By Tim Grayson |
Technology Record’s Tim Grayson sat down with James Spencer, video solutions director at Jabra, at Commsverse 2025 for a candid discussion about the current meeting-room challenges faced across industries, the opportunities they may unlock in the new future, and how he predicts these trends evolving over the next five years.
“I think a lot of workplaces today are still struggling to deal with how they’re going to cope with people coming back to the office,” says Spencer. “We see a lot of mixed responses to this. Some organisations are enforcing a full return to the office where people are in for five days a week, others less – and for those who are in (let’s say) three days a week, they’re often oversubscribed on those days – which means they can’t find a free meeting room when they need one. They’re then left wondering how they can get around that.
“A lot of people’s solution is to have an ad-hoc space. We talk about this in terms of having a meeting space, rather than a meeting room because we actually have to find new areas. Although this is something we talked about two or three years ago, I feel it’s something that’s only really started coming to fruition completely today.”
These concerns aren’t theoretical. “We met one customer earlier today who spoke about their big rooms being underutilised,” says Spencer. “So, for example, you might have a 16-person room that two people are using at one time. This begs the question, how could we better utilise that space? Do we divide that into seven meeting rooms, for example?
“The research we’ve done – and we do research every year – has been showing that there are 33 million ‘huddle rooms’ globally, and only three per cent of those have some sort of technology within them today, so there’s still a long way to go. In the coming months, we’ll be releasing our PanaCast 40 Video Bar system, which is designed for small rooms. It has 180-degree field of view, which is massively important, because the more you can push things towards the wall, the more you can fit in to that space.”
James Spencer at Commsverse 2025, showcasing the Jabra PanaCast video conferencing camera system
Moving beyond the present, Spencer envisions a future for how these solutions may continue to evolve as we move towards the second half of the decade – and how partnerships are crucial for this development.
“We’re always looking to push innovation as far as we possibly can,” he says. “A lot comes down to the alliance partnerships we have, and the ecosystem around that. We’re seeing more need to automate things, and as part of a bigger solution, there’s talk of smart buildings, and what we might be able to do within a smart building. That could involve integrating our system into a larger ecosystem – one that includes features like wayfinding or connections to room booking systems.
“We’ve spoken recently about ‘phantom bookings’, where rooms are booked up on the system, but are empty in real life. What if your video camera could look in the meeting room 10 minutes past the start time, realise there’s nobody in there, and automatically release that room? It would make people more productive.
“It could also evolve to the point where the camera automatically detects the room’s lighting conditions. If it’s too dark, it may increase the light in there, or open a blind. The goal is to automate these adjustments to ensure the best meeting conditions, or to correct them as effectively as possible.”
The Jabra booth at Commsverse 2025
Spencer also highlights the need for alternative approaches to meeting rooms (or spaces), concluding with a series of prescient observations.
“Ultimately, within organisations, you need a mix of different things,” he says. “You need some rooms that you’ll walk into and simply press a button to join – something easy – and at senior executive level, that’s exactly what they want. However, there does seem to be this rise in meeting pods, which are flexible spaces where people can just plug their own laptop in, and go ahead.
“In addition to this, things are becoming more modular – certainly with what we’re doing – so you can add more audio components or cameras. The multi-cam systems are interesting in terms of attendees being able to ask while in a room, ‘which camera would I need to use?’ It could be the front of room camera, or one of the cameras down the side. Over the last 15-20 years, there’s always been that technology - it’s never been perfect (although it’s getting rather good now), but what interests me as we move towards 2030 is that there’s a step to go beyond that, where the AI technology itself almost becomes like a TV director (one of the modes on the PanaCast is a Virtual Director). I think it’s interesting that you’ll have an AI director, identifying who’s speaking, where it needs to look, and what it needs to look out for.
“Having AI systems like this that just work and pick things up within the room and the ability to add on bits very simply, and easily, seems to be the way the industry is going. I’m genuinely excited to see what differences these evolving technologies will bring in the near future and the impact they’ll have on the meeting room.”