By Lisa Schmeiser Leading collaboration vendors are talking about how AI will augment your presence among your colleagues – by duplicating your thought processes.
ChromeOS will “soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack” so that it can roll out AI features at a faster pace, Google announced on Wednesday. The company says it will be embracing things like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks “as part of the foundation of ChromeOS.”
The changes won’t just mean more AI features, according to Google. The company also noted that they will help “simplify engineering efforts” and “help different devices like phones and accessories work better together with Chromebooks,” as detailed in a blog post.
Google surely wants to have Chromebook users trying as many AI-powered features as possible, so these changes will probably accelerate that. But the company cautions that while the...
Soon, you’ll be able to create you own emoji and generate custom images with new AI features on Apple devices. I hate to be the bearer of bad news (and I’m guilty of grossly overusing emoji myself) — but those images could have the biggest environmental impact of all of Apple’s new AI tools.
Generative AI is notoriously energy-hungry, which means it leads to a lot of planet heating greenhouse gas emissions. Image generation, in particular, is one of the worst offenders. The AI arms race has already started to grow some companies’ carbon footprints. Now, new fruit emoji varietals and sketches generated by AI are likely to add to the problem.
Image generation, in particular, is one of the worst offenders
On Thursday, Tesla shareholders will face a stark choice: approve Elon Musk’s enormous pay package, the largest ever awarded to a chief executive, or risk him picking up his ball and going home.
The shareholder meeting on Thursday is a referendum on Musk’s tumultuous leadership, in which he took a relatively niche startup, wrested it away from its founders, and turned it into what is arguably one of the most consequential car companies in modern history. To reward him for this feat, shareholders are being asked to cast an unprecedented vote on Musk’s compensation — to the tune of $50 billion — for the second time.
Last January, a Delaware court judge invalidated Musk’s pay package, first approved in 2018, arguing that the process was...
The Jabra Elite 10 gen 2 wireless earbuds (pictured) will still be available, serving as a final farewell to the Elite lineup. | Image: Jabra
Immediately after introducing upgraded versions of its Elite 10 and Elite 8 Active earbuds, Jabra says it’s departing the consumer earbuds market entirely. Jabra’s parent company GN announced that it’s winding down its Elite and Talk audio product ranges in order to “increase focus and resources on more attractive parts” of its business, citing the rising costs of competition.
“The markets have changed over time, and it is today our assessment that we cannot generate a fair return on investment compared to the many other opportunities we have within our Hearing, Enterprise, and Gaming businesses,” said GN CEO Peter Karlstromer. “I am very grateful to our retail partners, who have supported us on the Elite and Talk product lines, as well...
By Lisa Schmeiser Cisco’s head of collaboration asserts that by focusing on the fundamentals – great audio and solid transcription – AI can work seamlessly and unobtrusively in collaborative environments.
Meta is shuttering its enterprise communications business, Workplace, while recommending customers migrate to Workvivo By Zoom.
As first reported by TechCrunch, Meta is closing an iteration of Facebook that had been designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between business teams and external networks.
Meta intends to maintain the platform operationally until September 2025. Workplace will then be read-only until May 2026 before being entirely shuttered.
Meta’s Workplace Help Centre posted an update:
We’ve made the difficult decision to close Workplace from Meta, which will be going away in 2026. We understand that this decision will be disruptive to the businesses, organizations and partners that rely on Workplace every day. Our priority is to make the transition as smooth as we can.”
Workplace users can download their data, including profile information, posts, and chat messages, until May 31, 2026, using the “Download your data” button in settings, provided their Workplace admin has enabled this feature.
“Two weeks ago, I was asked about Workplace by Facebook,” analyst Dave Michels commented on LinkedIn. “I said I don’t think they are still around. Well, now they aren’t.”
The end of Workplace marks the conclusion of Meta’s decade-long ambition to create a new revenue stream, but communications and collaboration giants like Microsoft Teams and Slack overshadowed the platform. While Meta viewed Workplace as a “strategic asset,” according to TechCrunch’s source, “growth slowed down” after the pandemic and several key employees left. Meta reportedly intended to demonstrate decisiveness by “killing all non-core projects”.
It is unclear for now how many workers will be impacted by Workplace’s closing.
Meta Recommends Workvivo By Zoom As Migration Option
Meta is also recommending Workvivo as a migration-ready alternative. Workvivo was acquired by Zoom in 2023 and is now integrated across Zoom’s upgraded platform, also named Workplace.
“Since Workvivo joined the Zoom family, we’ve seen how powerful this platform is at engaging workforces and bringing culture to life – especially for frontline employees who may not have a desk or even an email address,” said Zoom CEO and Founder Eric S. Yuan following the news. “We are excited to support Workplace from Meta’s customers and help them reach their goals of reaching and engaging employees – whether they’re desk or frontline workers.”
To assist with customer transitions, Meta will partner exclusively with Workvivo as its preferred migration partner. Workplace from Meta and Workvivo will provide migration tools, and Workvivo will offer additional implementation services at no extra cost to support customers’ transition.
“We know that the news today may be disruptive for Workplace from Meta customers, but we’re so excited about the opportunity to support and help them,” added John Goulding, CEO and Founder of Workvivo. Meta has made a huge impact in this market, and we believe that Workvivo is the natural choice for Workplace from Meta customers to transition their employee experience platform.”
Crexendo has celebrated its UCaaS platform passing the 4.5 million global users milestone.
The provider of enterprise cloud comms platforms and services, video collaboration, and managed IT services acquired NetSapiens in June 2021. At that time, the platform had approximately 1.7 million users.
Since the Netsapiens acquisition, Crexendo says platform use has surged by over 150 percent. With new licensees deploying Crexendo’s NetSapiens platform and strong growth from the existing base of over 220 licensees, over 4.5 million users now utilise the Crexendo NetSapiens software platform for their comms needs.
“We continue to see very strong adoption of our offerings, and we see no end in sight,” said Crexendo CEO and Chairman Jeff Korn. “We are very excited by our continued strong growth.
This announcement confirms for us the findings by Frost & Sullivan’s who in their recent 2024 report awarded us the Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for Excellence in Cloud Communications as well as confirming that we are the fastest growing UCaaS platform in the industry. We believe this growth is tied to our disruptive business model, our superior cloud offerings and our talented team that truly are the best in the industry.”
Korn highlighted that this growth is corroborated by G2.com’s Spring 2024 Reports, which underlined Crexendo’s “outstanding” customer service with 19 first-place rankings based on real user feedback.
“This very important metric, which follows our very strong third and fourth-quarter earnings reports,” added Korn. “Our significant momentum continues to give me great confidence in our strategic growth plan this year and beyond. I am convinced that our company is executing well on all fronts, and we are very excited about our future.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers a speech during an event called Microsoft Build: AI Day in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 2nd, 2024. | Photo by MOHD RASFAN / AFP via Getty Images
Microsoft’s producing a lot more planet-heating pollution now than it did when it made a bold climate pledge back in 2020. Its greenhouse gas emissions were actually around 30 percent higher in fiscal year 2023, showing how hard it could be for the company to meet climate goals as it simultaneously races to be a leader in AI.
Training and running AI models is an increasingly energy-hungry endeavor, and the impact that’s having on the climate is just starting to come into view. Microsoft’s latest sustainability report is a good case study in the conundrum facing big tech companies that made a slew of climate pledges in recent years but could wind up polluting more as they turn their focus to AI.
Enreach has announced the successful migration of over 100,000 users to its UCaaS platform, Enreach Contact, marking an important step towards growing its European UCaaS offering.
Moreover, the leading UCaaS solutions provider, Enreach, believes the milestone aligns with its strategy of providing a more joined-up and efficient platform for business communications.
The company says it has been focusing on operational and technical improvements and making it possible for Enreach, its partners, and customers to utilise “the synergies of a consolidated technology platform”.
Enreach’s Chief Technology Officer, Koen van Geffen, explains the significance of this achievement for Enreach Contact: “Completing the migration of 100,000+ users to our Enreach Contact UCaaS platform is an important milestone that reflects our ongoing efforts to enhance the quality of our business communications solutions.
This project was not just about moving users; it was about evolving our technology to better serve our customers and partners.”
Enreach Contact
Enreach Contact, Enreach’s core European offering, is a UCaaS solution designed for modern business needs and high-quality customer service.
It includes chat, voice, video, and advanced call management features with mobile and fixed connectivity, plus AU-powered capabilities like smart Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voice and chatbots, and more.
The solution also enables integration with over 100 CRM systems and business apps, such as Microsoft Teams, ultimately raising the standards of communication, collaboration, and remote working accessibility.
Enreach has expanded its portfolio through several acquisitions, each adding new capabilities to its technological arsenal.
Through its acquisition of the conversational AI company Botsquad, for example, Enreach has added advanced conversational bots to its product range.
Other notable acquisitions over the years include ipnordic, Masvoz, Benemen, DSD, and Go2thecloud.
The UCaaS platform integrates these technologies into a single unified offering, providing a scalable, robust, and flexible solution option for businesses across Europe.
According to Enreach, each new technological addition is helping it on its journey to becoming the “European leader in converged contact solutions”.
This convergence refers to its interconnected CCaaS and AI capabilities, which simultaneously make good on its goals of creating more efficient, connected, and collaborative business communications.
Koen van Geffen also spoke about the latest platform supporting Enreach Contact and its expanded user base: “The migration also represents a technical new age for us, shifting to our next generation platform based on Elixir, a dynamic programming language running on ErlangVM.
“The new platform serves as the foundation for Enreach Contact, ensuring that it can efficiently manage the increased demand from our growing user base while at the same time guaranteeing the resilience of our services and enabling Enreach to rapidly deploy new features.”
Last month, UC Today’s Kieran Devlinspoke to Matti Heikkonen, CCO at Enreach, about the major trends impacting Enreach’s partners in 2024, the challenges those partners face, and how Enreach’s product roadmap ahead intends to address those challenges.
Also in April, HP announced the certification of new Poly terminals by Enreach for Service Providers. In the evolution of the partnership between HP and Enreach, the Poly Edge E range has been certified, and these terminals are being integrated into the Enreach UP Platform.
RingCentral and Vodafone have brought their Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral hybrid work solution to Ireland.
Already accessible in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral enables seamless communication and collaboration from “virtually any device, anywhere, at any time”, according to the vendors’ news story.
With this offering, Vodafone Business Ireland and RingCentral aim to empower businesses to embrace the evolving landscape of hybrid work.
Lee Williams, AVP International Service Providers at RingCentral, said:
We’re thrilled to deepen our collaboration with Vodafone Business as we broaden our European footprint to Ireland, delivering enterprise-grade communications to businesses of all sizes. Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral offers a tailored solution fostering productivity and adaptability so organizations can facilitate successful hybrid work.”
Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral provides robust collaboration features, including team messaging, video meetings, and a feature-rich cloud-based system, helping customers streamline workflows and boost productivity.
The vendors say the solution integrates with many popular applications, and RingCentral’s AI-powered platform offers conversation intelligence and actionable insights to enhance communication experiences.
“Workplace needs are changing, and legacy voice technologies such as PSTN are sunsetting,” added John McCarthy, Head of Product & Partner for Vodafone Business Ireland. “Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral is a uniquely flexible communication and collaboration solution that will help businesses take control and become more efficient, agile and future-ready, while delivering a world class connectivity and service for better customer experience.”
Vodafone and RingCentral’s launch coincides with strong market momentum. According to a Cavell Group report, unified communications cloud penetration in Ireland is currently 43.7 percent, with growth projected to exceed 80 percent by 2028. RingCentral and Vodafone highlight this aligns with Ireland’s leading position in remote or hybrid work job postings, as signalled by Indeed.
Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral is now available in Ireland for new and existing Vodafone Business customers.
RingCentral and Vodafone’s Impressive 2023
In April 2023, RingCentral and Vodafone upgraded their shared collaboration and calling platform to enhance the experience of mobile users.
The two vendors introduced updates to their Vodafone Business Unified Communications (VBUC) platform, leveraging Vodafone’s mobile network and RingCentral’s mobile applications. These updates provided a unified experience for making calls, sending messages, and launching HD-quality video meetings, seamlessly turning a user’s iOS or Android device into an extension of their office.
In May 2023, RingCentral and Vodafone brought the Vodafone One Net collaboration with RingCentral UCaaS solution to empower flexible working for Portugal-based workers.
The collaboration merges RingCentral’s messaging and video capabilities with Vodafone’s fixed and mobile voice communications into a single platform. Although Portugal-based workers already had access to Vodafone Business UC with RingCentral, this fully cloud-based solution enables them to work collaboratively from any device, anywhere.
In November, RingCentral and Vodafone partnered to deliver its shared UC and collaboration solution to Spain.
RingCentral and Vodafone’s One Net Unite con RingCentral offering will provide Spain-based businesses with greater flexibility for hybrid and remote work while maintaining effective collaboration. This secure and agile platform streamlines communications between employees, customers, and suppliers.
Zoom has introduced a $100 million fund to help developers grow applications that use its technology.
The US-based communications platform Zoom published information about the fund on its website, stating that portfolio companies will initially receive an investment of between $250,000 and $2.5 million for solutions that will become central to how its customers “meet, communicate, and collaborate”.
Chief Financial Officer at Zoom, Kelly Steckelberg, revealed to Reuters that it would like to encourage more apps to be created with functions like digital whiteboards, as well as support telemedicine app providers and videoconferencing hardware manufacturers to connect with Zoom’s video service.
Zoom also defined its investment search parameters on its website:
We’re looking for companies creating products that are a solid fit for our Zoom ecosystem and provide value to our customers.”
“Companies should have a viable product and early market traction to be considered. We expect to make investment decisions monthly.”
The Perfect Partner
Zoom also outlined its reciprocal requirements for apps in black and white, expressing the need for companies to be committed to “developing on and investing in the Zoom ecosystem,” including Zoom Apps, integrations, SDKs, APIs, and hardware.
Within the growth stage, Zoom clarified that although it is stage agnostic, it is mainly focussed on seed to Series A stages.
An ideal investment prospect for Zoom might have been an app like Figma for Zoom, which was launched at Zoomtopia last year.
The app enables teams to collaborate via Zoom on Figma design files or a FigJam whiteboard. As a result, users will not need to share their screens or switch tabs; instead, they will gain increased interactions and face-to-face collaboration.
As mentioned above, Zoom is looking to promote the creation of digital whiteboarding apps.
For example, the Slack app for Zoom adds value to the Zoom ecosystem by allowing users to instantly start a Zoom meeting from any Slack channel using a simple slash command. The app also makes it easy to access meeting summaries, share recordings, and send Zoom whiteboards with any Slack direct or channel message.
Miro offers another Zoom whiteboarding experience. It is one of the world’s most popular collaborative whiteboard platforms, used by 45 million users worldwide. The solution helps teams work effectively together in a visual space.
According to Reuters, Zoom is not looking to invest in apps that major firms like Salesforce have released that can show information from corporate systems for discussions during sales meetings.
In June 2022, Zoom launched Zoom Apps SDK to its developer platform to provide developers with support and resources to build Zoom apps.
Using this software, developers can target their apps to Zoom users by listing them in the Zoom App Marketplace and the Zoom client. Users can then install the apps, even while they are in meetings.
At the time, developers had already published over 100 Zoom apps, including team collaboration, meeting productivity, social networking, gaming, and more.
Now, there are over 2,600 apps in the Zoom App Marketplace.
Climeworks’ Mammoth direct air capture plant in Hellisheiði, Iceland. | Image: Climeworks
Mammoth, the largest industrial facility yet built to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, just powered up in Hellisheiði, Iceland. It’s run by Swiss climate tech company Climeworks, whose clients include JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, among others.
It was the latest industrial plant built with the purpose of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, a process called direct air capture (DAC) — with more facilities planned around the world. DAC is supposed to be a way to fight climate change by getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions that have built up in the atmosphere, but the process still has to prove that it can scale up enough to have a meaningful impact.
It’ll have to see if it can replicate that early success in a...
Experts say AI automation likely won’t mean human jobs are replaced altogether — instead, humans will work alongside new tech, potentially for less pay and in worse working conditions. | Getty Images/iStockphoto
Is a new age of digital offshoring coming?
Questions of how a new technology will change the way we work have only become more pressing since OpenAI’s Chat-GPT burst onto the scene in late 2022. Since then, we’ve seen frenzied predictions of how AI will upend American jobs — perhaps even doing away with the need to work altogether. Some wonder if their careers will even exist in a few years. Chances are, they will, but the tasks they do might be different. How exactly that will happen can feel obscure, but it’s been happening in much the same way for decades if not centuries.
To put a human face on the way technology changes jobs, visit a fried chicken spot called Sansan Chicken in New York City’s East Village. There, the cashier takes your order over Zoom, from over 8,000 miles away in the Philippines. Another worker in the kitchen slides your order through a small window when it’s ready. These workers are employed by a company called Happy Cashier, which contracts them out to a handful of NYC-based restaurants. The big draw of Happy Cashier is that it saves the restaurants money, as the average hourly wage of a cashier in the Philippines is about $1, based on Indeed’s data. Happy Cashier’s “virtual assistants” make $3 per hour, according to the New York Times.
While video calling isn’t bleeding-edge tech, the Zoom cashier captures what often happens when an industry integrates new tech into its business model: Jobs don’t really disappear, they just shrink, along with their paycheck, and this degradation is presented as the natural outcome of automation and technological progress. Modern tech has allowed more industries to chop up jobs into smaller parts and to send many of those parts to underpaid workers overseas. The offshoring of American jobs is most immediately associated with the exodus of manufacturing work that kicked into high gear in the 1980s, but a great deal of foreign outsourcing has occurred in the digital age: think social media content moderation, customer support, and even virtual personal assistants. Silicon Valley can still be summed up by the famous labeling found on Apple products: designed in California, assembled in China. (Or, these days, the Philippines.)
Now, with AI poised to automate new industries, instead of commanding a salary of $50,000 per year for taking charge of a whole range of tasks from start to finish, you might eke out a fraction of that for doing just a part of the work, the rest of the tasks fulfilled by an AI function. It might mean that, with the aid of AI, your boss now expects you to produce twice as much in the same amount of time. It might mean that some or even most of your job is done by a poorly paid worker outside of the US.
If it sounds too far-fetched and pessimistic, the unfortunate reality is that the use of tech to degrade work that humans do is not novel — it’s been happening for hundreds of years.
A brief history of paying people less
Fears about what automation could do to human work date back centuries. In the 19th century, the Luddites were textile workers who smashed machines in protest of their employers using machines to replace them or reduce their pay. Introducing machines to boost productivity and reduce labor costs was a fairly novel idea — to workers of that day, it looked like employers were “quite literally stealing work, and therefore money and bread, as they put it, from the mouths of working people,” says Brian Merchant, journalist and author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Merchant explains that since then we’ve had 200 years of ideology saying that technology equals progress, a prevailing outlook that stifles any Luddite impulses.
Tech itself, not corporate executives, was the inevitable force replacing jobs, or devaluing them
According to labor historian Jason Resnikoff, “automation” was a term coined by a Ford executive in 1946. In the New Deal era, employers faced a problem. In a political climate where unions were powerful and popular, companies couldn’t just attack them outright. At the same time, there was an “almost universal technological enthusiasm” in this era, Resnikoff tells Vox, when we believed people would soon drive flying cars, go to the moon, and have a lot more leisure time. Corporations argued that their R&D labs were where technological innovation was born. It had its own momentum, as if multiplying in a Petri dish — tech itself, not corporate executives, was the inevitable force replacing jobs, or devaluing them.
“What’s wild is everyone agrees to that, including the unions,” says Resnikoff.
Unions of this era didn’t reject “automating” machines because standing against technology would brand you a backward-thinking opponent of progress. Unions had also traded control of how they worked, including production speed and what machines they would use, in exchange for benefits like health care, unemployment insurance, and pensions.
Far from ending work, or even reducing it, workers in a multitude of sectors — automobiles, railroads, coal mines — quickly found that they were laboring even harder. “It has just put more of the work on me, and they fired or laid off my colleagues,” explains Resnikoff, speaking for the workers. Until the 1960s, in the industries that “automated” quickest, the number of workers actually grew, he reports in his book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work. Often, what was one job before would get split up into several parts, and the new work would become more repetitive, more boring, more like part of an assembly line. It was around this same time that offshoring, or sending jobs overseas, started to come into fashion.
The humans behind the robots
Now, in 2024, as employers scramble to adopt AI technologies, we stand at the edge of what might be another wave of atomizing jobs and shipping them to nations with cheaper labor. A 2022 report from the policy think tank RAND Corporation predicted that with remote work becoming ubiquitous alongside the explosion in AI enthusiasm, “the greater a sector’s exposure to AI, the more likely it is to offshore jobs to lower-income countries.”
What we call “automation” has long meant humans toiling alongside machines, rather than machines replacing humans entirely. A lot of supposedly automated tech, including AI, is actually assisted by a mass of human laborers — often in Asia, Africa, and South America. Amazon recently discontinued its Just Walk Out service in its grocery stores, which let customers leave without checking out their items because the store’s sensors automatically detect what they had picked up in store. News of the wind-down went viral when people learned that this technology had needed human workers in India to double-check that it was tallying checkout items correctly. There was also some surprise when Presto Automation, an AI drive-thru technology used by fast food chains like Carl’s Jr. and Hardees, revealed that it used human workers overseas to fulfill, review, or correct the vast majority of orders. The robotaxi company Cruise, which suspended its operations after one of its cars ran over a woman last fall, has said that its driverless cars received remote human assistance about every four to five miles.
Automated tech is trained (and continuously improved) with the blood, sweat, and tears of human workers
What’s more, automated tech is trained (and continuously improved) with the blood, sweat, and tears of human workers — like the annotators who label and sort data that ChatGPT learns from. On digital “crowdwork” platforms, such as Upwork, workers complete small online tasks, like identifying objects in images, that computers have trouble doing — and are paid pennies for each tiny job. One 2021 paper estimated that there were 14 million workers registered on such crowdwork platforms who had completed at least one task.
Amazon nodded to the all-too-common illusion of intelligent, autonomous machines in naming its crowdwork platform Mechanical Turk, which was a fake chess-playing automaton in the 18th century that in fact housed a human chess master. Launched in 2005, it became one of the biggest crowdwork sites around the world. Remotasks, a newer crowdwork platform owned by the AI data provider Scale AI, boasts that over 240,000 “entrepreneurial taskers” work for them currently — many in the Philippines, under conditions that one AI ethicist described as “digital sweatshops.” These taskers often complain that their payment is delayed, and that’s not to mention that the pay is low to begin with, at times not meeting minimum wage in the Philippines — currently about $10.67 per day in the Manila metropolitan area.
The truth behind AI and automated tech plays out like the end of a Scooby Doo episode. Surprise! Behind the spooky ghost is a real, solid human being. As the filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor put it, it’s “fauxtomation.”
Tobias Sytsma, an economist at RAND and the author of the report, explains that automation might hit new kinds of jobs — not so much in manufacturing jobs this time, but jobs in sectors that produce intangible goods, affecting who we often call “knowledge” workers. One potential target is software development, says Sytsma. Large language models like ChatGPT have been trained on a lot of code, and “we’ve seen companies use offshore developers in the past,” he tells Vox. He notes health care may also see a lot of AI adoption.
Instead of thinking of how to design a piece of code, a software developer might now merely review the AI’s output and fix any errors. Instead of translating a book from start to finish, the human translator makes smaller tweaks for style. For each piece of work, the rate of pay shrinks. “You talk to illustrators, you talk to writers, you talk to copywriters — and freelancers especially — and you hear that they have already lost large percentages of their work that they would have been getting this time last year,” says Merchant. Some workers in creative fields have already embraced using generative AI as part of their workflow, allowing them to set lower prices while also producing at a quicker pace.
This sort of hybrid model is actually ideal for most employers, says Resnikoff. “The machine cheapens the labor, and then the labor allows you to not have to invest too much in fixed capital, which are the machines.”
The future of automation is still unwritten
Techno-optimists often make sweeping statements about the radical changes new technologies will bring — like declaring that we’re in an “AI revolution” that will redistribute social and financial power. People are led to believe that this mysterious, awe-inspiring tech will itself be a transformative agent. We can gird ourselves, but the transformation is coming whether we want it or not.
The Zoom cashier shows how tech is usually deployed by companies in the same mundane (if discomfiting) ways as before: to save money, skimp on labor costs, and even skirt labor law, as in the case of countless gig platform companies that continue to classify their workers as independent contractors. The workers don’t have much say in how the tech impacts them. “We have this very non-democratic mode of technological development that has more or less been in place for 200 years,” says Merchant.
As Resnikoff points out, if people want to change that, the first step is recognizing that automation isn’t inevitable — and certainly not in the way employers would like to implement it. Workers most keenly feeling the threat of employer-imposed automation have been organizing and putting up a fight, whether it’s gig workers trying to form unions and improve their working conditions or Hollywood screenwriters with the Writers Guild of America last year winning some provisions around AI, including that AI-generated writing can’t be used as a source material that a human writer might later spruce up. (Disclosure: Vox’s editorial staff is unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.)
In the post-war period, when people believed that tech would end work altogether, the suggestion that machines should not be brought into the workplace might not have been taken seriously. But amid the labor momentum galvanizing American workers right now, there seems to be more awareness that new tech like AI isn’t a force of nature they must accept.
“A worker today can say, ‘you’re bringing this machine, but you’re just making me compete with some poorly paid Filipino worker who deserves better him or herself,’” Resnikoff says.
When I visit Sansan Chicken on a Wednesday afternoon, the Zoom cashier is at first the only visible employee in sight, a floating head amid a greenscreen background. I ask her what she recommends — well, what’s most popular on the menu, anyway — and based on her response I order the karaage fried chicken. She notes that if I get the combo it comes with fries and a drink. After I pay, on a second screen next to the Zoom call, a standard tip screen pops up. The touch screen, however, is unresponsive. An in-store employee notices and tries to help, but to no avail. Another employee in the kitchen calls my order once it’s ready, sliding the tray out a narrow window. The Zoom cashier greets every customer who comes through the door, but most don’t respond. A few feet from her, there’s a digital kiosk that several customers opt to use instead.
Alianza has introduced its new access control solution CLOUDEDGE to provide telecommunications service providers (telcos) with a way to streamline legacy voice migration to the cloud.
According to the cloud communications platform, it provides telcos with a “low-risk path” to simplifying operations, increasing network management efficiencies, and speeding up innovation.
Telcos have previously been able to setup UCaaS cloud services and move softswitch services to the cloud, but CLOUDEDGE sets itself apart by creating a path to the cloud for even the most complex legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructure migrations, without any meaningful risk to services.
In Alianza’s related press release, it explains some of the difficulties that CLOUDEDGE will help to solve:
“For more than a decade, telcos have faced challenges in managing legacy services side-by-side with the development and delivery of net-new capabilities.
“These realities undermined revenue growth and left telcos vulnerable to competitive threats from over-the-top (OTT) competitors that were not constrained by the need to maintain network infrastructure, optimize service reliability, and deliver full-service capabilities, often in adherence with regulatory mandates.”
CLOUDEDGE Features
Alianza believes that its CLOUDEDGE solution helps telcos from a strategic and operation management perspective via a single cloud-based platform.
The solution also includes features such as support for multiple access technologies, which allows telcos to provide a broad set of customer requirements.
CLOUDEDGE allows for diverse communications protocols that enable interoperability and enhanced network connectivity.
It also facilitates reliable communications during emergencies by local voice and 911 traffic routing for session initiation protocol (SIP) and non-SIP endpoints, leading to an improved overall service.
From a financial perspective, CLOUDEDGE represents a lower total cost of ownership for telcos by consolidating a comprehensive communications portfolio into a single platform.
Greater customer operation management capabilities come through an API, with billing software and other cloud-based solutions for enhanced integrations.
The combination of these features alongside upgraded operational efficiency brings innovative services to stay ahead of the competition.
Dag Peak, Chief Product Officer of Alianza, set out what CLOUDEDGE can do for service providers: “The development of CLOUDEDGEmarks a significant milestone in the journey towards the Telco 3.0 reality of modernised telco operations.
“Telcos can now embark on their transformation journey [from TDM to the cloud] with confidence, knowing they have a robust and reliable platform to support their evolving needs and propel their business forward to what’s next as innovation continues.”
Alianza describes itself as a “leading cloud communications platform for service providers”. It works to help customers increase growth, decrease costs, and turn from ‘telco’ to ‘techco’ – the latter including services beyond simply voice and data connectivity.
It will reportedly empower Alianza customers with excellent deployment and configuration ease-of-use for Alianza-certified devices supported natively on its platform.
I’m kidding! But I have to admit something: I’ve been going on LinkedIn every day recently, and I’m having a great time. Last week, the company announced it was adding three games to its app, both on desktop and mobile, as a naked engagement ploy to get you to open the app every day. I hate to say this, but it’s working.
The three games are called Pinpoint, Crossclimb, and Queens. Pinpoint is basically The New York Times’ Categories game but in reverse: the game gives you items, and you have to guess the category. Crossclimb is like the Times’ mini crossword, with a twist that you then have to rearrange the answers into a word ladder. And Queens, my...
Beef cattle stand in a barn at a feedlot in Illinois, on April 5, 2011. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Tyson Foods and the federal government refuse to show their math for a new sustainability label.
One species accounts for around 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions: the cow.
Every few months, like clockwork, environmental scientists publish a new report on how we can’t limit planetary warming if people in rich countries don’t eat fewer cows and other animals. But meat giant Tyson Foods, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), has a different solution: “climate-friendly” beef.
Tyson claims that its “Climate-Smart Beef” program, launched last year andsupported with taxpayer dollars, has managed to cut 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from a tiny fraction of its cattle herd. Those cattle are then slaughtered and sold under the company’s Brazen Beef brand with a USDA-approved “climate-friendly” label, which is now for sale in limited quantities but could soon land in your local supermarket’s meat aisle.
It sounds nice — Americans could continue to eat nearly 60 pounds of beef annually while the world burns. But it’s just the latest salvo in the meat industry’s escalating war against climate science, and its campaign to greenwash its way out of the fight for a livable planet.
Show me the math
Tyson’s climate-friendly beef website is full of earnest marketing phrases like this one: “If we’re showing up for the climate, then we’ve got to show our work.” Yet that “work” is nowhere to be found.
Despite requests for transparency from scientists and dogged journalists, Tyson and the USDA haven’t opened up their emissions ledgers, so the program remains a black box.
Tyson and consulting firm Deloitte, which worked on Tyson’s program, both declined interview requests for this story. Where Food Comes From, a private company that audits food labels for animal welfare, safety, and sustainability claims — including Tyson’s “climate-friendly” label — did not respond to an interview request.
Last year, when I asked to see Tyson’s environmental accounting model, the USDA said I’d need to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group did that — but all 106 pages of the documents it received were heavily redacted to, as the USDA put it, protect “trade secrets.”
Tyson’s sole known supplier for Brazen Beef, Adams Land & Cattle Co., is a sprawling cattle feedlot operation in Nebraska.
Google Maps/Environmental Working Group
An aerial shot of Nebraska-based Adams Land & Cattle Co., Tyson’s sole supplier of its Brazen Beef line.
“I’m not surprised, but I’m concerned,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group. “Where’s the evidence? Where are the receipts?”
“If [Tyson’s] Brazen Beef could carry this claim,” Faber added, then “what’s to stop other companies from making similar claims based on science and other data that’s simply unavailable to all of us?”
The USDA didn’t respond to a request for comment about the FOIA documents.
Tyson also worked with environmental nonprofit juggernauts The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund to develop its Climate-Smart Beef program, which the company touts on its website and in advertisements. Environmental Defense Fund said in an email that it integrated its nitrogen emissions model into Tyson’s environmental accounting, while The Nature Conservancy noted that it reviewed and provided recommendations on data used in Tyson’s model but wasn’t otherwise involved in its Climate-Smart Beef program.
Both organizations declined an interview request for this story when it was first published last year. Earlier this year, during interviews for a related story, both groups said companies need to be transparent about their climate goals but stood by their collaboration with Tyson Foods.
What makes beef climate-friendly, according to Tyson Foods
So what exactly does Tyson say its ranchers and farmers are doing to achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction? We can look to their website to get a vague sense, but it helps to first understand how cattle pollute the planet.
The 1.5 billion cows farmed worldwide for cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes each year accelerate climate change in three main ways: they eat grass and/or grain, like corn and soy, causing them to burp out the highly potent greenhouse gas methane; they poop a lot, which releases the even more potent nitrous oxide, as does the synthetic fertilizer used to grow the grain they’re fed; and they take up a lot of land — a quarter of the planet is occupied by grazing livestock, some of which could be used to absorb carbon from the atmosphere if it weren’t deforested for meat production.
Raphael Alves/Washington Post via Getty Images
Cattle are seen along deforested land on highway BR-319, in the rural city of Humaita in Brazil. Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.
To achieve a 10 percent emissions reduction, Tyson’s website mentions that grain farmers who supply feed to its cows employ practices like planting cover crops and reduced tillage, which are good for soil health but haven’t been proven to cut emissions. There’s also mention of “nutrient management,” which usually means reducing fertilizer over-application, but no details on emissions savings are provided.
Among other practices, Tyson also lists “pasture rotation,” which entails moving cattle around more frequently with the goal of allowing grass to regrow, which can provide a number of environmental benefits, but many climate scientists are skeptical it can meaningfully reduce emissions.
Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University who’s written about Tyson’s climate-friendly beef label, told me the methods Tyson is talking about are admirable, but that doesn’t mean the 10 percent reduction claim is justified. Some practices may be good for land stewardship but don’t reduce emissions. For those that can reduce emissions, savings will be marginal.
“These are razor-thin distinctions in a country that already produces meat incredibly efficiently, and our tools are not cut out [to measure] these thin margins,” Hayek said. “You can’t call that [climate-friendly], in any good conscience.”
And because emissions from US cattle operations vary widely, “There’s simply no reliable way to estimate a change in greenhouse gas emissions as small as 10 percent on any one farm — let alone a complex network of them,” Hayek and political economist Jan Dutkiewicz wrote in the New Republic last September.
Tyson’s claims are brazen but unsurprising given how the USDA collaborates with industry. When it comes to animal welfare claims on meat packages, for example, the USDA more or less allows meat producers to operate on an honor system.
Just as important as showing its math is knowing where the starting line for emissions reduction begins. Tyson says it has reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent, but 10 percent relative to what? What’s the benchmark?
Nobody knows. A 2019 study by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association found that the average American steer emits 21.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilogram of carcass weight. But in 2021, the USDA approved a low-carbon beef program (unrelated to Tyson) that uses a benchmark nearly 25 percent higher than the 2019 study, as noted by Wired last year.
In September, when asked what benchmark the USDA uses to approve a 10 percent emissions reduction claim, the agency again said I would need to file a FOIA request. In the document it sent to Environmental Working Group, the portion on benchmarks was redacted.
But even if we give Tyson and the USDA the benefit of the doubt, there’s a stubborn truth about beef: It’s so high in emissions that it can never really be “climate-friendly.”
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Beef cattle at the Texana Feeders feedlot in Floresville, Texas.
To be sure, the US beef industry has reduced its emissions over the years, and it’s much lower than most countries. But relative to every other food product, beef remains the coal of the food sector.
“Beef is always going to be and always will be the worst [food] choice for the climate,” said Faber of Environmental Working Group, which has also petitioned the USDA to prohibit “climate-friendly” claims on beef products altogether. “And no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.”
What Tyson’s done here is equivalent to making a Hummer 10 percent more fuel-efficient and calling it climate-friendly — it’s greenwashing, and surveys show that most consumers know far too little about food and climate change to navigate this brave new world of so-called “climate-friendly” meat.
Consumers will be deceived by “climate-friendly” meat claims
Meat and dairy production account for 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and leading environmental scientists say we must drastically reduce livestock emissions and eat more plant-based meals. That message, however, hasn’t broken through to the general public, nor to policymakers.
In an online survey conducted last yearin partnership with market research consultancy firm Humantel, Vox polled consumers about which parts of the food sector they think contribute most to climate change. Meat and dairy production came in dead last, even though it’s the top contributor in the list.
In another question, “what we eat” was (incorrectly) ranked as a smaller contributor to extreme weather than refrigerant chemicals, single-use plastics, and air travel.
Most respondents did rank plant-based meat alternatives as more climate-friendly than beef by a decent margin. However, plant-based meat and grass-fed beef were almost tied, even though plant-based meat has a drastically smaller carbon footprint (and grass-fed beef is generally worse for the climate than conventional beef).
Othersurveys have found similar results, demonstrating Americans’ limited understanding of emissions from the food system. Throw “climate-friendly” beef into the mix and consumers are sure to be misled and possibly persuaded that beef can indeed be good for the climate.
However, meat companies could face legal consequences over misleading environmental claims. Earlier this year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, the world’s largest meat company, over its claim that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040. James argued that such a goal was unsubstantiated and unachievable.
Cashing in on consumers’ desire to shop more sustainably — and their misunderstanding of what actually makes food sustainable — could lead to more of what Tyson wants: increased beef consumption after decades of decline and stagnation. That would be a disaster for the climate at a time when the window to act is closing.
The USDA and government agencies around the world know what must be done to slash food emissions. Now they just need to follow the science, resist industry greenwashing, and cut back on the burgers.
Update, May 8, 2024, 2:40 pm: This story, originally published September 8, 2023, has been updated to include documents obtained by Environmental Working Group through a Freedom of Information Act request.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
Republican lawmakers are attempting to overturn the twin pillars of the Biden administration’s climate platform: tax credits for electric vehicles and the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules to curb tailpipe emissions.
The effort involves new bills introduced by members of Congress, as well as lawsuits filed by state attorneys general, all with the goal of rolling back the minimal progress made by the Biden administration to reduce the share of planet-warming carbon emissions produced by the automotive sector.
Last month, 25 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit intended to overturn the EPA’s recently finalized tailpipe rules aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2032. In a statement, Kentucky Attorney...
Akixi has announced real-time CX Analytics For Microsoft Teams to empower service providers and their customers.
Akixi, a prominent value-added services (VAS) provider in the cloud comms space, has enhanced its portfolio with the general availability of CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams, which is delivered via a single cloud platform.
Leveraging its market leadership in providing call analytics through a network of service provider partners, Akixi is aiming to revolutionise outcomes for service providers and their customers with CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams.
Mike Wilkinson, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, commented:
To date, service providers have had to make do with limited enterprise grade Teams analytics solutions which significantly impacts their operations and cost of delivery. With CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams, we have built a service provider-first solution alongside the real-time bot engine, which provides the precision needed for call analytics that satisfy the largest ranges of use cases in the market.”
Engineered for seamless integration into service provider operations, this solution simplifies end-customer onboarding and elevates user experience. Being a fully cloud-based platform, it can be swiftly integrated into service provider portfolios and scaled to accommodate the rapidly growing demand in the Teams market.
Akixi’s CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams will initially be accessible through select service providers, namely Redcentric, Evolve IP, and Vanilla IP.
More Information On CX Analytics For Microsoft Teams
Akixi stresses that its CX Analytics feature for Microsoft Teams is indispensable for service provider customers, particularly in informal contact centre environments, who demand instant access to end-user call data.
CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams provides comprehensive call visibility, merging historical and real-time data to generate intuitive business insights, ensuring all customer experience requirements are met effectively.
CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams also includes several industry firsts, including “Akixi Bot Engine”. Akixi describes this as “providing deep real-time visibility of Teams calls and queues”.
Another first Akixi highlights is “Onboarding automation”, which enables swift deployment for significant numbers of enterprise users within a multi-tier channel environment. The final first Akixi cites is “Consistent reporting”, which exists between a series of cloud platforms for hybrid use cases.
What Major Teams Stories Have Happened This Week?
As always, it’s been a busy time for Microsoft Teams.
According to Dropbox, teams now have access to a beta version of Co-Authoring, enabling live edits to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from both web and mobile platforms. Additionally, as part of Dropbox’s ‘Spring Release’, an enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams has been introduced, allowing users to seamlessly search, upload, share, and preview content from Dropbox within Microsoft 365.
Furthermore, users can access a plugin extension for Copilot for Microsoft 365, which can automatically address queries and generate summaries.
Currently, invitees have a limited range of responses, such as “Accept”, “Decline”, or “Maybe”. The new Follow option will allow users the added possibility of simultaneously rejecting a meeting invitation while also expressing their desire to stay informed, meaning they will automatically receive post-meeting recaps.
Lightware, a Hungarian provider of audio-visual automation devices, has developed a solution for systems integrators, meeting room users, and IT professionals. It offers advanced BYOD functionality and room control capabilities.
At the core of this solution lies the Taurus UCX/TPX Series Universal Switchers, which empower Teams Rooms users to seamlessly connect their personal laptops to the meeting system within the room. This facilitates content sharing and grants access to lighting, projectors, and shade controls.
Global cloud market share leaders in first quarter 2024 includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and Salesforce for cloud services companies.
The US approved a Texas power emergency as a blackout threat loomed due to a brutal heat wave in fall 2023. | Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images
High temperatures across the US have the potential to increase risks for drought, wildfires, and hurricanes.
The United States could be in for another scorcher this summer, per a new study from the National Weather Service (NWS). And that could mean more extreme weather events — as well as heightened health concerns.
The NWS outlook, released this month, found that many parts of the US — including New England and the Southwest — are likely to have higher than average temperatures from June through August. In recent years, hotter summer temperatures have been driven by climate change and, in some cases, the arrival of a climate pattern known as La Niña, which contributes to drier conditions in certain regions in the US.
National Weather Service
Much of the country could see higher than expected temperatures this year.
A hotter summer could have serious environmental consequences, including a higher risk of drought, hurricanes, and wildfires in some areas. Additionally, it could pose more health threats to people, with heat-related fatalities — including those tied to cardiovascular disease — increasing in the US in the last decade.
Broadly, warmer summers have prompted people to take more precautions when it comes to the activities they engage in, become more dependent on resources like air conditioning, and remain on guard for extreme weather events affecting their water supplies and air quality.
This summer is expected to be no different, which is why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the CDC recently rolled out tools aimed at forecasting when extreme heat waves will strike this summer, with the goal of alerting people about these events so they can better prepare for them.
The reasons this summer could be so hot
Climate change is a major factor in the overall warming that the Earth is experiencing — including hotter summers, experts say. “The big obvious player is greenhouse gases that are producing long-term climate change,” William Boos, a UC Berkeley earth and planetary sciences associate professor, told Vox.
As a Washington Post analysis found in 2022, the average summer temperature from 2017–2021 was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average US summer temperature from 1971–2000, an increase that coincided with record-breaking annual temperatures overall in recent years. The outlook for this year could well make this summer a continuation of that trend.
The La Niña climate pattern could also be a contributor to higher heat levels this year if it occurs in the coming months. La Niña is an atmospheric phenomenon involving strong winds that result in cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The cold water alters the course of high altitude air currents known as the jet stream, which contributes to weather changes.
While La Niña can lead to a “cooling down of global temperatures ... it causes changes in wind patterns that can cause some areas to be warmer than normal in summer,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.
Heat could mean more drought, wildfires, and hurricanes
Higher temperatures in the summer can directly contribute to the proliferation of droughts because heat increases water evaporation and the loss of moisture from plants. Droughts often reduce water supplies for people and animals, and impact the ecosystems of flora and fauna that live in bodies of water as well. According to the National Weather Service, the Southwest, part of the Pacific Northwest, and Hawaii are a few of the regions susceptible to drought this coming summer.
National Weather Service
Drought outlook for this summer highlights areas that are more susceptible.
A hotter, drier summer season can also increase the likelihood of wildfires in certain areas because it means the ground is drier and the area is more likely to catch fire. When the temperature is warmer, there can be a higher frequency of lightning, too, which can ignite more wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
An outlook for July captures an area with higher likelihood of wildfires.
In recent years, wildfires have disrupted nearby communities, damaging people’s homes and displacing them, while also affecting people hundreds of miles away. Wildfires in Maui last year — which were sparked partly because of ongoing drought — killed around 100 people, and many of those who lost their homes have yet to find new ones. A major wave of wildfires in Canada affected large swaths of the US as well when smoke drifted over and reduced the air quality.
Because evaporation increases when it’s hotter, hurricanes can pick up more moisture from oceans under these circumstances, leading to a higher frequency of more aggressive storms.
Generally, higher temperatures also raise worries about health issues and fatalities people may face due to conditions like heat stroke. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, cities like St. Louis and Philadelphia have seen increases in death rates during heat waves in the past, and hospitals tend to see a spike of admissions related to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in these times.
Since people’s hearts are under more strain when it’s hot, this puts additional stress on those navigating preexisting health issues as well as vulnerable groups like the young, elderly, and pregnant people. Additionally, people’s standard mechanism for cooling themselves — sweating — can be insufficient when it’s especially hot and particularly when there’s high humidity.
“In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, previously told Scientific American.
Buttons feel magical. You press here, and invisible connections make something happen elsewhere. But “magical” is probably not how I’d describe most public drinking fountains.
Who among us hasn’t walked up to a drinking fountain, expecting a bubbling stream of life-giving water, only to experience the crushing disappointment of a measly trickle after smashing in that button?
But I’m beginning to think it’s not the drinking button’s fault; they’re actually some of the most elegant buttons out there. They’re one of the few remaining buttons where your push directly and mechanically controls the result. They’re over a hundred years old. And all the action happens within an inch of the button itself.
RingCentral has upgraded its platform with new APIs and workflow builders powered by RingSense AI.
These new features aim to revolutionise how customers construct workflows within their businesses. RingCentral intends to empower non-technical users and developers to seamlessly integrate AI, video, and social messaging into workflows, automate alerts and notifications, and create user-friendly customer experiences without any coding required.
“RingCentral is taking its platform capabilities to the next level. Regardless if you’re a developer or an end-user, you can take advantage of our world-class platform with hundreds of APIs and automated workflows to drive critical business communications forward,” said Srini Raghavan, Chief Product Officer at RingCentral.
Our developer community can leverage new APIs and SDKs for embedding RingSense AI, video, or social messaging into workflows. These enhancements reflect our next step in delivering no-code and low-code platform experiences and giving customers more intelligent and personalized capabilities.”
The latest APIs are now accessible in beta mode for both RingCentral Video Pro+ and RingEX users at no additional cost.
More Details On The New APIs
New APIs for RingSense AI open up fresh possibilities for RingCentral customers.
They can now effortlessly generate audio and video transcriptions, summaries, and speaker diarisation across both RingCentral and third-party recordings. This empowers developers to create applications that offer advanced insights into audio and video interactions, producing a key stream of data to personalise and enrich customer engagement. For instance, businesses can rapidly comprehend their calls’ topics and recurring themes through keyword analysis.
In other fresh additions, the new Video API and SDK enable developers to integrate live video meetings and interactions into their applications seamlessly. They present a white-labelled experience with customisable features such as closed captioning and chat functionality while prioritising security.
Additionally, with Social Messaging APIs, developers can integrate with various popular platforms, expanding the reach and adaptability of their applications.
Brands can now connect with customers across nine social media platforms, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, X (formerly Twitter), X Messages, Instagram, Instagram Messaging, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Viber.
More Details On The Workflow Builder
The new RingCentral Workflow Builder is pitched as a groundbreaking tool that empowers users to develop personalised and automated business workflows, boosting workplace efficiency and elevating CX. RingCentral customers can gain the ability to design workflows either from a selection of pre-built templates or by fashioning their own tailored solutions, streamlining routine daily tasks and processes.
The pre-built templates offer rapid solutions for different situations.
Users can set up out-of-office replies for timely responses to team messages during absence. With SMS keyword auto-reply, common inquiries are rapidly addressed with pre-designed responses. The voicemail received notification template alerts team members through SMS for missed voicemails. Lastly, the after-hours SMS auto-reply ensures communication outside regular hours by sending automated responses to incoming SMS messages.
Customers can effortlessly construct their own customised workflows using an intuitive and robust visual editor. This new platform capability aims to manage more intricate triggers, such as automatically generating personalised responses upon exact phone number matches from incoming SMS messages or transcribing voicemails to trigger actions based on their content.
By generating customised replies to myriad incoming communication channels, such as chat or SMS messages, incoming or ended calls, or received voice messages, RingCentral customers will experience heightened intelligence and personalisation in their interactions.
What Has RingCentral Been Up To Recently?
It’s been a busy time for RingCentral.
The vendor and Optus partnered in March to produce a new solution empowering communications for Australian businesses.
The co-branded solution, Optus Loop with RingCentral, aims to bolster communication for businesses of all sizes through RingCentral’s dependable, secure, and feature-rich communications platform. This offering provides enterprises with an agile, cost-effective, cloud-based solution, enhancing collaboration and communication among employees, customers, and suppliers. Accessible from any device and location, it guarantees seamless connectivity.
That same month, Brightspeed partnered with RingCentral to launch Brightspeed Voice+, a premium unified communications solution for enterprises.
Brightspeed Voice+ leverages RingCentral’s business cloud communications to provide Brightspeed’s Voice+ customers with AI-powered integrated messaging, video, and voice capabilities across nearly any device.
Lastly, last month, RingCentral unveiled RingEX, an evolution of RingCentral MVP designed to enhance the employee experience.
RingEX, enhanced with RingSense AI, delivers advanced AI capabilities spanning phone calls, SMS, meetings, and messaging. These include real-time call notes, messaging summaries, and AI-driven search functionalities across conversations. Moreover, purpose-built AI features are integrated across RingCentral’s suite, encompassing RingEX, RingCX, RingSense for Sales, and RingCentral Events, fostering heightened personal productivity and seamless business collaboration.
Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation speaks during the “Microsoft Build: AI Day” event. | Photo by Peerapon Boonyakiat / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Microsoft just agreed to support the development of 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity around the world, a massive amount of electricity to fuel its AI ambitions and climate goals.
For comparison, 10.5 GW of renewable energy amounts to nearly half the amount of solar and wind capacity California had in 2022. This is quite literally a very big deal — effectively the largest corporate agreement to purchase renewable energy to date, according to BloombergNEF. Microsoft inked the agreement yesterday with Brookfield Asset Management, which said the deal is almost eight times bigger than what was previously the single largest corporate power purchase agreement ever signed.
After moving to ban TikTok in the US, the federal government could target the China-based DJI next. A report from The New York Times highlights a bill advanced by the House of Energy and Commerce Committee last month that could ground DJI’s fleet of drones across the country.
If passed, the Countering CCP Drones Act would add DJI drones to the FCC’s list of equipment covered by the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019. This bars communications equipment or services that “pose a national security risk” from running on US networks. It also prevents companies from using federal funding to purchase banned equipment. Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE are already included on the FCC’s list.
Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings.
Investors, at least, are eating it up: Google parent company Alphabet has finally officially hit and maintained a $2 trillion market cap for a whole day of trading after briefly touching $2...
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