Introducing Lena

It has been a month since we debuted Lena at ISE, and I wanted to share more information about who Lena is and what problems she is going to solve.

First off, Lena is the product from Netspeek.  Netspeek is a start-up formed to bring Gen AI into the UC and Pro AV spaces.   While there is so much talk around AI in the industry, much of it seems to be hype and marketing.  At Netspeek we are embracing the massive changes Gen AI is bringing and using it as a tool to solve long standing industry challenges.

While Lena is a Gen AI SaaS platform, she solves problems in a very humanistic way so we can’t help but personify Lena and talk about Lena as a her or she.  When using Lena, you can talk to her naturally in the way that you would talk to a human as Natural Language Processing is built into the platform.

We think of Lena as a virtual assistant to help with the products and technologies in conference rooms.  As traditional AV support of conference rooms has merged into an organization’s IT, many of the nuances of the support of these spaces have become more challenging for many organizations.  As the number of spaces where AV and collaboration technologies continue to increase, the number of people who have deep knowledge and experience is not scaling at the same pace.

There are lots of problems that Lena can solve, but we are initially focusing Lena in 3 key areas;   Installation, Administration and Reporting. 

One of the key points that makes Lena able to be so successful in supporting these spaces is that she is an “expert” in the industry.  We have been and will continually keep Lena up to date on all the knowledge within the industry.  She is an expert on different platforms like Microsoft Teams Zoom.  Lena is also an expert in the main hardware manufacturers that have products in the conference room like Neat, Poly, Crestron, Sony, Samsung, Barco and many more. 

Lena can also use data from other sources when helping with installations and administration.  For instance, she can leverage Service Now to not only open and close tickets, but Lena can leverage the vast database of tickets to learn how to solve problems. 

Lena is built on a very modern AI architecture leveraging the latest tools in her platform.  For instance, she leverages an agentic architecture that allows for virtual “experts” to support the administration of different devices and platforms.  Netspeek has spent a lot of time on the architecture which allows for an enterprise grade platform where we do not see incorrect answers or “hallucinations” that you see with consumer solutions like ChatGPT.

As Lena has this very robust architecture and deep database of knowledge, this enables her to support the 3 main use cases:

Installation: What I have heard from organizations for years is that they want the implementation of rooms to be simpler and more cost effective.  While everyone has that one boardroom, or complex training room, most rooms are far simpler yet the inherent nature of multiple vendors with an ever-growing list of products and features have made it difficult for a generalized IT professional to keep up to be an expert.  This has helped to keep the costs high with the integrators. 

Lena will help bridge the knowledge gap and enable a generalized IT professional to install most rooms.  Lena will create easy to follow workflows for the installer (i.e.  Lena - “step three plug the HDMI cable from the Neat Bar Monitor 1 output to the HDMI1 on the Samsung monitor.  Once that is done, I will send a signal to the monitor to test it was done correctly”).  Having a problem with one of the steps, no problem, just ask Lena to help you troubleshoot an issue real time.  Having this virtual assistant to work with, will drive down the complexity and allow for more cost effective installations.

Administration: While the UC and AV industry has seen quality improve significantly over the last few years, the users’ expectations for the rooms have also increased significantly.  As it has been such a challenge just to get people back into the office, any issues or any down time has much higher visibility.  And since conference rooms rarely only support a single person, any issue can cause exponential downtime for employees.

Lena can autonomously support the technologies in the conference room in several ways.  Of course, Lena can monitor what is happening on the products, but many industry monitoring tools can do basic monitoring.  What differentiates Lena from those products is the proactive maintenance of the rooms.  Lena can autonomously troubleshoot issues, can read device logs and act on the findings, can change system settings and more. 

One of the major applications Lena will be able to deliver in version 1.0 is the ability to run room checks.  Room checks today are done leveraging sneaker wear, where a tech goes into the room to make sure that everything is online and working correctly.  Lena can autonomously run a room check at a time that the administrator defines.  If Lena finds a problem with the room, she can automatically fix the problem.  If the problem is beyond what Lena can fix remotely (i.e. she doesn’t have arms to plug a cable in) she will alert the administrator and could very well give much deeper information about the issue (i.e. she read the logs and identified a hardware issue) than an IT administrator would traditionally have knowledge of.

Reporting: Generative AI is going to have a big impact on data and analytics.  As Lena has such a deep understanding of the use cases for the rooms with her ability to help with installations and administration of rooms, this sets Lena up to deliver an incredibly rich set of data on the conference room spaces.  Being able to create very specific reports of what is in the room, assisting with analysis of usage, licensing, maintenance, educating on updates from vendors (i.e. new updates, new products, end of sale notices) there is so much Lena brings to organizations around reporting.

One of the things that makes Lena so powerful is that she is how she uses Generative AI to solve for these use cases.  There have been other tools that can solve for room checks or installations for instance.  But by leveraging Gen AI Lena creates the commands to control the devices independently each time.  There is no pre-coding or If-this-then-that statements needed for these use cases.  She understands what the ask is, she understands how to control the devices (via Cloud-to-Cloud API’s, API’s, etc.) and she figures out how to get there each time independently.

Showing the world Lena for the first time at ISE was a fun experience.  Watching the reactions from so many industry leaders as they see what is possible by vertically integrating Generative AI was a real highlight of the show for me.  And it was just the beginning of the future for Netspeek, Lena and our industry. 

The days of AI as just a marketing term are just about behind us.  We are getting ready to launch Lena as a product.  We expect her to be generally available in the next few months.  For anyone who is interested in a demo please reach out.  I look forward to sharing the future with you.