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planning to bring the AI destination closer and give access to powerful machine learning and data science technologies that can turn data into game-changing insight.” Not to be outdone, VMware is em- bracing AI in a different way, unveiling Workspace ONE Intelligence, a cloud- based service integrated with the Workspace ONE digital collaboration platform that offers the aggregation and correlation of users, apps, net- works and endpoints data. Organizations have struggled to gain visibility across all end users, devices and applications, as the data is spread across many systems and tools. This lack of visibility contributes to poor user experience, greater op- erational costs and a lack of proper security controls. Workspace ONE Intelligence features a decision en- gine that leverages the data to pro- vide actionable recommendations and automation. This intelligent digital workspace can improve employee experience by allowing IT to identify and proactively fix issues before they impact productivity, set employee- friendly access policies, and provide a consistent user experience across devices and platforms while helping mitigate security issues at scale. It also features integrated insights to bring together actionable information and recommendations for the entire digital workspace across all endpoints, apps, networks and user experience into one comprehensive view. Inte- grated insights pinpoint what’s working and what’s not in the environment, including monitoring application perfor- mance, and offer tangible recommen- dations that IT and development can easily act on, said VMware. How It Looks in Practice Despite vendor announcements, there are a few immediate aspects when it comes to how AI can open up a new chapter for UC in practice. For instance, an ideal application of AI or machine learning in UC is to nurture the shift from reactive to predictive troubleshooting – something that the VMware platform hints at. “There are several elements that contribute to a good unified com- munications experience, many of which are controlled by enterprise IT departments,” said Alan Shen, vice president of Consulting Services at Unify Square. “However, many of these departments manage UC on a reactive basis. This notion of predict- ing when something is going to go wrong is the first area where IT can mature. People do not change their communication patterns very often, and AI has potential to latch on and move the needle when it comes to being predictive.” Examples of this could be opera- tional, as in predicting when a VIP has a conference and intelligently manag- ing her communications settings; or quality of experience-oriented, as in Core Communications (Continued from page 18) Channel Vision | May - June, 2018 20