Smart meetings – three visions of the future

Of course, developing daring visions of the future for a business meeting in the year 2030 is a challenge.

His work is focused on the development of new digital services to improve workplace conditions in future. How companies can manage their meeting rooms in a smarter and more sustainable way is a question that particularly interests Paul Chaplin. Other innovation teams at Konica Minolta are investigating what employees need to set up somewhere they can work well and happily in any location. Or are finding out how meeting participants can work together efficiently and simply. Three visions, and three intelligent assistants for everyday digital office work.

Vision 1: the Smart Room Booking System – when meeting rooms learn and think

The Smart Room Booking System learns more with every room booking about how to optimise the building infrastructure of small, medium-sized and large companies. The system records the utilised capacity, use and usage duration of various meeting rooms.

In addition, it combines an intelligent calendar app with a variety of data from the Internet of Things (IoT), and thus ensures optimal booking and capacity usage of rooms. In the medium term, it should also be able to save and arrange specific meeting preferences such as lighting, sound and room temperature. The Smart Room Booking System can also be combined with weather and climate data in future. It could then ensure sustainable and cost-efficient heating or cooling of the meeting rooms depending on when they are in use and monitor adherence to environmental and health standards.

Vision 2: Spoke – when a wearable multifunctional device turns any room into a workspace

Konica Minolta’s Spoke is the vision of an all-rounder that makes any room a friendly, well-equipped workspace in no time. Whether it is within the company, in a hotel or in booked meeting rooms: Spoke raises the quality of meetings to a new level with a range of practical features. These include a 360-degree camera and the possibility to project important business or project documents, images, films or graphics onto a wide variety of surfaces.

Vision 3: The Cognitive Hub – when people and artificial intelligence work in perfect harmony

The Cognitive Hub brings together artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT data on a learning platform to more efficiently manage cooperation within and between teams. Where and how can colleagues best be reached? What tasks should they take on? The aim of the Spoke vision is to improve complex workflows in projects and teams with the help of the Cognitive Hub and, at the same time, to ensure greater security for data flow. Of course, within the human–AI team it is still the human who makes the decisions.