From connected to intelligent: how meeting spaces are evolving
In the first phase of hybrid work, organisations faced a relatively straightforward challenge: how to ensure sure everyone could join the meeting?
Businesses invested rapidly in cameras, microphones, displays and collaboration platforms to connect employees wherever they worked. Today, organisations are focusing less on basic connectivity and more on meeting experience quality.
Organisations are looking more closely at the quality of the experience. Do remote participants feel as involved as the people in the room? Can employees walk in and use the technology intuitively? Can already stretched IT teams manage meeting spaces without constant intervention? And can the technology provide useful insight into how people use the wider workplace?
These questions sit at the heart of the challenges Neat sees customers discussing today.
As AI, analytics and flexible collaboration technologies mature, we're prioritising intelligent spaces that respond to the people who use them.
For AV resellers and integrators, that shift creates opportunities to have much broader conversations with customers about the role technology can play across the modern workplace.
Meeting equity means more than joining the call
Meeting equity is the idea that all meeting participants have an equal opportunity to contribute and engage, regardless of location or technology.
Hybrid meetings may have become commonplace, but organisations haven't completely solved the experience.
Neat identifies meeting equity as one of the biggest challenges facing customers today.
A remote participant can technically attend while still feeling disconnected from the conversation. When several people gather around a meeting table, traditional room cameras can make it difficult for someone joining remotely to follow natural interactions, identify who's speaking or pick up the non-verbal cues that make face-to-face conversations feel effortless.
AI can help close that gap.
Intelligent framing has moved beyond detecting a speaker and zooming in. Neat's approach uses AI to dynamically frame participants and help remote attendees follow conversations as they develop.
Centre-of-room technology takes this further. Neat Center, for example, captures people from within the conversation and gives remote participants more natural, eye-level views of those around the table.
The goal isn't to put more technology between people. It's to make the technology less noticeable and the conversation more natural.
For resellers, this changes the discussion from "Which camera does this room need?" to "How should this meeting feel for everyone taking part?"
More intelligence, less complexity
There's an interesting contradiction emerging in workplace technology.
Meeting rooms continue to get smarter, yet customers still expect them to feel simpler.
Neat sees this challenge from both sides of the meeting room.
Employees want to walk into a space, start their meeting and get to work. They don't want to understand the technology behind intelligent framing, audio processing or collaboration platforms.
IT teams want simplicity too.
Managing multiple room types, devices and locations can quickly create an operational burden. Every piece of technology that requires regular intervention adds another potential support ticket.
That's why smarter meeting spaces need to reduce operational friction rather than add to it.
Neat designs its Board and Bar portfolio around this principle, combining multiple elements of the meeting experience into streamlined solutions. Neat Pulse extends that thinking to IT teams, providing centralised device management and proactive monitoring across deployments.
AI also plays a role. Neat's intelligent framing and acoustic capabilities help rooms respond automatically to what's happening around them, including filtering distractions from open collaboration areas.
The result supports a useful principle for the modern workplace: more capability doesn't have to mean more complexity.
In fact, the smartest meeting spaces may ultimately feel like the simplest ones to use.
The meeting room is becoming a source of workplace intelligence
The evolution of the meeting space doesn't stop when the call ends.
Technology within the room can give organisations greater insight into the physical environment and how people use it.
Neat Sense, for example, uses sensors within Neat devices to capture environmental and occupancy data, including CO2 levels, temperature and room usage.
For facilities and workplace teams, this information can help answer practical questions about how spaces are being used.
Are teams consistently underusing certain rooms? Do employees prefer particular types of collaboration spaces? Does the organisation need its current amount of meeting space? Could it manage energy consumption more effectively by understanding when people use different areas?
These questions matter as organisations reassess their office footprints and look for ways to support sustainability and operational efficiency.
They also broaden the role AV can play.
A collaboration device can contribute to wider decisions around real estate, employee experience and resource use.
For resellers and integrators, that creates another opportunity to move beyond individual products and start conversations around measurable business outcomes.
Flexibility is becoming fundamental
People don't all collaborate in the same way, so meeting spaces can't either.
One organisation might standardise on Microsoft Teams. Another might prefer Zoom. Employees, guests and external partners may arrive with their own devices and expect to use different platforms.
Customers increasingly want spaces that adapt without introducing unnecessary friction.
Neat addresses this through technologies including Neat Open, which gives organisations greater flexibility around applications and workflows while supporting the simple meeting experience users expect.
That flexibility becomes even more important as workplaces themselves diversify.
A traditional boardroom has very different requirements from a focus booth, executive office, glass-walled huddle space or open collaboration area. Higher education and town hall environments create different challenges again, particularly when presenters need to move freely while keeping remote participants involved.
Neat's focus on a range of room types reflects a wider shift in workplace strategy: the technology needs to fit how people use the space, rather than forcing every space into the same template.
For enterprise and public sector organisations deploying technology at scale, that flexibility must also work alongside security, consistency and low-touch management.
The aim is to create a collaboration experience that can adapt across different room types.
Experience Neat at Tech Xpo 2026
At Tech Xpo 2026, Neat will be showcasing Neat Center, Neat Board, Neat Bar, Neat Pulse and Neat Open, allowing you to see its latest collaboration technologies in action.
Tech Xpo also gives you the chance to discuss real projects and challenges directly with Neat and Midwich.
Whether you’re working on a live opportunity, exploring a new area of the market or simply want to understand where workplace technology is heading next, bring those conversations with you.
Register for Tech Xpo 2026 and join the conversation.
