Building tools for teams: how meeting room analytics move organizations forward

With connected devices and appliances, smart home automation has long become a fact of our day-to-day lives. Increasingly, we see this trend make its way into the office as well. A 2017 report on the Smart Office Market predicts that it will grow from $22bn in 2017 to $46bn by 2023. The key factors driving this increase include a desire to increase productivity, reduce costs, streamline operations and improve end-user satisfaction. It’s no wonder that this industry is on the rise – the potential benefits of automation in the office space go far beyond automated work processes and the regulation of temperature and lighting.

At Huddly, we build tools for teams – powerful products and features that use AI to enable team collaboration and make people’s workday that little bit easier. One of these tools is the Huddly InSights API which delivers meeting room analytics in order to enable organizations to understand how their rooms are being used and thereby optimize the ROI on floor space and technology.

Huddly IQ is more than a conference camera, it is an intelligent sensor. Its on-camera neural engine has been trained and optimized to detect the people in the meeting room. This means that it can capture data such as meeting room usage, occupancy, and people count. We are working with our partners to use our InSights analytics API to make those analytics available via their reporting dashboards.

“With Huddly IQ and the Huddly InSights analytics API, decisions on meeting room investment and management can now be data-driven, which helps organizations in all sorts of ways: better ROI on equipment and office real estate, reduced waste and increased efficiency, and, ultimately, improved productivity.”

– Øystein Grimstad, VP Products at Huddly

In this article, the second in our tools for teams series, we asked Øystein Grimstad, VP Products and one of Huddly’s first employees, to explain a little more about how our InSights analytics API can move your organization forward and how to get started with it.

Øystein Grimstad, VP Products at Huddly

Huddly InSights analytics

Øystein writes:

“Huddly IQ’s intelligent capabilities can be separated into two categories – automated user experiences, the so-called Genius features, and room analytics, the “Huddly InSights” API.

“It’s easy for users to understand the value of our Genius features – every time you’re in a call with a Huddly camera you can experience them. But our powerful InSights analytics API is arguably even more valuable to organizations. With a Huddly IQ in the meeting space, you can get accurate, real-time data on exactly what is happening in the room.

“Huddly IQ features an onboard neural engine that enables it to see, understand and respond to what is happening in the meeting space in real time. This high-quality analytic data can be accessed by organizations who want to get a better understanding of how their meeting spaces are being used.

“I’d like to talk a little about what kind of data organizations are able to access now, how it can help them and, most importantly, how to access the data.

“Here’s what information you can access from a Huddly IQ today:

• People count: how many people are in the room

• Usage: how much the room gets used

• Status: whether the room is free or occupied

“Our software team is constantly training the camera to understand more of what it sees, meaning its capabilities will expand over time.”

Data-driven investment decisions

“When an organization starts monitoring the usage of rooms and how many seats are being used on a per meeting basis, there are a lot of valuable things they can do with that data. And the more rooms you monitor, the more valuable it becomes. Getting an average value gives you insight into whether or not you should be investing in more rooms and, if so, what type? What size? What type of installation and platform is the most successful? All those investment decisions can now be data-driven, ensuring a much better ROI than what has been available in the past.”

Reduced waste, increased efficiency

“Collecting data on peaks of usage tells you about the minimum and maximum meeting room size your organization needs. This can help to minimize waste of office real estate and increase efficiency, which is one of the main drivers behind the increasing investment in smart facility management.”

Improved ROI and team productivity

“You can minimize waste even further when you correlate real-time room occupancy data with your preferred cloud-based office calendar service. A 2017 study showed 4 in 10 office workers spend as much as 60 minutes every week searching for available desks, conference rooms, or colleagues. The InSights API can go a long way to helping organizations reduce that, with huge gains in efficiency, ROI on real estate and, ultimately, productivity.

“If you think that meeting room analytics would be beneficial to your business, here’s more information on how to access the data. We encourage you to explore the Huddly SDK and see what the InSights API can do for you.

“Thank you for reading.”

We’re getting ready to reveal a lot of exciting things at InfoComm 2019. Come find Huddly at booth #4087, or follow us on social media!