EPISODE 145 | Guest: Jason Cain, region sales manager – South Central for Visix
Businesses of all types have been using digital signs for internal communications for years. But with the rise of more complex data sources, IoT, AI, AR and other technologies, corporate communicators are finding new and innovative ways to reach and engage their audiences.
In this episode, we do some future forecasting with Jason Cain, looking at what corporate digital signage managers and content creators are doing now, and how that might change over the next few years.
- Explore how data-driven content will be optimized, personalized and targeted
- Discover how IoT and AI will affect content creation, delivery and analytics
- Learn how mobile and multi-screen experiences will provide expanded engagement
- Understand how interactive experiences will evolve with voice and gesture controls
- Hear how cloud, sustainability and security will all be major factors in future systems
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Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Corporate communications continue to evolve, driven, very often, by the technologies that we use to deliver our messaging. Today, we’re gonna talk about maybe what the future of digital signage in corporate communications might look at. And to help me with that, I am speaking with Jason Cain. He is the region manager for South Central in the United States, and he’s joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for talking to me, Jason.
Jason Cain: Yeah. Thanks, Derek, for having me.
Derek DeWitt: Absolutely. And of course, thank you everybody out there for listening to this episode of the podcast, Digital Signage Done Right. Don’t forget that you can subscribe, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website under resources and podcasts.
In order to understand what the future might hold, it’s often useful to kind of look at the past. So, let’s kind of go over like a little, I dunno, thumbnail history of corporate communications using digital signage.
Jason Cain: Yeah, sure. So, you know, digital signage has been used in corporate communications for many years. Mainly, you know, static displays with limited capabilities. The displays were mainly used for basic information, primarily HR announcements and event schedules.
However, lately, the rise of the digital age, and advancements and technologies have enabled digital signage to become a much more powerful tool for corporate communication. Both the hardware and the software have evolved as have the design tools to create content. External systems that either feed into digital signage systems or can display digital signage messages have also evolved.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Event schedules, as we know, number one thing; obviously a lot of HR announcements. And now the software keeps getting more interesting. Touchscreens and interactivity have become almost de rigueur, honestly. And now, of course, we’re seeing AI being used for content creation, images, even text, things like this, and things are just moving at a pace.
Like, I was speaking to Brian Galante, who’s the head of Dimension PR, not long ago, and he said, you know, in his experience, he can’t think of a technology that has come up faster, certainly in this space, than AI. Two years ago, nobody talked about it outside of science fiction films, and now everybody’s talking about it, you know, so things are certainly changing and might change quite rapidly.
Jason Cain: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. This is the future that I think the Jetsons had promised us. So, I’m very excited for us to finally get to that stage.
Derek DeWitt: I can’t wait for a robot maid and a flying car. Actually, the way that most people drive, I don’t want flying cars. I think that just sounds like death from above.
Jason Cain: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. If you can’t drive on a flat surface, how in the world would they take that to the air?
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Adding more dimensions is not gonna help.
Jason Cain: Yeah, exactly.
Derek DeWitt: You’ve been in this field for a long time, so you’ve got your kind of finger on the pulse. What are some of the things you see for the future of corporate digital signage? I’m thinking specifically sort of emerging trends in technology that are really shaping the future of this.
Jason Cain: Yeah, I think one of the most popular trends is data-driven content optimization, you know, data integration, visualization. It’s already popular on digital signs, but I think we’re gonna see that to continue to grow more and more.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Do you think it’ll be, like, more sources or how is it gonna get bigger?
Jason Cain: Yeah, I think that, you know, we’ll see a lot more sources being pulled in and maybe different ways to show the data that you can choose from, right in a CMS.
Derek DeWitt: Ah, yeah, that would be nice. Kinda like, like in Excel you just, you choose what kind of chart you want to show or something like that. I would imagine analytics would probably play a big part in this.
Jason Cain: Oh, absolutely. Companies will start to use data analytics more and more to continually perfect their digital signage content. You know, and a CMS could measure the success of a message and maybe change that chart type you choose to see if it works better, sort of a, you know, A and B testing.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Or heck, that might even be automatic. I mean, it’s just pulling in the data, doesn’t really matter (I mean, it matters obviously to a certain extent what kind of charts you’re using), but it might be able to, in the future, be smart enough to say, you know what, actually I’m noticing that people aren’t looking at this, so I’m gonna change it to this. You know, instead of a pie chart, a bar graph or something.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah.
Derek DeWitt: A buzz word, of course, we hear a lot of these days is IoT or the Internet of Things. Again, briefly, for those that are going, wait, what is that? It’s a network of connected devices that communicate with one another and exchange data, and they kind of do it without human prompting. In the digital signage world, certainly I think that could make all that data sharing we’re talking about a lot easier.
Jason Cain: A lot of this is currently talked about in the retail space, so you can serve up a certain ad when, you know, when a sensor triggers, or do a more targeted campaign based on, you know, different metrics. But what I really think is gonna happen is we’re gonna see corporate digital signage begin to integrate more with IoT sensors and devices as well.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Yeah. And again, so people know, we’ve talked about this at length in previous episodes, but so these sensors can do things like sense whether or not someone’s standing in front of the screen, maybe get some demographic information about that person. It’s a man, it’s a woman, it’s a, you know, older, younger, what have you. What the weather is, traffic patterns may be as well, cars going by in the background, or maybe it’s tied into an inventory system. So, it all just kinda has access to all of this data – some of it that it’s picking up right there at the screen, some of it, it’s getting from other sources. And then it’s kind of just deciding what is the most optimal thing to show at that particular moment, or what’s the most relevant or what’s the most important. I think in a corporate setting, I think that kind of up-to-the-minuteness is quite exciting.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s all about enhancing contextual relevance and effectiveness, and the more that you can do that, the more appealing it is, you know, to the audience.
Derek DeWitt: That’s the goal, I think, now, is we wanna be, yeah, we spent money on this system, and we put it all over the place, and we want it to be as effective as humanly possible.
Jason Cain: Yeah, exactly. The future is now, you know. The days of just showing the same content over and over and over again on a screen, you lose the audience because, you know, there’s this little thing called a smartphone, and there’s social media and there’s all these distractions. So, relevant, you know, realtime data-driven content is always gonna be your biggest advantage, especially in the corporate setting.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I always say that any source, whether it’s a digital sign or it’s a website or my newsfeed or whatever, if you can answer a question either before I’ve asked it to myself or very quickly after I’ve asked it, wow, you’ve really done your job. So, you know, that’s amazing to me.
Now, obviously with this kind of, really, astonishing access to, and automated access to, information and data sources, we’re gonna see the trend that we see online and, on our smartphones, really starting to take off. I think in digital signage, we’re gonna see more personalized and more targeted content. Again, we’ve talked about this in a previous episode about internal communications trends, but this is a big goal for creating more engaging content. If it’s not just targeted to people like me, but to me, well, obviously I’m gonna be engaged with it.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the content tools and ideas are gonna just continue to evolve in the future, so that you get that more enhanced, you know, content that makes it truly feel like, you know, hey, is this talking just to me?
Derek DeWitt: Right. Did it just read my mind?
Jason Cain: Yeah, did this just read my mind or, you know, what is happening here? You know, again, like I mentioned before, that’s the key to engaging and keeping it very fresh and relevant and current is what’s gonna get someone to say, wait a minute, you know, this is real life, real time, right now.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, obviously analytics, which we mentioned before, are gonna be a key part to this. You know, obviously specific employee groups and stuff, but it would really be able to parse to the kind of person, their role in the company, the location that that particular sign is in, people’s interests and so on. And as the machines, let’s say, and the digital signage managers kind of work in tandem, we’re gonna see the corporate communicators really being able to adjust their approach sort of on the fly almost, and really just drill right in and target exactly the people they need to for a specific message.
Jason Cain: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think the immediate future is just getting those analytics in place. Once you have those analytics in place, then it makes this all come together seamlessly, so that you can show the relevant content that you need to show. I just think that currently a lot of companies just don’t have the data yet to create those profiles.
Derek DeWitt: Or they have the data, but they don’t, they haven’t integrated their digital signage into it. I’m one of those people that lives by the philosophy of never do today something you can put off till next week. You know, there’s a signup deadline for benefits or for something, you know, with the company, and 90% of the people have signed up.
I’m the guy who’s, you know, gonna maybe forget because I’m probably going to wait until the last day or two to, to get around to it. And, you know, I kind of have this vision in my head almost of like, as I walk by the digital sign, it goes, oh, that’s Derek, and he hasn’t signed up yet. So, it quickly grabs the, “Hey, don’t forget to sign up for this thing – deadline’s tomorrow” message, which it doesn’t show you, ’cause you’re, you know, you’re good and you have already signed up. You don’t need to see it. But I do need to see it, so it sends it to me.
Jason Cain: Yeah, that’s a perfect analogy. I mean, you know it, for you, it could do just that. It could say, you know, hey, you need to sign up. And for me it could say, thank you for signing up.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Yeah, exactly so. Now of course, we’re also seeing more sort of complicated messages out there, more visual multimedia stuff going on. Video, you know, people keep talking about video, video, video; Zoomers love it, millennials love it. Video is the way to go. We hear this all the time now, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Video is still very much at the forefront of modern communications.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah. I mean, all the research shows that visuals are more engaging, memorable, effective in conveying, you know, complex information and messages to employees.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. And I wonder if we’re gonna find more and more clever ways to sort of animate or make the content dynamic, even a picture. You know, like we’ve talked about the Ken Burns effect, we just kind of have it slowly drift across the, you know, the screen, but there may be other ways.
There may be clever ways soon where it’s easy and you don’t have to have, you know, a design degree to be able to do it. Where, I don’t know, you know, here’s a picture of a cat, and the cat’s eyes suddenly go boing and pop up really big. Or, you know, something like that that makes you go, I’m sorry, did that thing just, did its eyes explode at me for a second? The technology is going to enable people to unlock and unleash their creativity more too.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the future of corporate digital signage is gonna be to fully focus on animated and dynamic content.
Derek DeWitt: I think another thing we’re gonna see as things get more personalized, like you said, everybody’s walking around with a smartphone, is we’re gonna see more mobile integration maybe. Do you think that this is something that’s gonna start happening more and more?
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That, that has already started post-Covid especially, you know, in the, now very normal, hybrid workplace. You know, our software can already do this. You can just put a message on a playlist and put it on a webpage, so people can view it on their phone.
What used to be a very abnormal environment of the hybrid workplace, in my opinion now that’s more normal than an actual going to work five days a week at an actual location. Yeah, I think that that time has passed for most, you know, short of fire, ambulance, police jobs. I think that if you have to actually show up somewhere every day, five days a week, good luck filling some of those positions.
Derek DeWitt: Right, exactly. Yeah. It makes you feel like they don’t trust you, you know, oh, you won’t work. Well then fire me, you know, if I don’t work. If I’m not gonna work, I’m not gonna work while I’m physically here either. That’s just how that goes.
Now, like you said, you can put stuff up on a webpage, so obviously people can view it on their phone. One way that’s really starting to take off in the States, again, Covid kind of really accelerated the adoption of this, is QR codes. People scan it, boom, there it is, takes them to a webpage or a PDF or whatever. The Visix software also pairs with, like, Microsoft teams too, doesn’t it?
Jason Cain: That is correct, yeah. You can deliver content via the Microsoft Teams app. In fact, at InfoComm this past year, we showed the, you know, digital signage using Microsoft Teams. And we then even, while showing digital signage on Microsoft Teams, started sending random messages to Ellyce Kelly, who was back in the office, and she couldn’t figure out who it was coming from. So you, you can do a lot. You can do digital signage; you can play pranks on your fellow employees. It’s, the future is now.
Derek DeWitt: Pranksters, rejoice.
Jason Cain: That’s right.
Derek DeWitt: And, you know, obviously, for a long time, I think the software has been able to integrate, especially with wayfinding, with SMS, like you can get turn-by-turn directions sent right to your phone, it’s all about, hey, pay attention, so people engage with it.
Jason Cain: Yeah, exactly. You can walk up, you can scan a QR code, you could actually just type in your phone number and then we’ll send you the turn-by-turn directions, so that you can navigate to where you’re going. Mobile is the thing.
Derek DeWitt: Because of that, I think that the sort of onsite experience needs to kinda, I don’t know, like jazz it up a little bit, you know? Obviously, we’ve seen video walls in the past, but I think we’re seeing more different kinds of multi-screen experiences now in some locations.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it used to be you would see video walls in large venues like hotels and sports arenas. But now, you know, your corporate offices are doing the exact same thing, because as we mentioned before, it’s all about getting people to look up from their phone and look up at what you’re presenting to them.
Derek DeWitt: And I think a lot of the technology is making video walls just better now. You know, before it was, you’re literally sticking up a bunch of flat screen TVs with these, you know, kind of thick bezels. So, you have to work around the bezels when you’re designing and stuff, and that’s all starting to go away.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah. I mean, the definition of what used to be considered a video wall is constantly changing. You have, you know, bezel-less displays, MicroTiles, so the images can be seamless. It’s just a really great way to present cohesive storytelling and offer more immersive environments.
Derek DeWitt: And speaking of immersion, obviously interactivity, that’s a great way to know that people are engaged with your signage and with your messaging because they’re physically touching the screen and they’re using it, or they’re interacting with it in some way, like we said, QR code, or maybe you’ve got gesture control or voice control or whatever. But interaction is, I don’t think it’s just that it’s becoming more and more popular, it’s becoming expected by the audience. As digital signs get into more and more public and shared spaces, people just kind of expect it.
Jason Cain: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I mean, interactive displays are just getting so popular, especially for corporate communications. And one of the things that was most eye-opening to me, because again, it’s, as you said, it’s just expected and it’s kind of interesting to me, this was years ago, but we were at a show, it was InfoComm actually, and you know, we had a 65-inch display with a, you know, interactive wayfinding project on it. And the most common thing that people would do when they walked up to it is try to enlarge the display like you would your phone. Now, this is a 65-inch display that you’re standing inches away from. I was just baffled because I’m like, so let me get this straight, we’ve got a map on a 65-inch display, and just out of pure habit and expecting it, they’re trying to make it bigger. And, you know, and they could, but it was just, it was interesting.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. I mean, maybe that’s just their way to test if it’s interactive, like, hmm, can I do this? Oh, I can. That’s very exciting. And of course, this year Visix unveiled sort of this kind of cool AI-moderated gesture control, so you don’t even have to touch the screen at all.
Jason Cain: Yeah, very cool. It was, you know, just another way to make communications more immersive and focus on the individual user’s experience. You know, when you think back, Covid and post-Covid, it was kind of a race to what do you do on an interactive display to make it germ free, we’ll call it? You know, so it’s like, you know, well, do you do a protective screen, or do you do voice-activated controls, or you know, what do you do?
And so, of course, at InfoComm, we showed off this really cool technology where it’s just gesture controls. You literally just use your finger like you’re clicking a mouse, which is a normal behavior that everyone is used to, but instead of touching something, you clicked the mouse in the air, and it took you to where you wanted to go.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I was, I was impressed.
Jason Cain: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, the year before we showed voice activation, which is very cool, too. But you know, you think corporate settings and sometimes they can be loud or sometimes it can be in a busy area, and so the voice controls, you know, could be compromised with that type of scenario, but now you’re using gestures. So it’s, the future is now, I’ll say it again.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s absolutely so. And you know, obviously, for people with accessibility issues, it’s just better for them, you know, as well. And everybody always in a corporate setting or what have you, anything that it deals with employees or the public, you gotta follow those ADA guidelines. And I’m pretty sure ADA is gonna come along one of these days and start looking at some of the new innovations in technology and start making rules for those as well.
Jason Cain: Yeah, absolutely, they will. It’s always been consistent that way.
Derek DeWitt: Now, of course, another thing that people have been talking about for ages in the digital space is cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. Everything’s moving towards the cloud. We said this a few years ago, but now it really is true, like everything is moving towards the cloud.
Jason Cain: There’s still a limited, you know, few places – take your government or some tech companies – that are worried about security, but overall, more and more companies are moving to the cloud. One, it makes just perfect financial sense. It’s a subscription versus, you know, an initial outlay of cash. And it also saves them, quite honestly, from having to take care of software updates and maintenance. It’s all handled. It’s ready to go when you want it to go. It’s always updated, and you don’t have to waste, you know, IT folks’ time doing something else.
Derek DeWitt: And you don’t need that hardware sitting around either. It’s still using hardware and electricity, but it’s using less in some regards. And so, in that way, you can consider it to be more sustainable.
Jason Cain: You know, I would say five years ago-ish, it was more of a 98% perpetual, 2% hosted, and those numbers have drastically changed. I don’t wanna say that it’s 98% hosted, 2% perpetual, but it’s, it’s probably 80/20 hosted. And like I said, there’s are a few outliers, you know, government, tech companies worried about security, but overall, everything’s in the cloud.
Derek DeWitt: It’s a lot less work. You don’t have to make the things, you don’t have to buy them, you don’t have to install them, you don’t have to…. I know that there are, you know, energy efficient displays and even servers that use recyclable materials, but you just don’t have to deal with any of that. That’s literally someone else’s problem.
Jason Cain: That’s right. That’s exactly it.
Derek DeWitt: And of course, ePaper has really taken off in the digital signage space lately. I know the EPS signs are kind of like going like hotcakes. You know, this is the, the E Ink technology that we all first encountered, probably with a Kindle or similar reading device, but you know, why not? They’re easy to use. They’re super low power, right?
Jason Cain: The great thing about ePaper signs is that unless they’re receiving an update, they don’t even use power. So, you know, they’re battery operated, and once the sign has been updated, it no longer needs power. So, the typical battery, they say three years or 10,000 updates. I lean more towards the 10,000 updates, you know, just by pure math. If you think about it, there’s 365 days in a year, and are you really gonna update it 365 days? Don’t know. But 10,000 updates is a lot.
And I am personally, as is our company, seeing that more and more, you know, with the hybrid workplace and the office hoteling, people are using it literally just to have a name and a room number on there. So, you know, John Doe, room 101. Well, once you put John Doe, room 101, until John retires or dies, you no longer are using power at all.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. And, you know, of course that makes me think of a use that Visix has come up with for these very small, super lightweight, easy to mount anywhere kind of, EPS signs and ePaper signs, which is putting a QR code on there and then integrating it with an augmented reality product.
Augmented reality is when you’re using, usually it’s your phone or tablet, it’s through your camera. So, there are virtual elements on the screen overlaid over the actual real world that your camera is picking up. And so, you’re kind of getting a combination of those two things. And obviously, this is gonna be more and more in the future.
Jason Cain: Oh, absolutely. You know, with our Choros space booking platform, you know, when you talk about sustainability, it’s literally a QR code that, as you mentioned, could be on a smaller EPS sign, it could be on a piece of paper, it could be anything that you want. But we’re using the augmented reality that’s already available in smartphones. So, once you scan the QR code, you can actually see what does the room look like, you can book that room, you can search for other rooms.
You know, we were obviously just in Las Vegas, and I had multiple people that came up to me, this isn’t corporate, but you’ll see the similarity. And Vegas is known for their swimming pools. And I guess it’s a big – I don’t like the heat, so I don’t go to the pool – but I guess it’s a big battle to try to save a chair or get a chair when you’re poolside. And so Choros is the perfect fit. You put a QR code on a chair, on a lounger, on a day bed, and someone walks up with their phone, they can book it, and away they go.
Derek DeWitt: There you go. No more having to leave a wet towel behind to claim it as your own. It’s already in the system.
Jason Cain: Yeah. That apparently, that is frowned upon at Vegas pools and on cruise ships. I’ve seen some interesting fights and videos over wet towels being used to claim space.
Derek DeWitt: Now, obviously, the other big buzzword is AI. As I said, the gesture control interface utilizes AI as a sort of intermediary manager. We’re seeing it show up so fast and in so many things, Brian Galante said, obviously content creation is somewhere we’re gonna see it, too. And he thinks it’s also gonna start being used for analytics and data integration as well.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, absolutely. AI is making its way into digital signage in a big way. Just like you said, through data collection, content publishing, analytics. I think currently is where you see most AI in content management systems is in your analytics.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. I especially think of, right now, until the sign can recognize that’s Derek DeWitt, you know, born on December 5th this year, this place, you know, this geographical location, and identify me as a specific individual out of the billions on earth, we create what we call personas for different segments of our audience. I think AI’s kind of just perfect for that.
Jason Cain: You can use AI-powered digital signage, you know, in conjunction with the IoT sensors we were just talking about. And you can, like you said, you can personalize message on screens, you know, based on factors like audience demographics, preferences.
Derek DeWitt: Yes. Now, of course, right now, there are more and more AIs are showing up on the field and in the market, and it’s gonna be quite interesting in the next couple of years to see what happens with that cage match, because I think it’s quite clear a lot of them are not gonna survive. And so, it’s gonna be interesting to see which ones are still around in five years, and how they’ve either swallowed up their competition or bested their competition and what they’ve started to integrate with.
You know, is it just gonna be image and audio creation, or are we gonna see it actually getting incorporated into content management software? You could already get them to write code, maybe it’ll write its own code. It’ll come up with innovations all by itself.
Jason Cain: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that, you know, you said it perfectly when you said there’s gonna be a lot of change and it’s just gonna see how it all shakes out. You know, the big best players are left, and how does that all integrate into a system, truly integrate into a system?
Derek DeWitt: But right now, the state of the art, as we know, it, is prompt writing, which is what gets the AI to do what you want it to do. And that is a skill. I know there’s been a lot of talk about people, you know, getting $100,000 a year jobs and more for being prompt writing engineers, which I do wonder about the validity of those news stories, but it is a very particular skill and it’s worth looking into. It’s not quite as straightforward as people might think. Not yet anyway.
Jason Cain: Definitely not yet. Maybe, could it be? Sure, but only time will tell. It’s all still evolving and changing, and we will see.
Derek DeWitt: Yes, we will indeed. I wanna go back to something you said earlier about how there are still some holdouts, let’s call them, or organizations that don’t feel comfortable going to cloud yet, like government facilities and maybe some tech companies and things like this, because they’re worried about security. And yet I wonder if security is the same problem it used to be. One of the arguments against the hybrid workplace, pre-pandemic was, well, it’s insecure, and yet we now see that that’s just actually not true.
Jason Cain: So, security is, you know, obviously still a really big concern, especially for larger companies that have offices across the country and around the world. I think that beyond the standard firewalls and antivirus apps, future digital signage systems, they’ll have to incorporate, you know, more of an advanced security measures to protect against cyber threats and unauthorized access. We also have to think about content manipulation. For example, if your AI is breached and told to create something inappropriate, what does that look like?
Derek DeWitt: Right, right. Or, you know, whatever, it changes the deadline for that benefits enrollment or whatever. I mean, that could have huge ramifications, especially if you’re using an outside party, you know?
Jason Cain: Yeah. I mean, exactly. I mean, in, you know, old school and even today’s society, we have security in place. It’s not security, but it’s kind of a fail safe because, you know, you can have a content creator be a high school student or a college student or, you know, whatever, but you don’t allow them to publish what they created. They create the content, and then it has to be approved by somebody that is allowed to approve the content. That’s how you stop, you know, a high school student from saying, you know, that they’re in love with, you know, Billie Jean or, you know, school sucks or whatever. So same thing with AI, you know, now it’s not even a, you know, Johnny playing a joke, it’s AI saying, you know…
Derek DeWitt: Johnny married a horse!
Jason Cain: Yeah, exactly. You know, or whatever. So yeah, you’re definitely gonna have to have, you know, some sort of a way to prevent content manipulation.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. And I think AI, again, because it can operate so quickly, operates at so many cycles a second, much faster than we do, it seems like it’s gonna be also a natural pairing with, sort of creating more reliable systems and making sure that everybody’s data remains, sort of, has good integrity.
Jason Cain: Oh, yeah, exactly. You know, hackers and threats are just gonna continue to get more sophisticated. I mean, as technology gets more sophisticated, so do the hackers. So, you know, we’ll definitely have to expand the ways we ensure the data integrity and system reliability.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so that’s a look at some of the emerging trends and technologies that are shaping the future of corporate digital signage today. Check this space a year from now, and who knows what will have come along. You know, as we said, AI showed up, really just a year ago, and now it’s everywhere. AR has been around for a long time (that’s augmented reality), and yet it’s only very recently that people have started to figure out how to start using it in non-niche use cases. IoT continues to grow more and more and more. And eco-friendly tech is becoming more and more quite the thing. And so, we see all this stuff starting to come together. I think the future kind of looks kind of cool. Maybe not Jetsons yet, but still pretty cool.
Jason Cain: I agree. Maybe not Jetsons, but we’re getting closer.
Derek DeWitt: Well, I’d like to thank my guest today. Jason Cain is a region manager for the south central region of the United States for talking with me today about some ideas about the future of digital signage communications in the corporate space. Thanks for talking to me, Jason. Super stimulating stuff. I always find future forecasting very interesting.
Jason Cain: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Good conversation.
Derek DeWitt: Indeed. And, again, thank you everybody out there for listening. I remind you there is a transcript with links to helpful outside sources on the Visix website.