Drones, Virtual Tours, Avatars and Sports – Digital CxO Podcast EP 73

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today of course is Mike Baard. How are you?

Good to be here as always. Well, we have some really fun things to discuss today. And so first we're gonna talk about drones and how they're being used in warehouses.

We have some really neat articles over on Digital six so that you can check out, but they're being used currently for some inferred case counting and speeding up the process of delivery. And we're hearing more about this being used in the manufacturing area. So what are you hearing, Mike?

I was excited to see a story about drones that didn't involve killing people, so that's what I was kind of excited about. So there not to be too facetious about it, but that seems to be like the number one use case, kinda like, you know, I think we could use this stuff for better things. Yes.

And you know, warehouses. Yeah, I mean they're becoming more robotic and it makes sense to me that there's a drone flying around with a little infrared camera that's gonna, you know, take care of inventory. It probably be done faster and a little more accurately over time.

Uh, I'm hoping that, you know, the folks who work in the warehouse that will find more interesting things for them to do to add some value on top of that because, well, uh, I'm not sure, maybe they're not gonna work at a warehouse, but we need to, you know, make sure we're retraining all these people as we bring all these innovations along, right? Yes. And you can find a lot of pieces on digital CXO about other use cases for drones in the manufacturing industry.

Um, it, it goes beyond the warehouses to the delivery. So last mile delivery when, you know, it's hard to get to certain places in a timely manner or due to some sort of weather issue or traffic issue, utilizing drones for that. In fact, um, there's a piece about Chick-fil-A is going to start using drones, uh, to deliver food and, um, various other retail stores that are gonna deliver products.

We're gonna need an AI traffic cop for all these drones flying around because, you know, they're likely to smack into each other at some point. And of course, you know, some people may take delight and try and knock 'em out of the sky, but that's probably not a good idea. But yeah, things will happen.

Well, you know, it was just recently May the fourth and so we've been rewatching all the Star Wars movies in order and you know, I hope we're not anywhere like that soon, having all these drones everywhere. Yeah, it could, I don't know how it's gonna play out ultimately. I mean, do we have to like give drones their own airspace now and our planes gonna have to fly higher?

I mean there's only so much room in the sky, so Exactly. Where will the planes fit? Where will the drones fit?

You know, it has to be like an FAA problem. Yes, it's a good question. We'll see what happens.

Um, I haven't seen any drones flying around my town delivering anything yet, but I'm sure it starts in the bigger cities. Um, so next is virtual tours. This is a big area that we're seeing, um, augmented reality and virtual reality is, um, being implemented more and more in the travel industry.

And, uh, you can see several pieces over on digital CXO, but um, there's a survey that shows that the tour market is hitting 18 billion by 2035, the virtual tour market, and, uh, some other pieces on there about buildings where you can get tours of the buildings and landmarks, um, via virtual reality. We talked a little bit about this last episode and this article kind of moves that whole conversation forward. But so I was unclear though.

I mean, is a virtual tour something that I physically go to and then I like get an augmented reality experience? Or is it I stay at home and I just kind of buzz around the Grand Canyon because somebody already took a drone and captured the footage and presented it to me in a way that I don't have to leave 'em up? It's both.

It is both. So we've got buildings that you can enter and they're very, um, uh, they have virtual reality things inside of them. And then we also are talking about staying home and using virtual reality to get tours of places that maybe you can't visit otherwise.

Um, so it's both. Do you think some people will just stay home and there might not be as much travel to the actual location? I mean it could have a negative impact on local tourism, but I don't know, I'm just kind of postulating for grins here.

I mean, how do you see this playing out? Well, you know, as far as that goes, I see it more as a tool to get people to want to visit those places. I mean, I'm thinking about myself personally.

If I can see, you know, when I'm looking to be inspired for places to visit, I like to look them up and I look at lots of pictures and if I could have some sort of virtual tour and familiarize myself from home with the area and then I'd be inspired to go visit and I'd feel more comfortable because I am more familiar with the area now, especially if it's another country. So I think it's just going to help. All right, all those people asking for directions in New York City will probably slowly but surely dissipate in time Maybe.

So, I mean, I could see that, um, being such a great tool to have a tour of big cities and to know where you're going ahead of time through like feeling like you've actually been there and walked those blocks. And then when you're there it should be like a piece of cake. All right, I'm with you.

So next avatars, we have an article that you shared recently and Nvidia and ServiceNow have recently demoed a customer service avatar, which allows humans to ask the avatar to do different tasks, uh, in a very natural way and eliminate some of those tedious tasks. So can you share more about it? Yeah, I mean we're all kind of buzzing about generative AI and all these AI assistance, but the next wave of this is gonna be avatars that we assign personality traits to, right?

There's no reason why that AI assistant that you're currently using call a copilot will one day have some personality traits that you subscribe to it that have, uh, you know, they could be funny, they could be, uh, serious, they could be, um, advisory and I think we're gonna have a bunch of Denise that we're all gonna uh, use to accomplish various tasks. But it was just interesting to watch. And from a digital CXO perspective, it's kind of like, well this is not very far away.

I mean, it's not here today. It's probably overly expensive to produce using the current GPU technologies, but if you're planning on a three to five year horizon window, you might wanna start thinking about this a little bit. 'cause it, I feel like it's gonna be commonplace.

Oh yeah, I think so. I mean, who wouldn't want to just be able to ask an avatar to do a bunch of tasks and move on to other tasks? Uh, at the same time it'll certainly speed up processes and be more efficient.

Yeah, I mean there's tons of stuff there, you know, we never get to in our lives that somebody could handle for us. And I think who hasn't has said at one point I need my own assistant. Mm-Hmm, exactly.

And next up we have the world of sports and we've got a new potential streaming service today, b this fall. Um, it's, it's all the main players in, uh, sports television, they're gonna come together and offer a streaming platform. However, um, it's being a little bit contested by certain companies who say they're gonna be sort of like a monopoly and there's gonna be no other choices because all the big ones are gonna be together in that one package.

So it's not gonna be as affordable, I think it was in the realm of say 30, 40, $50, um, a month. When you think about that along with everything else you're probably gonna be paying for, it's like, why don't you just get regular television again? Well, yeah, It's gonna, you're gonna wind up paying more no matter how you look at it.

So anybody that tells you that, yeah, we're gonna bundle services together to save you money is probably lying. Um, but it's an interesting dilemma. So let's say I am the New York Edge and I have my own yes network and I make a fortune off of that yes network and I use that money to fund the talent that I use to drive a ball club.

So why am I gonna be interested in joining up with some combined service? Now if I, I'm say the Pittsburgh Pirates and I don't have a network, then maybe this is an interesting alternative and you know, it'll be a revenue stream for them. At the same time though, as far as I've been seen in the last year, apple has streaming games so is AWS for that matter.

And uh, sometimes frankly it's a little annoying trying to figure out what game is being played whereby whom, because, uh, like, uh, what network isn't on, I just used to know that in the previous years and maybe these guys will make it simpler or maybe I'll discover sports that I never knew existed before. Because you know, my son was telling me about, you know, some hockey game between Mongol and Macau recently and I was like, where were you watching that? And he was like, some obscure internet service and there you go.

You know, you raise a good point there. Uh, we do have the same issue when we're trying to find some particular sports event and we don't remember what station it's on and we're sitting there clicking through stations and clicking through all the apps and everything. So that convenience factor of you can find any sport on one streaming platform would be pretty nice.

I think a lot of people would like that. Mm-Hmm. And I hopefully they'll get to know my tastes and maybe they'll surface games that they know that I'm interested in versus always me trying to figure out who's playing when and where.

It would just be nice to say, you know, we realize that you're a Yankee fan and there's actually a Red Sox Oriole game on that you care about because the Orioles adjacent the Yankees and they're half game out. And I'll be like, oh, I won't care about that. So I'm hoping for a little more personalization maybe.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, as we see with, with, um, with a lot of platforms, you know, the popularity will determine the price.

If it's really popular and everybody is catching on and using it, what I tend to see is the price goes up a little bit, it'll, it'll prove whether or not it's worth it or not. Now do you think that these streaming sports services, will heavens to Betsy be hooked up to gambling sites? That is a good question.

I think there'd be some, you'd have to look at legalities and everything else of that. Yeah, I believe it's already legal in most states. So, uh, you know, it seems to me maybe at the end of the day the big casinos are gonna wind up bombing the streaming services 'cause they're gonna be like, Hey, yeah, we'll advertise on and and then they'll sit there and go, Jesus just cheaper to buy this thing than it is to advertise on it.

And that very well could happen. There is gonna certainly be a lot of advertising opportunities and like you said, the teams that aren't anywhere on TV right now, it's a good opportunity to just tag on those other additional rando, uh, you know, channel not rando for se, but you know, all those other sports that might not be normally aired could have a chance to be aired through just, you know, these additional extras on these services. Well, you know, the X paid, uh, let me try that again.

Well, the xp uh, let me try that again. The expats from various cities that live around the world and that are still sports fans for the team that they grew up in, they're gonna be very happy. 'cause they're gonna be like, I can actually watch my team even though I'm living in Singapore or wherever.

It's Yes, that's true. So that brings us to the end of today's list and we would like to ask you to share your comments and tell us what do you like caring about? What are you most interested in?

And then share in the comments so we can cover more of that. Meanwhile, if you wanna read all the details, go to digital CXO to read all about what we talked about today. And Mike, do you have any last words?

Yeah, if you have some cool instance of a digital transformation, by all means share. com. We'd love to check it out or we'll get one of our fellow writers to go do something with it and then we'll feature it on the show.

So, hey guys, share. Yes, definitely. Alright, well that does it.

Thank y'all and have a wonderful rest of your week.