to a level of true personalization on the individual level? Is it Is it on the computer monitor? Is it on the cell phone? Where how does that apply? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a combination of both. I mean, digital signage is the tough channel. Like, we're an omnichannel platform. The reason why signage is tough is kinda spray and pray TV. It's like, hey, I know this TV is on the fifth floor, the fifty third floor. It's near the break room. I kinda know the finance departments over there, so I can make some content associated with the finance department, but I don't know that George is in front of that. On the desktop, on the mobile device, on the web, we have we know you sign in, we know exactly who you are. So, that's why signage has been tough. But usually it's it's geo located. That helps us go ahead and at least assign content at a department level. It might not be at my personal level, but at least at a department level. What content's good for you. And again, with our AI innovations, we're gonna be learning from who's actually watching that content or if you're on your own computer, using our desktop product, who's actually, you know, where are people clicking, what content are they looking at? And then another big thing to say about content, which is really important with this AI is It helps you get across your mission, vision, and goals. Like, one of the things we've seen across our our customer base is, our customers aren't really messaging out departmental goals, departmental KPIs, things of that nature. And you don't wanna stick that in your employees face all day long, but you do need a gentle reminder of like, hey, you know, this is the company. This is what we're doing in for the environment. This is how we're helping out our community. This is what we're doing for you. And, oh, by the way, this week, this is your sales goal. Know, in the finance department, you guys need to close your accounts receivables three days early, something like that. So that's another great thing that AI is doing for Well, you talked about the web browser and some some personal tools, cell phones, laptops, things like that. You know, that opens the door for, out of office, right, that remote work experience, how do you translate the employee engagement digital signage side with the, okay, this person's at home. Is it Is it, hey, this is gonna be your homepage? Is it, you know, what it what does that look like? Yeah. Great question. And, you know, the the modern work force and the back to work is all changing. It's changing dynamically. Yeah. I mean, ideally, we just want a little piece of real estate on their desktop, whether it's web or our desktop product. They can keep them engaged with what's going on back at the corporate center. Obviously, once they get back to the corporate campus, that's where the signage takes over, and we wanna, you know, reinforce. It's always about reinforcing messages, making sure you were we were not getting attention deficit disorder. But at the same time, also making sure those messages are reinforced, but Yeah. We've got a desktop product that can really be sized to any form factor you like. It can actually be made circular. It can be in the top right hand corner of the screen. Can be a small little web sliver that's over here. It works well for engagement. Also works well for remote contact center employees too. So when you think about rolling something like this, I'll say I was to roll it out here at our office, who typically is the individual operator of that? Is this an HR thing? Is this an ops thing? Who typically is collaborating, building that content assigning it? Where does that normally live? Yeah. That's some of that challenges too because it is multi functional. So, like, we we look at the personas of our buyers. A lot of times, it is the AV world. But now we're seeing that move over into people in culture, HR, the communications department. So in order to for us to get a sale, we usually have to sell cross sell across all those individuals, and then we've gotta put, like, a proper enterprise project plan in place to say, to make sure that we've get a good rollout. Because, you know, that's really important to us, obviously, for repeat sales and continue ARR is we want the solution to be impactful, have a demonstrable effect on performance, make your employees, feel less likely to leave the company. So having that really good rollout, super important because you gotta deal with details like cables and transmission equipment and certain screen sizes and players, but you also gotta deal with the content. So everything from content down to the cables. I think you just, laid out really nicely. One of our biggest challenges as an AV community is that our decision making profile has changed. Yeah. You know, it used to be very clear who your AV buyer was. And now your HR team might be buying, you know, the digital signage tools because they need to share out messaging with the office or maybe it's emergency alerts, things like that, things that historically technology was much harder to achieve. Now technology picked up so easy to use it. It's enabled that. What are some of the things? If you if you had to punt five, ten years down the road, What are some of the changes that you you expect to continue to see on the employee engagement digital signage site? Definitely more AI. AI based on, not just, generative AI that's like, hey, you you describe an image or you describe a video and it pops up the video. But more particular to your company, I know Microsoft with their co pilot, they talk a lot about their LLMs or large language models being proprietary to a company So MetLife would have an LLM, and Nike would have an LLM. So we'll probably start seeing more of that, and then the employee engagement side tapping into that tapping into the fabric and the DNA of that company, you know, what differentiates MetLife from Nike. So it'll get more and more hyper personalized over time. Well, Georgia, I I love that that we landed the plane with that because I always love to say, if our technology is not serving our end users and driving outcomes and our technology is technology for its own sake. Right? And, as our industries continue to evolve, whether it's on the signage side, the hardware manufacturer side, the integrator side, wherever, our industry continues to focus a little bit more towards that end user experience and outcomes. I think that that is going to continue, to drive Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, George, we appreciate you coming on today and hanging out. Thank you. You can't see the great view today. It's it's a little bit rainy, but we'll take it. But we appreciate you tuning in to pro EV today as well, and we'll see you next time.
