Deep AI Insights from Collecting Teams Meeting Media with Numonix CEO Michael Levy

Tom: This week on Teams Insider Podcast, we have Michael Levy from Numonix, we get deep into recording in Teams, but not just for compliance, but the other use cases. In particular, AI and transcription and getting insights from calls and how both obviously Microsoft can do that natively, but there are a number of third parties doing clever things with recording and transcription.

Many thanks to Michael and many thanks to Numonix for being a supporter of Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate their support. Hope you enjoy the show.

Tom: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the pod. Interesting conversation this week getting into kind of teams, meetings and callings and AI, but not Copilot for a change, actually, what can you do as a customer potentially, or what can third parties do with me, Michael. Michael, do you want to introduce yourself,

Michael: Yeah. Hi, I'm Michael Levy. I'm the CEO of Numonix. We're a compliance recording company in the Microsoft ecosystem. Hopefully providing some good insights to Tom today. Always have interesting discussions with him. So looking forward to it.

Tom: Yeah, thanks, Michael. Yeah. And thanks to Numonix for being a big supporter of what we're doing at Empowering Cloud, I really do appreciate it. So let's jump in, Copilot is the conversation everybody's having at the moment. That's your personal assistant for calls and meetings.

So you can, as an individual, you can press the Copilot button, get summaries Numonix, you're known obviously for compliance recording, but you'd be doing some interesting stuff around beyond compliance. Can you give us a bit of an intro?

Michael: Yeah. So typically we're focused in the compliance space and we take that very serious seriously being able to record what people want in a secure manner, encrypted, restrictions, GDPR, deletion functionality, all that sort of good stuff, but we then realized that there's a large opportunity in media acquisition where companies, especially now during this AI age where everyone's trying to rush to the, rush to bring something out, that media acquisition is key to a successful and reliable AI platform.

So what we've done is we've built an offshoot of our product to enable people to do media acquisition, get them up and running really quickly with little headache and using all the benefits of our compliance solution.

Tom: Cool. And so for the uninitiated here obviously, Microsoft has convenience recording where I can hit the button and I get an MP4 on my OneDrive, my Stream. For compliance recording, it's quite a different conversation where you have a bot that follows the user that can pull the calls and the meetings.

But that bot is a non trivial piece of code. Like I imagine you'd have things like, banks tend to want to roll their own technology, so they want to pull all the calls out of a certain division and look at the data that they can't just make one API call and get all the calls, can they?

Michael: No. So traditionally before we had this product and I would imagine it's more of a market wide thing, is you have your product, you have your end to end UI product that someone will log into, and then an API into that, where you can then go and do everything, which is perfectly fine, it's a little clunky and you're maybe paying for what you don't need, which is all these little, all these front end features.

What we've done is really deliver that capture as a service. So you don't have to worry about maintaining a UI and everything, you can simply have a developer product basically where you have an API call into a storage account. It's all recorded in an encrypted way. You have all the great features of our compliance product.

For example we give you flexibility to record only what you want to record. No and restrict no internal, maybe you don't want external parties on a meeting or only record external parties on a meeting. Maybe you want to only record a meeting if there's a specific calendar invite, which again gives you more data protection in terms of what you want to record and then base your insights on.

And the mechanism for most companies that we work with is how they would be building their own applications in any any case. So they don't have to, rebuild the wheel as such they, they can just, plug something in to their normal model of doing things.

Tom: Yeah, and you're obviously already certified with Microsoft. You're already committed to maintaining that, and we talk a lot offline about the challenges of keeping up with Microsoft and their API changes and their program changes, so rather than rolling your own integration there, which, if you had enough muscle, you could technically do, but who's looking after that, who's maintaining that, who's keeping that.

And also you've been working with some other SAS providers that are using you as like a capture layer for their products. Is that

Michael: Correct. Yes. So we've actually been working with some AI platforms, just as an example, Gong is one of them where we're delivering their service for customers to analyze revenue intelligence through their platform, but they needed a mechanism to seamlessly easy record teams interactions and

through those interactions, provide their insights. We made it really easy for them to have an integration, to turn on a client within minutes, to be able to just then start ingesting their audio, to be able to analyze that audio.

Tom: Yeah, I worked with a company who's gone and they say they'd love it, so it seems to have a really good reputation. That's a good example where their expertise is not grabbing the media. Their expertise is interpreting the media and bringing it into their sales pipeline process, however it works.

So that seems interesting. I can definitely see a use case where within larger companies, they want to analyze all the customer facing calls of this division or Teams contact center scenarios as well come to mind where it's not about the compliance capture, it's about the data insights.

Michael: Yep. And interestingly enough, we're even seeing it that people are now saying, we probably don't need it for compliance, but your insights are only not as good as your current insights, but you want to be looking back and compare where you've come from to where you're going and to train your engines.

So people want to just get it up and running, start recording, start storing it, and then, maybe in six months, their plan internally is to only start with something in six months, they at least have some legacy data. And again, it's pretty risk free because the way that we do it is really on a consumption basis.

So if you're recording, you're paying, and if you're not recording, you're really, the costs are minimal.

Tom: So what does that look like? Let's imagine I'm a customer who has a team, they're engaging with, another team and I want to gather some insights. So sales manager, 10 sales people for the sake of it, a simple scenario. I've got the skills in house to take the data and, build a model because I'm in FinServ and I've got that team, but I can't get the media.

How do, how would I use your tool to get the media? How does that come out?

Michael: So essentially it's the data acquisition model of our IX cloud product, which would be, a normal recording product, but except UI-less, so everything would be configured as normal, but we would give you access in your environment so you can have the calls going directly into your environment into a, a storage account in a format with XML data with a media file, and then you could go in there and just grab everything directly out of that storage location that you have, which is yours and protected by you, or we can manage it.

It all depends on your. Your choice, but essentially it's really simple. It's a mechanism of using the bot, with the compliance API is, admin consent, URL, putting the bot into a tenant, into your admin, into your enterprise apps application instance, recording policy, set the policy, assign the policy to a group,

throw your users in the group, through our platform you can call with an API, maybe you don't, you only want to record inbound outbound PSTN calls. No hardware software anywhere. When that call happens, it will identify that users in a compliance recording group that needs to be recorded or, just a group, a security group and invite the bot in as an invisible participant, record the call, and then drop it in that location of your choice.

Tom: That's cool. Let's play devil's advocate here. Like I hear this all the time, particularly, banks come to mind like we've got loads of devs. We could do this ourselves. Why? Why can't they look at the Microsoft documentation and build their own bot and data export?

Michael: At the risk of going too much out of the lines where I might not be able to go, but there's a lot of subtleties and nuances in maintaining these integrations. It's a full time job. We built a company out of that. Um, firstly, one of the things I can think about is if you are going to have issues, one of the key elements of being part of certified certified solution is premier support.

So you and that premier support then will allow us to interact with a recording group, excuse me, at Microsoft, which unless you have access to that group, it's going to be very difficult to troubleshoot certain things. And it's not always us as the vendor that is having the issue. Theirs could be a graph issue.

It could be a Team's issue, could be an AD group issue that doesn't give a policy to someone for some reason. And there are features being added all the time to the API that you continually have to manage and test. There was a, an instance and you and I have discussed this before offline where with bot grouping where the recording had an issue with dealing with two larger meetings where there were recorded parties and the rosters were giving too few messages in the rosters, and now you had to deal with bot grouping.

With Delta roster, which is the ability, certainly adding to the rosters, it is a full time job and would, you would rather have your smart developer working on your AI than on gathering that data where there is someone who's perfectly capable experienced been doing it forever doing it for you.

Tom: yeah, and I think that you touched on the maintenance of the solution being a big thing there. This is Microsoft are very agile, constantly moving like this is not a one and done scenario. And the certification being really important is. If you are in the kind of industry that wants to do this, you're probably, your meetings and calls are probably pretty important,

so having a non-certified solution in play that you've rolled yourself, if you have Teams issues, you are not on a certified support track because you are messing with the media. It might well work, but you are not using a certified recording solution, you've rolled your own.

Michael: Sure. And also the fact that, you might need bots in multiple locations for latency. It all depends on how you want to use our platform because again, it's very flexible. You can choose different options as well, but we understand it, being, from May 19th, 2020, when it went GA, we've been there, we understand what, where you have to be careful, what you have to do, how you keep it alive, how you maintain it, how you ensure uptime.

Again, and also the cost of really using our acquisition is less expensive than you even hiring one person to build it and maintain it for you. So it's, we like to think of it as a no brainer.

Tom: Nice. And have you began to think, Michael, about how you might do things with the data? Are you looking at how you could use AI with the call and meeting data?

Michael: Yeah. So we've always as a company never really wanted to compete with our potential customers who are AI businesses, but because we are natively Azure and we bet the farm on it, we, every component of ours is a service or a function or, we use every component possible,

we are going to be leveraging or are leveraging and watch this space, not meant to be a plug though, but meeting insights all that sort of good stuff from Microsoft Cognitive we use Cognitive Services, Sentiment, all that sort of stuff, but one in particular that is interesting is the meeting insights where we will deliver within our end to end platform, that ability in a secure and compliant way to deliver meeting insights on a more compliant level to be able to only firstly, you are in control of what you're recording.

So again, if you're having a meeting, it doesn't mean because every meeting is recorded , with Copilot that automatically people would have access to the data if you aren't managing your permissions properly. In this case, you can specify exactly in our product only record a meeting, 

if there's the word record in it. We have customers who have the opposite. Do not record. So if the meeting is organized by this person and it has the word private or this code, do not record it. So you're getting all the benefits of all these things that Microsoft doesn't include natively in what they do in a product that we've spent a lot of time developing to be able to deliver those additional because it's again what we do every day

Tom: Yeah, and this is where you start to separate around from the Copilot. So the Copilot story is I have a Copilot license, that's my ability to transcribe and summarize. I can't even share that amongst the team, like it's my personal license, whereas in your scenario, it could be a roll your own meeting insight service where we always want to automatically have meeting notes summarized for the monthly or even the weekly all hands and theoretically just spit-balling here,

we could take that summarize it through Cognitive Services, push it up to the SharePoint site, and there's the weekly AI summary of the meeting, for example.

Michael: Absolutely, or in our case like we have an ability to share things directly out of our platform with time expiration or you can allow you have to be a user who has the permission to access that so there are many different ways you're combining two worlds into almost a perfect world as opposed to be limited and what you said is true.

I don't think people See Copilot as a personal assistant it that's because that's really what it is. It's fantastic, and it works really well and I'm seeing it more and I'm being on the receiving end of it more and more, but it really works well. But as a as a personal assistant,

Tom: Yeah, the other thing you touched on there. I want to dive into is the you being, kind of 100 percent committed to the Azure space, it feels like obviously I talked to a few different vendors in the space. Everybody's really excited that Microsoft have made this big commitment to AI and having the open AI models and other AI models run on Azure.

It feels like everybody that's committed to Azure is really excited about the unlocks capability, keeping it in the Azure kind of compliant model, but getting all these AI capabilities. Are you seeing the same?

Absolutely, 

Michael: because that's always been a challenge for us over the years when we've looked and said, okay, we maybe want to use this transcription because somehow maybe it's a bit better suited to a region, and then you get down to the nitty gritty and it's hold on, it's sitting in a data center there, it's separated from the data.

When we record it, it has to leave Azure, go somewhere else, come back. The security becomes a little more of a nightmare. When we have everything within Azure, it stays within region. It's much easier. In terms of the compliance story, when you're having everything in the one solution.

And again, because we're native to Azure, we connecting to all these different components in Azure, we're helping my, Microsoft partners develop better as well, if they're in Azure as well. So for us it's been a really great thing and we're working very closely with Microsoft as well, because we always tell them, like, when someone buys one of our seats, they're 

inherently committed to you as well, because with us, every seat generates additional revenue for Microsoft as well.

Yeah 

Tom: and you've been through the Microsoft App Store process as well, I 

Michael: believe.

Yes. So yeah, we, our product is available TRS, which is our which is this capture product or this media acquisition product is available in marketplace as well as our end to end solution as well, which has tremendous benefits. We're seeing a lot with our partners and customers, the benefits because, a few things like just retiring your Mac that ends up on your Microsoft account,

so you're not have opening various vendors, it's just a line item on your Microsoft bill. I encountered someone recently that said to me, great, they don't even have to go for budget because they have their Microsoft budget

Tom: They've got the pre committed spend.

Michael: Pre committed, they're good to go. A lot of really good value in doing that and simplifying the buying process, also a lot of big enterprises, I was speaking to one recently, they said to onboard you as a vendor can take three months and it's okay, and if you Microsoft now they're a vendor, so if you, if they sent you the boat, no problem overnight, we can do something.

So it's got a lot of it's positive attributes. And again, if someone is developing AI, open AI, Microsoft APIs, and they're already consuming Azure to do it that way and having it all on one bill and worrying about one vendor that way, we still maintain the product absolutely as a managed service, but you have that flexibility to, to at least commercial stays there and tech technology stays there.

Tom: Yeah. Very often with Microsoft customers, they've already blessed Microsoft as a vendor, so you inherit some of that blessing. If it's all on Azure so it's secure and compliant from a virtue of being on Azure.

Michael: When we see RFPs and there's always a section in the RFP data center, do you have cameras, do you have access control? You just write Microsoft Azure and you're done with that section of the RFP.

Tom: that's definitely the dream.

Michael: Yes, exactly.

Tom: Michael, if people to find out more about TTRaaS, your team's recording as a service or the IX cloud, the kind of, the more classic Teams for kind of compliance recording service, what's the best thing to do?

Michael: Yes. We actually have a new domain, a website up Numonix. io. So you can go there, find all the information. And you'll typically find our phone numbers, on the website. We do have a number in the UK and in the US. We are growing more, we do sell globally, but we are expanding also sales at Numonix.

io is available as well, if you want to look for more information and, most people who know Numonix know that I'm very flexible and very available. And

Tom: Yeah, I think you're at all the shows, probably almost as many as I'm at, and we always have a good conversation. I will say as well you're always on the pulse of the technical side of the conversation as in what the latest challenges are and API changes and all that kind of stuff.

I talked to a lot of people and you always have a story about where things are going, so definitely worth the chat, I think.

Michael: Yeah I, I see myself natively as a salesperson, but yet I've learned over the years that technology and I love technology, it's so important to understand, especially in my position, understand the technology we delivering and being on the pulse of the technology that differentiates us as a company.

We're not just trying to sell you something. We're trying to help you and navigate that.

Tom: Awesome. Thanks, Michael, for the insights. If you want to find out more, definitely check out the website. It's definitely worth a look. And we'll catch you on the pod again soon.

Michael: Thanks so much, Tom. I appreciate it. And thank you for everything you do in our community, because I think you really are a key figure in our community and everything you always do for us is amazing, so thank you so much.

Tom: Oh, thank you. Cheers.

Michael: Cheers.