In our latest blog, Tim Pearson reflects on CES 2024 where AI was omnipresent, innovation abounded, and conversations focused on creative solutions to address existing and emerging business challenges.
As new year celebrations faded, it was time to head for Las Vegas. Providing an interesting juxtaposition of tourists enjoying the delights of the strip, interwoven with the badge-adorned 130,000 faithful that were attending CES this year, there were two letters that were everywhere: A and I.
For the second year, Kudelski Group companies NAGRA and Kudelski IoT, hosted visitors onto their booth within the Smart Home area of the Venetian Expo. Our business-value generating solutions enjoyed high levels of engagement from our visitors, both in traditional and emerging markets. Under the theme of ‘Secure Your Lifestyle, Connect Your World’, our teams showed the latest solutions designed to protect consumers from increasing cyber threats, maximize always-on support solutions and amplify benefits of the latest trends in media and entertainment aggregation, underpinned by the omnipresent AI.
Let’s have a look back at the highlights!
Securing Connected Lifestyles
NAGRA Scout took center stage in our showcase and featured several demonstrators. Designed to safeguard against potential cyber threats via smart home devices, NAGRA Scout empowers consumers to shape their internet experience, delivering advanced intelligent network security and ensuring content filtering extends beyond the home.
For operators, one of the biggest challenges is how to support the range of connected devices we’re all busily adding to our homes, as well as the additional challenge of cost-sensitive home gateways that need to support the latest range of connectivity standards. To address this, the NAGRA Scout team in partnership with Otodo showed an innovative, Matter-certified hub that connects to the home gateway and provides a centralized home connectivity hub. Key for operators who don’t provide a home gateway as part of their broadband proposition and complementary to those that do, the solution was further strengthened by an innovative, AI-powered troubleshooting agent available to operators that diagnoses in-home connectivity issues.
Smart Home opportunities and challenges were also discussed at the Parks Associates CONNECTIONS Conference. A panel featuring Nancy Goldberg, NAGRA EVP and CMO, took the pulse of consumer concerns about privacy and security in the connected home space and highlighted statistics that support the latest developments in the connected home space. Read more about the key takeaways from the panel here.
Always-On Support
Given the dynamics of the media and entertainment industry and the increasingly service-aggregated propositions being offered by operators, an area that often doesn’t keep pace is customer support. Today’s consumers like to interact at a time of their choosing and often, without talking directly to an agent.
Step forward the latest innovation from NAGRA, our innovative GenAI conversational agent that reduces contact center costs by directly explaining to consumers complex billing structures and suggesting optimal product matches. Designed to improve Net Promoter Scores (NPS) by reducing call response and average handling times, it directly addresses 60% of contact center traffic that focuses on billing explanation. Enabled through chatbots, social media and voice conversations via phone or set-top box, the solution relies on the integration of the operator’s CRM data. The consumer’s digital twin then directs a Large Language Model (LLM) that powers the NAGRA Negotiation Agent. For example, when asked a question such as ‘Why is my bill so high this month?’, the Negotiation Agent responds with a list of services broken down so each service can be identified. The Negotiation Agent then continues the dialogue and can offer adjustments, new deals or upgrades based on the consumer’s likely reactions predicted by their digital twin, albeit while constrained by operator-defined guardrails. The benefit for the consumer is that they have a results-focused discussion while the operator benefits from reduced calls into the contact center.
Service Aggregation
Highlighting the move from content aggregation to a service marketplace, our teams also showed a new super app approach that allows operators to broaden their service proposition in a world where video is no longer the dominant offer. Designed to break down barriers between service types, eliminate complexity and enable seamless and digital engagement for consumers across infinite digital services, the NAGRA super app has digital privacy and security at its core. An ewallet also enables payments in traditional, reward and digital currencies. With a migration path from the NAGRA OpenTV Video platform available, the new solution stimulated much discussion on the stand with operators looking to strengthen their value propositions.
Is AI at a Tipping Point?
During the Variety Entertainment Summit, Kudelski Group Chairman and CEO André Kudelski was part of a fascinating panel examining whether AI was at its tipping point. Examining the non-regulation of the AI industry and how it can be used to both attack unlimited consumer accounts on the one hand and create new content on the other, the panel comprised executives from Electronic Arts, The Recording Academy, Google, Digital Domain and was moderated by Deloitte Consulting.
The panel debated the role of AI in producing new content from library content based on a pattern recognition approach that delivers a result that may appear genuine but has not had permission from the owning authors across video, image and voice. It was considered that the mass adoption of tools such as ChatGPT has further increased this risk given the requirement to train individual models has now been reduced, meaning anyone now has access to powerful ways of creating AI-originated content.
While natural language processing exhibited in today’s toolsets may be facilitating the speed of growth in this space, the panel was quick to point out that AI has no moral code or core. Models need to be trained else we will experience hallucinations, or simply errors in more common speak. As a result, responsible AI policies need to be established both by content creators and the wider regulatory landscape to protect against areas such as bias but also to protect the IP of source content owners. As Harvey Mason Jr from the Recording Academy expressed, if a Grammy is awarded to an artist that has used soundalike or other AI-based content, who gets paid or rewarded?
The discussion around traceability has parallels elsewhere in the media and entertainment industry. André Kudelski referenced that the work done today to trace content pirates involves full IP tracing to identify the source. Together with consumer education, this also has a role to play with AI to establish the original content author.
One positive use of AI was in the gaming industry. Marija Radulovic-Nastic, CTO of Electronic Arts shared her positive experiences of using AI where game development is forecast to drop from six months to six weeks and she saw no reason why ultimately that couldn’t become six days! AI is also driving new game concepts such as intelligent non-playing pieces that interact with the gameplay or become coaches for human players.
Summing up, the panel considered what we will be discussing about AI in a year’s time. Should we be scared or excited? The panel’s view was one of cautious optimism. We may start to see new awards for AI creators for creative sampling (just as Napster did before), the industry will learn more about how to successfully implement guardrails and the limits of navigation for AI, the impact of synthetic data will be better understood, and the public will understand more about both the benefits and risks of AI.
‘All On’ Across 2024
Reflecting on CES and its theme of ‘All-On’, it’s apparent that 2024 will be a year of opportunity. If you’d like to find out more about the solutions mentioned in this blog, please get in touch! We’d love to continue the conversation and hear about the opportunities you face in your sector. With solution experts distributed across the globe, we’ll have someone local to you who both understands your market and how to seize opportunity. We look forward to hearing from you!
