Live Video and Strategic Alignment in AI-Driven Organizations

If your employees don't know where you're going, your AI won't either. We are entering an era where one person's clarity or confusion will cascade through a digital chain of command. And that person's understanding of strategy will be amplified across dozens or even hundreds of AI agents, each making decisions on their own. And in such a world, live video becomes more than a communication medium. I believe it is how clarity will spread. This talk is about what happens when that clarity is there. And what happens when it isn't. So, I'm the CEO of Hive Streaming. We are working with all of your video platforms that you use in your companies. Like an extension to those platforms, the streaming video platforms. And our mission is to maximize the impact of internal video communication at organizations. We try to deliver on that promise through our products and services that handle three distinct areas. Video delivery, where we make sure that the video is reliable and reaches every viewer without problems and without disrupting your infrastructure. And second, we help to maximize the video experience for every viewer independently of where they are when they watch the stream. And thirdly, we provide actionable insights within two areas. First, the more technical insights around the complex chain of things that we call the webcasting ecosystem. Where all of these parts need to function properly for the video to be delivered with maximum quality. And the second type of insights we provide is around the impact of communication. Attentiveness. We call it communications intelligence. For over a decade, we have worked with some of the world's largest organizations to help them succeed with live video. Over thousands and thousands of CEO broadcasts, town halls, and live events, we have seen what works and what doesn't work. And we believe that our unique vantage point at the intersection between technology, video, and internal video communication gives us an understanding around a question that I believe is more urgent than ever. And that is, how do we make sure that every employee stays connected to the company's direction when that direction is evolving faster than ever? Today, companies no longer have the luxury of fixed multi-year roadmaps or static playbooks. Markets shift overnight, competitors emerge out of nowhere, and strategies aren't updated every third year anymore. Sometimes it feels like strategy is updated every week. And in this environment, just pushing out information to people isn't enough to keep them aware of where the company is going. What companies need is what I call deep alignment. Where everyone understands the direction, believes in it, and is able to act on it with intent. Even when detailed instructions on exactly what to do will never come. And that level of alignment cannot be achieved with checklists or long approval chains anymore. Because checklist makers and approvers cannot keep up with the pace of all the change that goes on around us. No, companies need empowered employees that are able to make decisions on their own and make them fast. And even when some kind of alignment is achieved in the organization, it never lasts because every single little change to your strategy or direction creates a drift and people's mental image of where the company is going goes out of date. And so alignment requires constant reinforcement. I believe that you cannot look upon alignment, alignment, it's a word. I mean, I don't think you could look upon it as a leadership buzzword anymore. It's an operational necessity. And as I said, that kind of alignment doesn't happen just because people are exposed to information about change. I think it requires that people connect deeply with the message. Then alignment can happen and spread as a chain reaction. And I believe that, how does deep alignment appear in an organization? I think it starts when people become aware of some change or some message that is important. And then they hopefully understand it, not just the what, but also the why. And then they engage with that message, both intellectually and emotionally. Or non-emotionally, if it doesn't mean anything to them. And ultimately, if the message resonates with them, they agree with it. Not because they have to, but because it makes sense to them. And that's deep alignment to me. When understanding is shared and the purpose of the message feels personal and the direction is being distributed into the whole workforce. Alignment has been important ever since we could not rely on checklists to get everything done, right? And I've been talking about it in relation to live video and why it's important for several years. But I think there are some unprecedented disruptive changes that very soon are about to happen that makes deep alignment even more important in the future. Because we're entering the era of Agentic AI, where every employee soon will have access to intelligent AI agents that will perform tasks and make decisions on their behalf. And they are going to do that 24-7 at an extremely low cost. This is a revolutionary change to how companies will operate. I mean, employees will not do everything themselves anymore. So imagine this basic structure. One employee, previously an individual contributor, no one reporting to them, suddenly manages 10 AI agents. Yep. And soon after that, each of those agents is managing 10 more. Making actions and making decisions from the intent of a single human. If the person at the top of that chain, that human, is clear on strategy and deeply aligned with the company's direction, that person's productivity will be multiplied by orders of magnitude. But if the person is confused or working from outdated goals, that confusion will scale just as fast, if not faster. And this is what I call the multiplier effect. Clarity scales, but so does confusion. And this isn't science fiction, by the way. There are peer-reviewed studies coming almost every month on this topic. Stanford University recently published a study which shows, and they introduced something called the human agency scale, which shows that humans want to have a deep, productive partnership with AI, but only if that partnership is based on equality, basically. And I believe that that requires them to work from the same set of goals. And Microsoft just released their work trend index, where it says that more than 50% of organizations are planning to introduce agentic AI into their core workflows within 12 to 18 months. I mean, I guess that's within 10 to 16 months now, because it was two months old. And in the same study, they find that only a very few select companies that they call the frontier firms are actually utilizing agentic capabilities today. And McKinsey finds that 75% of companies' functions are using AI in some way already today, but so far, none of them have really implemented them at scale. And that's why those frontier firms are the only ones who actually reap the benefit of that productivity increase today. But the age of AI or these agentic possibilities won't wait for people to keep up with it. Everyone needs to adapt to it or face to be outpaced by companies who actually do adapt to it. What's the takeaway? Well, I guess the potential is massive, but so is the risk. A school of fish senses the shadow of an orca above. In an instant, every fish knows what to do, and they turn to gather. Nimble, adaptive, synchronized. A single fluid movement confuses the orca and leaves it behind. A herd of wild horses feeds peacefully in an open valley. Suddenly, a lion appears on the ridge. Some horses bolt forward, others steer to the left, a few freeze in place. The herd scatters, and the predator closes in. These are two organizations. One moves as a living, sensing network, and the other breaks apart when it matters most. And those predators, you can exchange them for any of the big, disruptive changes that's happening around the companies every time. So, vivid images and nice metaphors aside, how do you build that school of fish agility into your organization? Well, memos matter, and emails, and dashboards, but they don't create alignment on their own. For that, you need video. Live video, in particular, is uniquely powerful. It combines leadership presence, body language, tone, urgency, narrative, into a single medium. And it collapses hierarchy and geography, and it creates shared moments. And research support this. Media richness theory has long shown that physical face-to-face meetings, which unfortunately aren't scalable, and video, which is scalable, are the two most effective ways to communicate complex information. And this information is kind of complex, because companies need to adapt to what's going on, and it requires them to try and take weird routes to really navigate these changes. So, it's not an easy message to put through. So, if your strategic direction is evolving, and it is, only the richest, most human modes of communication will create the alignment that you're after. But there's a catch. That video has to work. If the stream buffers, if only a fraction of the intended participants are reached, and if the quality is inconsistent and bad, and if the latency of that stream is so high that you cannot turn on those engaging interactivity features, then the impact is gone, and the opportunity to align is missed. because strategic communication isn't just about crafting a great message, even if that's, of course, very important. It's also about delivering it with reliability, quality, and reach. And even if the video event you just ran seemed to work, you need to know that it truly did, and how. Did it reach the right people? Did they show attentiveness? Did it land? Was the experience reliable and crisp? You need to measure all of those things, learn from them, extract insights, and apply those insights to your next live event. And that's the only way you can turn communication into impact, because organizations, they cannot leave that to chance. In the end, it's not just about video. It's about moving as one. So companies have spent decades to improve productivity through tools and workflows and efficiency hacks. But the next wave of performance and productivity isn't all about tools. It's about trust. It's about clarity. It's about agency and empowerment. And it's about deep alignment at scale. And that alignment won't come from more dashboards or emails. It will come from human communication that is seen, heard, and felt by every employee, and soon by the AI agents that many of them will guide. Here's my call to action. Invest in strategic alignment as seriously as you invest in product development and sales. And treat live video not just as a broadcasting tool, but as a strategic capability for your whole organization. And above all, build the systems, the culture, and the infrastructure around video to make sure that everyone knows exactly what you're doing and why it matters. Because in a world increasingly shaped by AI, deep alignment isn't a leadership slogan. It is a force multiplier. Thank you. Maybe not. If not, Yes? Hi. Thank you for the great presentation. Have you been experiencing or working together with companies who were siloed not only strategically, but also digitally and from a technological point of view? And how did you bridge the very hands-on example? Not everybody is in the AD. How do I email people or how do I send a video out to people who are not in the same AD? If I worked with companies who are not savvy or who are, what was the question? Who are not savvy and who are siloed in multiple ways. Yes. I mean, Hive Streaming works mainly with companies. The smallest company we have is 10,000 employees and above. But this matters to every company, of course, managing the efficiency of communication. But we are very used to working with companies who are not at all savvy. And that's what I mean with building systems and culture and infrastructure to make it easy to use video. And we also see some of our customers who started off as, you know, quarterly town halls. The CEO is the only one speaking and everyone's supposed to show up. Maybe they don't. And then there's nothing. And then there's one more the quarter after that. But, you know, it's same companies. We have been trying to show to them that for alignment to happen, you cannot just have the CEOs. Speaking once a quarter, it has to ripple down and doesn't have to be managers can be subject matter experts because it has to be translated until the direction becomes meaningful and understandable to everyone. So we see this kind of long tail. And to make that happen, people need to know how to actually create videos also at the non studio produced way. And many of our companies, they are implementing self-service systems where people can just request to have a live event and they get help promoting it. And they basically just have to click a button to to start broadcasting. It's a democratization process. I don't know if that answered your question. Yes. So how do you track that companies are engaged or audiences are engaged in the tentative when you produce a message? Yeah, that's very hard. Most most platforms cannot track that when it comes to internal communication. We hear a lot about webinars and external communication. And that part of the world has become is much better at tracking engagement and tracking results. But so far, when it comes to creating alignment internally at an organization, very few know how to actually see this. And I believe that you need to track those four things that I talked about. Awareness, understanding, engagement and agreement, because that if you have low numbers on any of those, the likelihood of alignment is very low and the likelihood of impact is even lower. People listen. They don't get it or they don't agree with it. And then they won't go the next day and start doing something else. But this strategic communication is actually there. And I think that's what we're trying to do. We want people to actually think for themselves and take new decisions. So we at Hive, we are working towards a global standard for how this can be measured. And we are implementing our products to get more and more information out of that without compromising people's privacy. We're not using webcams and see if people are engaged by the way they're looking or anything like that. But we try to track statistics. We're looking for statistical signals that you can capture in the video stream and on the network and from the video platform and combine this to get an indication through statistical means if they paid attention, if they understood. I was thinking about Thomas showing the new, I don't remember what the feature was called, with those micropulse that you could send out. There's something called death by polling. You don't want to force every employee in your organization to fill in a lot of questions on whether you understood the message or if you agreed with the message. You want to have a smooth experience. So you don't want to have to have a very boring task after the event to fill in a huge form. So we're experimenting with sending small auto-generated questions out that you can ignore or answer if you want. And from those, signals, we can draw statistical conclusions on whether people were aligned or not. Anything else? If not, thank you very much.