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Am back now from last week’s Future of Work Expo in Fort Lauderdale, and from all accounts, it was our best one to date. I’ve been conference Chair for four years running, and we’ve got a really good mix now of familiar companies and ones you don’t know, and I think that reflects how broad the FOW moniker has become.

The first two days focused on workplace FOW themes, where we talked as much about HR, soft skills and culture as we did about how technology can support the hybrid work model. AI was a constant theme, and it’s clear that people have mixed feelings about it. For the third day, our focus shifted to the contact center, where we looked at how AI can be used to both improve CX, along with making the agent experience better, especially for those working from home.

We also had a FOW pavilion on the show floor, and on Thursday morning, many of our sponsors did live demos, which is a great way to see first-hand what’s coming to help make hybrid work viable. The speaker roster was solid, and all our sessions could easily have gone a lot longer, with plenty of audience engagement. I don’t have the luxury of time now to write a lengthy recap here, but I’ll have something coming soon. Until then, I did talk about the event highlights on my Watch This Space podcast, and the July episode comes out next Tuesday, so watch for that, or come back here on my site to give it a listen.

A quick shout-out to all the folks at TMC - thanks for having me back, and to their team for all the prep to make this event happen. Thanks also to colleagues Phil Edholm and Tom Brannen for helping out as moderators for some of the sessions. Extra kudos to Phil, who did a wrapup talk with me for the closing session.

Not only was it a nice way to end the conference, but Phil has told us he’s retiring after our event, so this ended up being his swan song as an event speaker. I felt lucky to share the floor with him for that, and his great insights will definitely be missed. You’ve had a great run, Phil, and you’ve enriched our understanding of this space. Am sure I won’t be the only analyst to offer thanks for all that you’ve done for such a long time - wow. With that, I’ll leave you with some photos below, and if you follow me on social, I posted during the event, so some of these will look familiar.

Below: Rethinking the Organization session, with Intermedia, Poly, Seekr, Coworks and Eleviant (photo: Tom Brannen); Barbara Steel from EY with highlights from their latest workplace study; and our panel on using AI to improve CX - with Avaya, Genesys, SharpenCX and IntelePeer

Below: Keith Sonderling, Commissioner, US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission; David Jodoin from Nynja (photo - Glenn Goldberg); FOW Expo program schedule

Below: Tom Brannen’s cybersecurity session with Journey ID and Connx; Phil Edholm’s frontline workers session with Twilio, Intermedia, United Office and Eleviant; Tom and I with Phil