Erik DeGiorgi, Netspeek

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people who build and maintain very large networks of displays, PCs, servers and other devices tend to have more to do than time to do it, and when some technical shit hits the operating fan, trying to work out what's happening and what to do about it takes experience, brainpower and what can be punishing downtime. So what if generative AI could be used by a network operations center team to comb through knowledge bases and trouble ticket archives to identify solutions in seconds, instead of minutes or hours? And what if a lot of meat and potato workflows done to deliver services and maintain uptimes could be automated, and handled by an AI bot? That's the premise of Netspeek, a start-up that formally came out of stealth mode this week - with an AI-driven SaaS solution aimed at integrators, solutions providers and enterprise-level companies that use a lot of AV gear. The Boston-based company is focused more at launch on unified communications, because of the scale and need out there. But Netspeek's toolset is also applicable to digital signage, and can bolt on to existing device management solutions. The guy driving this will be familiar in digital signage hardware circles. Erik DeGiorgi was running the specialty PC firm MediaVue, but sold that company about a year ago. Since then, he's been forehead-deep working with a small dev team on Netspeek. We caught up last week and he gave me the rundown. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Erik, nice to chat once again. You sold your company about a year ago, and I don't want to say disappeared, but kind of went off the grid in terms of digital signage, and now you are launching a new company called Netspeek. What is that?  Erik DeGiorgi: Thanks for having me back, Dave. It's crazy. Time flies. I think it's well over two years at this point since our last conversation.  We launched Netspeek at the beginning of the year. At the same time, we sold out MediaVue. Netspeek is bringing to market the first generative AI platform focused on supporting the day-to-day operations of mixed vendor estates of pro AV networks. Digital signage is certainly a component of that. We're really focused on the totality of pro AV technologies. So it includes a lot of UCC unified collaborations and communications technologies as well as signage, and really targeting office spaces. So think about meeting rooms and conference rooms. You might have a Zoom or a Teams environment in there as well as a signage system or classroom environments, and what we've developed is a generative AI solution that can be embedded into those networks, that can work alongside human operators, network administrators, technicians to help them support them in their daily workflows, and then also bring a large amount of automation. So our platform can not only kind of observe what's going on in a network, kind of a 24/7-365 way, but then take action and use its own logic and reason and independent thinking to analyze situations the same way a human operator would and then structure and generate responses. So being able to directly address equipment and solve problems independently. We're pretty excited to bring that to market. We're launching to the industry here in a week, and then we'll be demoing at ISE at the beginning of February.  You’ll have your own stand at ISE? Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, and I did pull up the booth number ahead of the call, but of course now it's on a different tab. It's in the Innovation Park, and the booth number is CS820, and it's actually centrally located there in the Innovation Park. So actually right outside the digital signage area.  Yeah, I think for people going to ISE, the Innovation Park is kind of along the main corridor in between halls.  Erik DeGiorgi: Yep, it's the central hallway.  Okay, so people should be able to find you there.  Erik DeGiorgi: Hopefully, yep.  Not a sprawling booth lik