Enterprise meeting rooms are under fresh scrutiny as IT leaders assess whether collaboration spaces still justify their cost, complexity, and footprint. In this UC Today interview, we speak with Javed Khan, CEO of Neat, about why the next phase of meeting room innovation may depend less on adding more hardware and more on making the room itself intelligent.
Why Neat Is Betting On Distributed Room Intelligence
Khan, whose appointment as Neat CEO followed senior roles at Cisco and Aptiv, says one of the company’s biggest differentiators is its distributed intelligent architecture. Instead of depending on a central box to control the room, Neat designs cameras, microphones, and related devices as intelligent endpoints.
That approach, Khan tells UC Today, gives customers more flexibility to expand meeting rooms over time while preserving the simplicity that Neat has built its reputation around.
A central theme of the discussion is AI at the edge. Khan explains that more processing can now happen directly inside the room, rather than relying entirely on cloud services. For real-time collaboration, this matters because latency can quickly damage the experience for remote participants. It also supports privacy, especially when sensitive conversations, transcripts, or contextual insights do not need to leave the room.
Khan points to Neat Center and the intelligent layouts announced at Infocomm as examples of this direction. These capabilities use signals such as who is speaking, how people are reacting, and where attention is focused to create a more natural view for remote attendees. As Khan puts it, the aim is to ask how a Hollywood director might frame a meeting.
