Executive Summary
Shift from Optimization to Transformation: Traditional meeting room design prioritizes operational efficiency and equipment standardization over human experience. By shifting focus from equipping activity to producing desired responses, organizations can elevate in-person gatherings to deliver high-value outcomes.
AI as an Experiential Enabler: AI dramatically reduces the prep, logistics, and customization labor that previously made tailored meeting experiences cost-prohibitive. Agentic AI and smart workplace infrastructure unlock scalable, personalized, and context-aware meeting environments.
Event Production Integration: Physical in-person collaboration must earn its friction by leveraging event production principles—utilizing environmental cues, sensory details, and intentional participant engagement—to maximize ROI on human connection in hybrid workplaces.
I began my career 30+ years ago in theatre production, moved into live events and staging, and eventually into AV and collaboration technology.
Founding NΞXXT has brought those worlds back together for me. Events have become as important to our transformation-enablement mission as our advisory work around permanent collaboration environments. Designing gatherings again, and challenging where the real value sits in a new AI age, has caused me to consistently reflect on what each side of our industry might learn from the other.
We routinely describe events and permanent AV integration as part of the same “AV industry," yet in reality, they operate in very separate silos. Yet looking forward (even more so than looking back) I see far more continuity than separation.
Our work has always been similar in creating the conditions for people to gather around something that matters, then helping them connect, contribute, learn, decide, and act. And I think that mission is only strengthening.
Yet, I keep coming back to one distinction that has driven the divide:
Events are produced around the response we hope to create in people. Meetings have increasingly been equipped around the activity we expect people to perform.
An event producer rarely starts with the technology. They start with people.
Who is coming? What do they already know? What should they understand differently when they leave? What should they feel? What relationships might matter? What decision, commitment, or action do we hope follows?
From there, almost everything can become part of creating that response. Content and participation matter, but events work across a much broader sensory palette: sound and light, food and drink, furniture and materiality, temperature, smell, touch, movement through a space, the welcome someone receives, even what they hold in their hand.
So why do we so consistently fail to think that way in designing collaborative workplace infrastructure, workflows, and environments?
When Optimization Becomes a Constraint
I don’t think the workplace collaboration industry somehow forgot about people. Something much more understandable happened.
As enterprise collaboration matured, many of its constraints became relatively stable. Organizations needed hundreds or thousands of spaces. Technology teams needed to support them. Procurement needed consistency. Users needed simplicity. Budgets needed predictability and efficiency.
So we operationalized. We standardized room types, simplified interfaces, reduced variation, created repeatable deployment models and improved reliability.
When the constraints of any maturing market remain stable, optimization is exactly what we should expect. We refine around what is practical because alternatives carry cost and complexity we cannot justify.
But when the sands shift, opportunity presents itself. As the constraint that shaped an existing model begins to disappear, the question is no longer efficiency. It becomes: what is now possible that was previously impractical?
That is the transition from optimization toward transformation.
Changing the Production Economics
It’s not the ambition that was necessarily missing. The economics of human effort made it unviable.
Byron Tarry
A significant event can justify extraordinary preparation. People spend days, weeks or months understanding audiences, shaping content, briefing contributors, coordinating logistics, creating opportunities for interaction and considering what happens before, during and after the gathering.
An ordinary Tuesday afternoon meeting cannot.
That has always been an ROI calculation. We may know a meeting would benefit from deeper participant context, a different format, stronger facilitation, a more appropriate atmosphere, or better follow-through. But somebody has to decide what would help, then do the work.
Across the volume of everyday meetings inside an enterprise, that human effort quickly overwhelms the potential return.
It’s not the ambition that was necessarily missing. The economics of human effort made it unviable.
This is where I think the AI age opportunity for meetings becomes far more interesting.
AI can increasingly help us understand who is coming, what they know, what they need, where perspectives differ and what might help a particular group progress. That alone will be powerful.
But the events analogy invites us to go further.
What if AI can begin not just changing the administrative effort around a meeting, but the economics of producing the experience?
What should the environment feel like when people arrive? Should it create energy or calm? Encourage exploration or focus? Where might informal interaction matter as much as the scheduled discussion? What role could lighting, sound, furniture, temperature, hospitality, food, materiality, or other sensory cues play in creating the conditions for the response we hope to achieve?
Historically, even considering those questions for an ordinary meeting failed the simplest ROI tests, so we tended to avoid almost any of those explorations.
I recently toured the offices of a high-end financial organization that moved from disposable serving ware toward fine china. Sustainability was part of the rationale, but so was experience. The materiality communicated something about the care, quality and intention it wanted people to feel when gathering there.
Fine china was not going to necessarily create better business decision. But events practitioners understand that human response is influenced by far more than the information we present. Attention, emotion, comfort, energy, trust and connection all contribute. In that instance, someone decided that a sensory detail contributed to that broader experience the organization wants to create. What a great inspiration to build from!
Of course it’s not that enterprises haven’t invested deliberately in the experience surrounding their most important gatherings—consider the CEO’s boardroom, or their executive briefing and customer experience centres. But those were exceptions, because the attention and effort involved was so difficult to scale.
The question now amid AI’s capacity to remove past constraint is whether AI might make more of that intentionality practical at everyday scale, and what technologists might play in that rethink.
Even “yesterday’s smart workplace” infrastructure already understands identity, occupancy, environmental conditions, room configuration etc. Add agentic AI capable of orchestrating some of the planning and adaptation across those systems to the context of meetings and users, and we start entering exciting new territory. To leverage a much broader palette of now experiential amplifiers at a scale where human effort previously made them unviable.
That does not mean making every meeting feel the same as an event. It means learning from an industry that understands how the conditions surrounding a gathering influence what people feel, embrace, and act upon.
Physical Gathering Needs to Earn Its Friction
There is another reason this matters now.
The traditional assumption was that moving from your personal work environment into a meeting room gave you access to something better: larger displays, better audio, better cameras and more specialized technology. Perhaps a compromise in convenience and personalization, but a payoff of broader outcomes in return.
Today that assumption is increasingly questionable.
At home or at a desk, people may have multiple displays, familiar devices, personalized software, tuned workflows and their own relationship with AI. Then they enter a shared space and may be asked to accept a more generic, even reduced experience.
The logistics of gathering also physically faces added friction. Who will be in the office? When are they available? Where can we meet? Does the available space support what we want to do? That’s got substantially harder in a Hybrid workplace.
This may all sound like an argument against physical gathering. Quite the opposite. But we need to raise the standard we expect from it. To recognise and leverage its strengths, not just refine its emerging weaknesses. The point is…
If gathering in person now faces additional friction and greater compromise, the experience of gathering must evolve to offer a return greater than that friction.
A good event does not justify attendance because its projector is better than your laptop. It creates something through people, place, experience and purpose that would be difficult to achieve alone.
Physical presence gives us access to an extraordinarily rich palette of human experience. The opportunity is to use it.
Start With the Experience, Not the Room
Most enterprises already possess much of the expertise required to explore this.
AV and IT teams understand infrastructure, collaboration platforms, reliability and increasingly AI. Events and marketing teams understand audience, narrative, participation, emotion and experience. Workplace and real-estate teams understand physical environments and how people interact with them.
Within the enterprise workplace model we have even seen virtual and hybrid events require some of these disciplines to collaborate, so have some initial precedent. But it seems clear we need to push that alignment further. Not by asking events teams to start specifying meeting rooms or AV teams to become event producers. Instead, bring those perspectives together around a collaborative problem that matters.
Here’s an initiative I propose:
- Choose one important recurring activity. An executive review, project kickoff, product decision, innovation workshop, or learning session.
- Then work future-back for an hour. Assume AI can, or soon could, remove a significant proportion of the preparation, coordination, personalization and logistics effort that historically made greater meeting tailoring impractical.
- Don’t begin with today’s room capabilities. Don’t begin with the latest AI feature on a vendor roadmap. Instead ask:
If this were an experience we were responsible for producing rather than simply a meeting we were responsible for equipping, what would we do differently?
- What should people understand, feel, decide or do when it ends?
- If the full experiential palette were available, what might we change about preparation, participation, environment, hospitality or follow-through?
- What could become standardized and repeatable? What might intelligently adapt to the particular gathering? Where will human judgement still add the greatest value?
Then work backwards.
- Which parts of that ambition are already possible?
- Which might become practical because AI dramatically reduces the human effort required?
- Which remaining constraints are genuinely technological, and which are process, policy, ownership or simply habit?
- Then find a way to test all that.
The objective is not to predict precisely what meetings will look like years from now. It is to create enough constructive discomfort that we start discovering what is already possible.
When constraints remain stable, we optimize within them. When those constraints erode, we have an opportunity to reconsider the model they created.
Some of the compromises that pushed enterprise collaboration toward standardization, simplification and efficiency were rational responses to what was practical. But we should not automatically preserve every limitation they created.
For me, that is one of the most exciting aspects of this AI moment.
The mission across theatre, events and collaboration technology was never really to install equipment. It was to help people gather in ways that allowed something valuable to happen between them.
That core mission has not changed. The opportunity to fulfil it has.
So my challenge is simple. Before asking what your next meeting room should contain, bring a few different people together and ask:
If the effort required to produce a more relevant, human and outcome-focused gathering no longer faced the constraint it once did, what new experiences would you create?
Then let what you learn challenge everything else.
