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January 2025 - Newsletter Article

January 2025

Is Your AV/Video Estate Ready for the Next Era of Hybrid Work?

January 30, 2025

Written by Eric Krapf, General Manager and Program Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect Publisher

The hybrid work pendulum seems to be swinging back toward high-profile return to office (RTO) mandates – or at least the press coverage is going that direction. Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, and the U.S. federal government have all issued high-profile RTO directives in recent weeks. So it’s once again time to consider how collaboration, AV, and video technologies will enable the next vision of the office of the future.

Room video systems were being impacted by AI even before ChatGPT upended the market in late 2022. AI has been heralded as the key ingredient to improving the quality of conference room video, by knitting together video streams from multiple cameras, cleaning up room-based audio, and providing single-speaker shots of room-based participants instead of the one-camera “bowling alley” view. But are enterprises really using these capabilities, and if so, are they getting enough benefit from them?

That’s just one of the key issues our AV/Video track and Impact Summit will tackle at Enterprise Connect 2025 the week of March 17 in Orlando. In Monday’s Impact Summit, AV industry veteran David Danto will lead a session entitled, AI-Driven Meeting Rooms: Cutting Costs, Boosting Performance, or Compromising Quality? that will provide a reality check on how much of AI’s promise is being fulfilled in the meeting room.

David will also serve as the moderator for the AV Impact Summit, helping the audience tie together the different perspectives and content threads over the course of 3 Monday morning sessions. That summit will also feature another longtime AV industry expert, Aaron Roe of Deloitte, who will describe how the professional services firm is strategizing for the future, in a session titled, Building the Connected Office for the Next Generation. Aaron will help attendees understand how the many different pieces of the technology puzzle – from wireless join to identity access and location technology – may be used, and what the risks and opportunities are. We’ll wrap up the Impact Summit with another professional services firm’s story, as Damon Talley of KPMG walks attendees through a case study on how the company did a complete upgrade of its state-of-the-art learning and innovation center, called Lakehouse.

During the rest of the week, our AV/Video track will offer a mix of real-world case studies and strategic technology topics. Among the AV/IT pros sharing their experiences will be Chad Hess of AdventHealth, whose session will address Achieving Better Management for a Large Meeting Room Estate. The need for more efficient management of rooms comes up frequently in conversation with AV-focused pros, and Chad will discuss how AdventHealth’s Central Florida team is automating and standardizing to better manage and continually improve the 375 meeting rooms they serve. A bonus: We’ll be holding one of our “post-session networking” sessions after Chad’s talk, which means we’ll hold the room for an additional half hour so session attendees can stick around and network with Chad and each other on this topic of shared interest.

We’ll also have a farther-ranging AV/video case studies session, in which the audience will hear from a panel of AV/IT pros representing a university, insurance company, and the nation’s largest distributor of wine, beer, spirits, and non-alcoholic products. For this session as well, we’re keeping the room available after the panel discussion ends, so attendees can network and continue the conversation.

Finally, standardization has been a major issue in room video over the past several years, and we’ve got the latest on some key issues here as well. David Danto will lead a discussion of how MDEP, Microsoft’s new Android version, may impact your choices for meeting room hardware. And analyst Craig Durr will lead a discussion among major vendors called Breaking Through the Fog: Demystifying UC Interoperability, focusing on how interoperability in the broader UC ecosystem impacts meeting rooms’ ability to connect and users’ ability to get the most out of their systems.

So wherever your enterprise finds itself in the ongoing struggles over RTO, you need a strategy around your meeting room estate, and around optimizing remote collaboration for those who continue to work from home – as many undoubtedly still will, given the pushback we’ve seen to RTO. Enterprise Connect is the best place for you to get a deep dive on how the trends and developments in AV and video will impact your broader enterprise collaboration strategy, and what you have to do to make it all work. I hope you can join us in Orlando – our extended Super Early Bird rate expires this Friday, January 31, so sign up now!