No category of consumer electronics asks people to do as much as home technology. There are dozens of categories to consider, from smart thermostats and speakers to doorbells and motion sensors. Brian Cooley, editor at large at CNET, says the complexity and inconsistency of the home technology landscape keeps homes from being “smart.”
“If you look at the smart home, I still don’t think it’s smart. It’s a connected home. The array of products you can find in it mostly have accomplished remote control, and a little bit of resource or time efficiency,” said Cooley in a panel discussion at Signal 2021. He’s optimistic but circumspect: “We have a technology moment in the home that currently is, I would say, pretty nascent. It’s sort of in its teenage years.”
Cooley led a panel discussion on the future of the smart home at Signal, where he was joined by Paul Lee of Deloitte and Jennifer Kent of Parks Associates. Watch the full session for a deeper dive into areas of opportunity in wellness, data and with senior demographics. Scroll down for the full transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
John Battelle
And we’re going to move on as we do at Signal to another topic, we’re going to pivot to the future of the home, the center of consumer behavior, a place we’ve all spent maybe a little bit too much time over the past 18 months. So for this special section, I’m pleased to introduce Brian Cooley, the editor at large of CNET, Brian is charged with following the consumer tech trends that drive today’s modern lifestyle, and demystifying what underlies the hits and the misses in the history of consumer tech adoption. Brian, the floor is yours.
Brian Cooley
Great. Thank you, John. And I am really enjoying the program today. Just want to apologize upfront if my background’s a little noisy. I’m normally a stickler for good audio, but I was just watching a concrete demolition crew arrive outside my window here. So so bear with me, if it gets a little noisy, I’ll make sure I mute judiciously.
Thank you, and welcome everybody. And I’ve just got a few slides and thoughts to share to get the juices flowing. Then I’m going to bring in the most important part, which are my two panelists Paul Lee from Deloitte and Jennifer Kent, from Parks Associates.
But let’s go ahead and get started here and just kick off a couple of ideas about this whole area of smart home, and where great technologies fit. The idea here that we have, and I’ll get my slides up here, the idea here that we have a technology moment in the home that currently is, I would say, pretty nascent. It’s the smarter connected home in its teenage years. If you’ve looked at it and said, well, it didn’t really radically change the home as much as the pandemic did. You’re right, but they have interleaved together. And we are now taking advantage of electronic availabilities in the home, and services that are digital in a way that got so radically accelerated, it’s time to reexamine the home.
So let’s get a few basic concepts here. Many of you are veterans of my talks and you’ll know this slide, tech and technology. I want to make sure we’re all on the same page when we talk about that. We are not talking about electronics, even though that’s what’s probably in your mind right now. Remember that technology is how we get things done. That’s why it’s very important to go to the root of the word because that’s one of the most important first steps you take to identify what sorts of software, hardware, applications, digitally-derived services are going to resonate with consumers. Don’t fall for the rubric, that technology inventors, by creating a device or an app or a digital based service, create appetites. That’s, that’s rarely, if ever the case. It’s about serving existing human appetites. Some of them are latent, perhaps. But in any case, that’s what we’re going after.
Great technology, in my experience, has four key things. It’s transparent, it gets out of the way as much as possible. The best phone is no phone one day, we don’t want to have electronic apparatus around us. For right now those are the essential tools to get things done. Intuitive, we often think about that as being easy to understand, how to use, what do you do with the interface to work the thing. But also always bear in mind, make it intuitive why to use. It should not be difficult for consumers to look at something that you offer in any digital domain and say I get it, I see where it fits, or I see where it doesn’t fit. But to have that clarity is very important. Intimacy is where we’ve been going the last few years, with the trends in data moving away from just gathering what consumers do explicitly, to increasingly starting to know what they do subconsciously. We gather this from wearables, we gather this from smart home devices that can monitor and know what people do that they would never consciously think about. And we also are getting it to some degree from the future of connected and autonomous vehicles, which will increasingly be overseeing part of our mobility in our lives and starting to notice trends about how we get around that we don’t consciously notice. So those three buckets of devices are leading to some very intimate, interesting data. And finally, I like this idea of what I call constant, for lack of a better word. Great technologies tend to be available wherever and wherever I want to reach out for them. And issue the idea of me having to go to a certain place, a certain silo, or have too many narrow eyes of needles I have to pass through to get to them. Try to be like air around consumers and not so much a destination. That’s kind of a general rule that works pretty well.
The future of interaction. Think about this, if you want to be well positioned for the future, is to anticipate needs, not just give consumers levers they can pull — liking, searching, following, signing up or clicking for automatic replenishment. Those are great. But ideally, we’re going to add a new layer in the future where we can anticipate needs and they will take care of themselves to some degree. This is all very much going to change based on what the need is, some will be easy to anticipate, some will be difficult or impossible. But the idea that you want to drive toward anticipation, I don’t think you can possibly go wrong with that, because we want technology to be less of a job in the future. In the last 2025 years, we’ve added a lot of work. You now have to deal with all kinds of apparatus that is constantly calling for your attention that we never had 25 years ago. That’s a very short period of time. We want to start to lessen that burden, to have technology be more like magic. And with that in mind, what will the interface of the future look like? Are we going to have more screen time? More commands we give? Skills we call out to voice devices? Perhaps not on the same arc we’ve had. Look for ambience, look for devices that increasingly quietly notice what I do, whether it’s through the data, whether it’s through utterances, whether it’s through visually recognizing who I am, what I’m doing. All of these can lead to the ability to better anticipate needs, and to make sure that life is a little less laborious, especially in the connected and digital home than it currently is.
Divergence and convergence are, I think, an interesting discussion to have, especially around the home, there’s always a an innovators conversation about do great products in tech succeed because they diverge and forge a new path, or because they’re the ultimate mashup of something we never thought could live together. Divergence has led to many breakout hits, things that we just never imagined we could have before. It’s like, wow, that was something totally new. I never saw that coming. And now I use it every day. On the other hand, you can look at a lot of examples of convergence, where things are brought together. And it’s like, good, I have an elegant combination of services or behaviors that I want to have served on one device. And they all tie together. And it’s also very tidy and neat and more compact. What’s a good example of this? When the iPhone arrived, it was both divergent. We never had anything quite like that unless you were an early Blackberry or Treo user. But for most people with flip phones, this was a radically new thing that stood as a singular new device, and a singular new portal into things that we want in our daily lives. On the other hand, it and all smartphones are in a sense, nothing but an elegant mashup of a whole lot of things we had before — digital cameras, PND, portable navigation devices, portable email, which the BlackBerry already nailed pretty well. So both tend to be the right path. I’m not trying to cheat the answer here. But always recognize where your efforts are both creating divergence and convergence. And make sure you’re playing those well, using those four traits we talked about a little earlier in the talk.
If you look at the smart home, I still don’t think it’s smart. It’s a connected home. The array of products you can find in it mostly have accomplished remote control, and a little bit of resource or time efficiency on my part, but modest amounts. Where we’re going now is greater interoperation, which we’ll talk about in a moment. And the ability to learn. Learning just another word for anticipation. The truly smart home will to some degree run itself, anticipate my needs. Whereas right now, it largely lets me remote control it or program it. The anticipation part tends to be very hit and miss. Any of you who’ve got a smart thermostat probably know, it doesn’t get it right a whole lot of the time. And that’s just the earliest example of smart home that proved it’s not smart. It’s just connected so far.
If you want to drive to what the smart connected home is really all about, it’s these three things in our opinion. We did a major research study with 1000s of consumers in a very broad way a couple of years ago, with basis research out of London, and everything kept driving to these three attributes about smart home and ideally, as much interlab or overlap as you can find between the three of course, but this is this is very conceptual. But if you want to draw everything you do back to the heart and gut check it and make sure we go in the right direction and not do gadgetry. This is an important filter to use, organize, reassure and optimize. Where do we stand in terms of smart home adoption? Great data from Parks Associates, three quarters or so of US homes? This is US data, I know we have a global audience, do not really have any smart home technology. And by the way, the definition here does not include things like streaming TVs and connected game consoles, phones or tablets in the house. Those predate the smart home as a category. But in this case, you can see the majority of people do not have the door locks, the smart cameras, the intelligent water irrigation system that’s coming to their phone. On the other hand, the good trend line is a steady inexorable growth of the number of devices per home in homes that do have some smart home technology. And we’ll hear a little bit more about this from Jennifer. Jennifer Kent at Parks Associates in a few minutes. But the trend lines are very exciting, while at the same time the overall base that is signed up is still kind of a yawning gap. We’ve missed something in terms of getting consumers to look at their home as a smart connected space as opposed to a place where they bring in some smart connected devices. Some more Parks data coming out of the pandemic’s core era, I do not want to use any kind of post pandemic rubric. I don’t think we’re at that point. But we are at an early return to normal. And so a view like this, asked people in a large survey, what did you do, what changes did you adopt in terms of connected smart home during the pandemic. And as you can see, delivery of food and packages delivery to the home was number one by far but also significant numbers made increases in devices that made their home more comfortable, gave them greater broadband, of course, that was essential for work and school, not so much for shopping, shopping, works fine on existing broadband. But when you do a lot of video conferences, things get different. And interesting ones, your indoor air quality, security of the home also running at pretty high numbers there. People who said we’re going to make some changes as we as we nest, if I can use that word.
Some great numbers that came from Deloitte here about this giant beta we went through, Paul Lee, who we will be talking to, talks a lot about the massive demonstration effect that pandemic COVID turned out to be. You could not have in any other way brought so many people around the world to the table and gotten them to try so many new behaviors. It’s never happened before. And so we have, and this is not the way we wanted to get there. But we have this giant subscription that everyone or many people had to sign up for just to keep their lives going. We need to take advantage of both the momentum that they’re in now, we want to keep them sticky on these behaviors because they tend to serve all of us, brands as well as consumers. And also to learn from them what they liked and didn’t like. We need to listen as much as we need to capitalize upon these trends, because an awful lot of feedback is coming here. And I often wonder if we’re all listening enough to what the problems were, as opposed to rejoicing and like, Wow, look how many people did this, that and the other years before they would have otherwise.
The new P word used to be pivot, right. Everybody was pivoting for the last couple of years. Now we’re all Pelotonizing. I hear this on everyone’s lips. And I’m not making light of it. I think there’s an enormous insight here around this one company that we know has done something very interesting at the intersection of devices and hardware, knowledge about you. A key point here with a lot we could discuss about this I don’t intend to take it on right now. But look, if you think about Pelotonization is not just easing pain points but also bringing in new benefits. That applies to any new technology that wants to be a hit. But especially here, Peloton did more than just say okay, I can move a bike into your house and have it more convenient than going to the gym and trying to find a slot in a spin class. That’s pain point solving, but also moving forward into a much greater sense of community, into a sense of greater personalization of what I’m looking for. Content. How to. These great publishing ethics are inside the Peloton experience as well, content and how to and community. So you want to look at those as part of this idea.
And notice that pretty much every time in technology, a behavior that will start and be tied to a device, quickly leaves it and is made available on other devices or without so much of a device at its heart. This is very important to realize as a general trend. Don’t just think that a Peloton bike, everything lives on the Peloton. Increasingly, this will be something that is distributed to other devices, not just that they make or something that is distributed outside of devices in general.
Matter is an interesting consortium that P&G is involved in. Not a founding partner, and I find that I find that to be sensible, because it’s still a very technical electronic group. Matter is the name of a consortium of large electronic companies, formerly called the connected home over IP, or CHIP Project that is seeking to make smart home simpler and easier. This is one of the key reasons we see so many homes not involved in smart home technology. It is too complicated, especially because it involves dozens of devices. No other category of consumer electronics asks the consumer to purchase, install and integrate dozens to 100 devices to join a category. It’s unheard of. And so we’re asking for a big lift.
Some quick thoughts on wellness here. Wellness is the twin with the home. The home is very much alongside health and wellness as you know. Know that we’ve got these sort of six categories on our dashboard at CNET in terms of what defines wellness as centered around the home, outside of things like clinics and such. This is where our users have told us repeatedly that they see the six buckets of what defines wellness and health with regards to what they can do about it in their own home. Because our dashboards at this point in our lives we run around with our gauges turned off. Makes no sense, you wouldn’t drive a car that way. And yet, that’s kind of how we live our lives.
A lot of health technology has to do right now with telehealth, which bridges the home to the clinician, with merging telehealth with the signals that are already coming off of our connected consumer electronics, watches come to mind primarily, but other devices in fact, almost every device in the home, can be a health signal sensor. Water meters, thermostats, motion detectors, all of those are picking up little bits of data that tell a smart system how people or a person are doing in the sight of the home machine interpretation. There are certain things that humans cannot see in data that machines have to see. And that’s a key part of this. And this idea that we might through connected digital health and these devices that consumers can utilize actually have better healthcare through that, not just okay.
The clean thing, of course, dominated early 2021 announcements around technology. That I think is going to moderate to a fairly good degree but not go away. We are in a new era of disinfection awareness, but I don’t expect it to be at the same level we’re at. We’re already seeing that settle and moderate quite a bit on CNET in terms of people who are trafficking and searching for technologies that are about disinfection. At the same time, it’s not eroding down to zero. There is a new baseline. But we are moderating down as you can imagine, from the peak.
We’ll talk a little bit in a moment here about some technologies that can do continuous monitoring. It’s a key part of turning on those dashboards at the home. Home medical technology in the home a would may be something we talk about here in a moment where you start to have a little bit of a doctor’s kit in your home so that when you do a telehealth consultation, it can have more informed signals beyond what your watch, or your own self can tell a clinician about how you’re doing. And I’m fascinated about glucose, because this is one that I think in the relatively near future everybody will monitor, not just those who have to manage their insulin because they have diabetes. This just makes sense. It’s one of the few examples of several sensors we should all be wearing. We’re not there yet. But we should all be monitoring our glucose. Why don’t we all know our glucose all the time? Why don’t we all know our blood pressure all the time? There is no reason other than the fact that it’s currently cumbersome. It’s currently expensive. It’s not considered natural, normal, unnecessary, and perhaps our clinicians aren’t ready, perhaps to receive all that data and be ready to do something with it.
I want to stop there and turn now to my panelists who have great insights into all this. Paul Lee is the head of research for the TMT division — technology media and telecom — at Deloitte. He’s based in London. And Jennifer Kent is VP of research at Parks Associates. They’re in Texas. And they both have tremendous organizations as well as insights that look at the smart and connected home all the time. This is my dream team. I bring them together whenever I’m asked to bring a talk together about how consumers live digitally in their homes. Let me start with you, Jennifer, big picture: what should our P&G audience and their partners be looking for in terms of a next phase of smart and connected home beyond where we are so far? What does your research suggest?
Jennifer Kent
Yeah, thanks, Brian. Thanks very much for including me on this panel and P&G as well. You really give a great overview of what’s happening in smart home and consumer tech generally. I’d say that one of the major changes that we’ve seen over the past year — if you think about where smart home was coming into 2020, growing slowly, steadily. The core value propositions or use cases in the smart home were really two. It was what you talked about — monitoring or accessing your home when you’re away — you can turn things on and off, see if your door’s open, let somebody. Really monitoring the status of your house while you’re at work. Also a very core value proposition around residential security. Making home security systems better. A lot of the smart home devices have been sold or provided through the residential security channel.
Over the past year we’ve transitioned into being home all the time so that early convenience automation check in while your home remote monitoring value proposition kind of went away, right? I’m here, Why do I have to know these things? I can change my thermostat. But it actually has led to, we’re seeing in our data, an expansion of what people think of as peace of mind use cases — so maybe expanding a little bit from the home security case. So now that I am at home, Am I safe at home? Who’s coming to my door? I’m in the middle of working and that video doorbell or that external monitoring camera can tell me who’s at my door or that a package has arrived that I need to go out and grab. Also, my home isn’t a safe place to be. So that speaks to interest in things like smoke detectors or safety sensors that you’ve left the stove on. But also, is my home healthy and well? So how’s my water quality that I’m drinking every day? But especially indoor air quality, because we’ve all been so focused on virus and a virus that spreads and am I breathing clean air. And then finally are my loved ones safe and well? The senior community and our elder loved ones were particularly vulnerable, not only to poor outcomes if they were to contract the virus, but also a sense of isolation and social isolation to keep them well. But for consumers who are really family caregivers, this made a very difficult situation and personal job even harder. And so the idea that you can use smart home technology to communicate with, keep an eye on, have a little bit more peace of mind about how your loved ones are doing is certainly a very kind of strong next phase that we see growing from here.
Brian Cooley
And that was, in that continuous monitoring concept that I mentioned you would be getting to, the idea that we can keep an eye on others without being with them, both because they’re remote at a distance. And we also developed an appetite for that, because we know that we couldn’t always be with people even when they were in the neighborhood because of isolation from COVID. Now, hopefully, that becomes a transitory concern, as this thing ideally fades for the long term, but the awareness and the sensitivity about that may linger for a while.
Paul, you’re, you’re my gut check guy. I always like the way you keep an eye on the real world and how consumers who are not technology first, which is most consumers, really approach and see connected technologies. It’s got to work for them. What do you see through your pretty, pretty fine mesh lens about smart home and connected home trends you’d be watching for the next year or two?
Paul Lee
Yeah, I think when we look at smart home, it’s interesting that we’re not including connected entertainment within there. And, you know, when we think about the consumer’s decision, you’ve got this possibility, for example, to spend, let’s say $500, on an air purifier, which will take out almost everything which could be maligned. But for the same amount of money, you could be buying a 65-inch TV. So most homes are going to go for the entertainment, which they could be using four to five hours per day, as opposed to the air purifier, which you may be able to see is doing good things because there’s an app which shows that, but generally you won’t notice that. So that’s one of the decisions which people are going to have to take. Now what you’d expect, though, is that the cost of adding connectivity to everyday devices will continue to go down. And as will the capability. So the number of transistors per dollar keeps on getting better, by 30% to 40% per year. So with a smartphone, now we’ve got 12 billion to everything else, that could be washing machines, it could be purifiers. And that will just make technology become connected appliances. by default. That’s all going to come through.
The ideal for a fully connected home would be that you do everything at once. You buy everything that talks to each other. That’s the nirvana. The reality is a bit like how we do decorating, you do one room at a time. And so you might buy smart locks from one vendor, you might buy an air purifier from another vendor. And they don’t always talk to each other. And so you may feel, well, what’s the point to this since to your very earlier slide, what you want from technology is to remove friction, and not to add friction. And that’s one of the challenges to the market. But all of that will be addressed over time.
Brian Cooley
What do you expect, Paul? Because I know you and I’ve talked a couple times about this vast demonstration effect, this giant beta that we’ve been in. I know there are many verticals in this, but what do you expect will drive people staying with new digital behaviors? We saw six key ones there from some Deloitte research versus leaving. Is it driven by a real conscious decision to stay with a new behavior like telehealth or online shopping? Or is it kind of like they just lose track of it and naturally flow back to old behaviors? What does your gut tell you?
Paul Lee
Yeah, it’s really hard, that one. I don’t know. First of all, my pragmatic concept, because we don’t know what’s going to happen with COVID. And, you know, I was glad that you’re saying we’re not post COVID because COVID is still evolving, unraveling. And, and, you know, unfortunately, probably got many peaks and troughs to come. And humans do tend to dislike change. That’s one reality. Economies also dislike change. So the easiest thing is for us to revert back to where we are or where we were. So that may mean going back to offices, and that will have knock-on impacts for things like ecommerce, because the economic model for e-commerce depends on the cost of delivery. When everyone’s home, the cost of delivery can be really, really low as a result of it, because you can have multiple drops coming through into the same area. If people start finding delivery more inconvenient, then some of the economics start unraveling. What we’d expect, though, is that, you know, ecommerce will recede a little bit, but it’s not going to go back to where it was pre pandemic. So we’ve seen about five years worth of advance, and also experimentation, within the last 16 months.
Brian Cooley
Which is just remarkable. And it’s been repeated across so many verticals. We’ve all heard the cliche phrases, we moved ahead X years in X months, but it’s all true. Whether you’re looking at online shopping, whether you’re looking at telehealth, whether you’re looking at the embrace of a wider gamut of streaming services people are sampling. It’s just it’s been quite remarkable. Let’s turn from the behaviors to some demographics now. Jennifer, I want to ask you about the category that I think is refreshingly focused on by Parks, which is not to the exclusion of others, but you look at seniors regularly and with a certain priority that I often don’t see in other research. Tell me what that’s all about.
Jennifer Kent
Yeah, sure. Well, certainly we know that it’s simply the case in the technology sector, that developers and manufacturers focus on innovators and early adopters, right, they are going to be the first folks who use these technologies, and they do typically tend to be younger consumers. And so there’s a blind spot that happens quite naturally for older consumers. You asked, you know, what new behaviors are going to recede and what are going to, you know, stay. One thing for sure is we will all keep aging, right. And if you look at the demographics of most developed nations, they are getting older. And so this is a growing market of seniors who are increasingly tech savvy, right, the majority of seniors do have smartphones now. Also, it’s really important to know that seniors are not all one big group, right? There’s a very, very major divergence of behavior between those who are 65 to 74, 75 to 80. And then kind of a crucial break in the 80-plus category where you’re your primary customer is actually the family caregiver for that senior. But really, seniors across the board are becoming more technology savvy. We have 22% of seniors in that 65 to 74 age range that do own one of those core smart home devices now, and 11% of those who are 80 and above, also own a core smart home device. So while Smart Home is still very much an emerging category, that shows you that there’s an openness to try, and a willingness to change. And again, I kind of go back to my point that, you know, seniors in particular, you know, really suffered the consequences and are continuing to have the pandemic. And so there’s a lot of investment and an eye on how can technology better serve seniors and some of it is direct to consumer where you are buying something, perhaps for your elderly parent or they’re buying something for themselves, at retail, but also from the healthcare system properly, right? An awareness that the consumer of any age, but seniors don’t have to be in the facility to be cared for, and may actually have better results and be cared for better by family members and nurses coming into the home at home. And how can we make that happen and the technology has been there.
Jennifer Kent
But importantly, reimbursement and some of the money in the United States is a very unique healthcare system and how it works. But the actual revenue and money is aligning now to make some of these new business models work where you can actually care for people in the home. So we will be seeing a lot of innovation and experimentation of pushing more healthcare into the home and also a big focus on doing that well for our older loved ones.
Brian Cooley
And I find this demographic question interesting because unlike some areas of technology, the home is applicable across demographics. There’s not an early adopter of home, I mean, everyone, ideally, is in a home and wants a home, whatever kind of household that is. But shelter and home doesn’t have peaks and troughs based on interest by certain age groups. And so this is an almost universally addressable interest for all demographics, whereas you might see game consoles skew a certain way, because that’s the interest of a demo. But all demographics are seeking home and a home that works better for them.
We’ve got about two and a half minutes left. I want to go to you, Paul, now as we wrap up, and then to you, Jennifer, with general, instinctual advice for how a company like P&G, that makes largely non-digital products, can best interface those to this world of digital devices and platforms that are out there. There’s a lot of products, a lot of devices, we can’t make a perfect matrix. In the few minutes we have left, but general advice on how a company that makes these kinds of products can best be relevant to a world full of electronics.
Jennifer Kent
Sure, and sorry, was that me? First
Brian Cooley
Paul, go ahead with your thoughts.
Paul Lee
Certainly. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the trends that we’re seeing is that more and more can be quantified. And I think that’s one of the trends which will be with us for many decades. And I think something just like, you know, brushing teeth is something which is quite mundane, repetitive. Yet, it’s something which can be digitized and can be quantified. And you can sort of encourage people to have better oral hygiene, if you make the technology easy enough to use, if you offer the right kind of rewards. And that reward can simply be the equivalent of a digital gold star on an app. So all these things can make a difference, then can have an impact on the sale of consumables.
Jennifer Kent
Okay, so quantification of how a person is, how their behaviors are doing, and rewarding that and it can be a simple reward you think?
Paul Lee
Yeah, I mean, you get that with a lot of smartwatches. And, you know, the objectives in which I look at day by day, on just little sort of infographics which say, you’ve done this, well done, and I know that I’ve managed to achieve them, because I’ve set my bar so low, but I still feel good about myself.
Brian Cooley
It’s the rings on the Apple Watch. Yeah. Jennifer, what are your thoughts? You get the last word here on how non-digital products can interface in a digital world.
Jennifer Kent
Yeah, I’d say that, you know, especially for P&G, focusing on this pretty incredible asset of consumer trust, that those in the technology space don’t actually naturally have some of the more established brands. Maybe Apple, you know, has a very strong consumer loyalty. But those who are startups, and even some more established brands, actually do not have the same level of trust as a brand like P&G, and, you know, associated brands underneath, have and particularly your knowledge of what consumers want that tech brands don’t typically focus on. And that’s why the senior opportunity is so important. Seniors do look to spokespeople, to brands to institutions that they know and trust and are familiar with. And so you have a real asset and ability to partner and play with those in the technology space to bring some interesting solutions to segments that tech companies don’t typically focus on.
Brian Cooley
Alright, we’re gonna leave it there. I’ve enjoyed this conversation with Paul Lee from Deloitte and Jennifer Kent from Parks Associates. Hope you have found something insightful in it, I know I did. John, back to you.
John Battelle
Thank you, Brian. And thank you to your guests for educating us on the state of consumer tech in the home.
