Large organizations and multinational businesses understandably take centre stage in discussions around what needs UC and collaboration solutions serve. This is especially true for industries like financial services, healthcare, and government where even the average layperson understands that excellent communications, collaboration, security, and compliance services are essential to their day-to-day operations.

However, high-quality and innovative UC and collaboration technologies matter to every organization, no matter its size or prominence in the public consciousness. It also matters to the passionate business users who look after the tech stack for such organizations, including Eddie Nesbeth, a Collaborative Applications Analyst at Davidson College, North Carolina.

Nesbeth serves as the higher education institution’s product owner for all its collaborative apps and SaaS platforms. With Davidson numbering close to 4000 users across the student, staff, and faculty bodies, Nesbeth acts as “the middleman between internal stakeholders and the outside vendors”, he explained to UC Today. “My job is to identify business needs and translate those to technical needs and make sure that our vendors are providing those solutions.”

With Davidson using multiple Microsoft, Google and Zoom services, he is “satisfied” with its tech stack and the current offerings provided by vendors – especially their recent integration of Zoom Intelligent Director which has enabled more seamless hybrid working. Davidson has also adjusted well to the era of permanent hybrid working, with on-premises phones recently being upgraded to Zoom Phone under Nesbeth’s watch.

However, if there is one request he’d like to make of vendors in the future, it’s the opportunity for smaller organizations like Davidson to be invited to test products in their alpha and beta phases.

“We’re a liberal arts college in North Carolina,” Nesbeth said, “just over 2000 students. I know (Microsoft’s AI-powered solution) Copilot is being tested right now. I think they said some Fortune 500 companies are testing it, and we’re never going to be among those.”

“We’re never going to be in those conversations, so sometimes, yes, that can be a harrowing reminder of where you are in that hierarchy of companies. My day-to-day work and what’s important to me in my job; for some people that doesn’t even register anywhere on their radar.”

Nesbeth stressed that this is not an emotional subject but a practical issue. Testing these products through massive organizations can help debug problems and help steer quality assurance before the product reaches general availability. However, there are potential applications behind a solution that only smaller or more specialized organizations might discover to facilitate greater innovation.

“A lot of these companies saw AI and their goal was ‘How can we use this to help our salespeople close better? How can we get more deals out of this?’” Nesbeth said. “We don’t operate for profit, so we are looking at it from a completely different lens.”

How can we use this to make our stakeholders’ lives easier? We’re thinking about students, we’re thinking about faculty, we’re thinking about staff. We’re not thinking about a sales team. We’re not thinking about it necessarily as CRM. We’re not thinking about client retention. That’s not our issue. We just want the best solution possible for our end users.”

Speaking of AI, it was 2023’s technology hot topic that caught Nesbeth’s attention at this year’s Enterprise Connect, which is where UC Today initially met him. While AI’s ground-breaking applications might not have particularly focused on higher education so far, they might prove just as revolutionary in the world of universities too. “I saw those announcements and my heart started racing because this is the future,” Nesbeth said.

However, integrating AI might be an exciting future, but it likely will also prove a significant challenge.

“There are different personalities in higher ed,” Nesbeth said. “There was a survey the other day that showed a lot of people are very apprehensive about this. Some people are willing to try it but unsure about its future. Some people have drawn a line in the sand, ‘I’m not using it. I don’t want it to have my data or my information.’ Some people are just completely afraid of it.”

“So that is the next emerging challenge for us. How do we drive adoption to this wave that is coming? Being on the tech side, I can see that it’s coming. I get the road map emails. I check the newsletters. There’s nothing we can do to avoid it.”

“How do I get that professor that started here in the 70s writing everything down, then moved into faxing, and then got e-mail in the 90s but was still hesitant, and then resisted Wikipedia in the 2000s? How do I now get that person to say yeah, ‘I’m using AI in my daily workflow?’”

If there is some source of encouragement to be considered in Davidson’s adaptation to AI, it’s in how it moved to a hybrid working model during and after the pandemic.

“Especially in higher ed, you’re working with a lot of different personality styles and you find that a lot of people are used to working in the way that they’ve been working for 10 or 20 or 30 years,” Nesbeth said. “The pandemic forced everyone to accept a little bit of change, but now a lot of people want to revert to the way things were before. Then you have this other silo of people that are like, ‘the world changed. We’re never going back to that.’”

Nesbeth’s task was, and still is to an extent, to ensure both groups of people are satisfied with their experience – to “increase meeting equity” between those working remotely and those in-person. The Zoom Intelligent Director’s multi-camera functionality has proven essential to fulfilling Nesbeth’s objectives.

“If you are in an office with ten other people (on a video call),” Nesbeth expanded, “I don’t know about you, but I’m staring at myself the whole time. I want to make sure that I don’t look funny and I want to make sure I’m being heard correctly. Whereas when I’m in my office at home, I don’t have those worries. Zoom Intelligent Director is doing a lot of work to help us get to the point of seamless hybrid work.”

However, while the successful transition into hybrid working might establish a template to follow, engaging students, staff, and faculty to collectively engage with AI might be a more intimidating challenge.

Nesbeth has certainly considered what exactly AI’s best solution might be for Davidson’s students, staff, and faculty – as a centralized information hub fully integrated with the university’s suite of apps and platforms.

“All three of those stakeholders are searching for different types of information,” he explained. “Students are searching for class information, syllabus information, and maybe meal plan information. Staff are searching for travel policies, remote work agreements, and business documents. Faculty are searching for research stuff, for office locations.”

“All that information is siloed and decentralized, and in different places that might be a nightmare to find it, or you might just never find it, or you don’t know the right person to ask.”

Nesbeth cited the tortuous process of finding all the policies needed just to get to Enterprise Connect: “It took me probably a couple of hours of searching through all of our documents to find the travel policy which told me how much I could spend on meals, how much reimbursement there was for miles and hotels.”

“How do we create a centralized place where all these people, for all the different information they’re searching for, can go and get their answers? What that boils down to is an AI-powered enterprise search.”

Nesbeth discussed how this type of solution would enable him to ask the centralized search how much he would be allowed to spend on meals and get back a natural language answer. “I think AI will go a long way in helping us get to that point where everything isn’t so fragmented, and all the information can be siloed in one place together,” Nesbeth added.

Nesbeth came across a vendor named Glean at Enterprise Connect who has created a similar solution to the AI-powered enterprise search service he’s seeking. Glean is integrating with both Zendesk, which Davidson’s help desk uses, and with Davidson’s public website to enable users to search for information nested 10 or 15 pages deep. Glean can integrate with Google Workspace so users can search for information that’s in their organization’s Google Drive.

“I think there were over 500 different integrations that different companies use. Obviously, we use a very small amount, but to take all that data, ingest it, learn it, and be a one-stop solution for people to come in and use natural language search for what they need? That is going to be a great asset to our campus.”



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