97 INTERVIEW Creating a connected workplace Vic Bhagat of Q-SYS explains to Alex Smith why AI is pushing businesses to reassess their approach to meeting room technology Many businesses choose meeting room technology on a room-byroom basis, leading to a fragmented collection of systems and technologies across different spaces. According to Vic Bhagat, senior director of alliances at Q-SYS, organisations must take a more strategic approach now that AIpowered collaboration and hybrid work are reshaping what they need from their office space. “A device-by-device approach may solve immediate needs, but it can also create fragmented systems, inconsistent experiences and limited visibility across the estate,” says Bhagat. “That becomes a challenge as organisations try to scale hybrid work, AI-enabled collaboration and workplace intelligence. AI is more dependent on contextual data from physical spaces. AI experiences such as Microsoft 365 Copilot become more useful when the system can understand who is speaking, what is happening in the room, what devices are active and whether the room is performing as expected. Therefore, the better the infrastructure is at capturing, managing and acting on that context, the better the employee experience can become.” The need for a more connected experience is therefore shifting organisations’ focus towards building with a flexible platform that can support different room requirements while maintaining consistency. “The expanding Certified for Teams Rooms hardware ecosystem gives customers more freedom to design spaces around real workplace needs rather than forcing every room into a single device model,” Bhagat says. “For Q-SYS, that matters because customers are no longer just solving for a meeting room; they are building a connected workplace. With the Q-SYS Full Stack AV Platform and Q-SYS Reflect, those spaces can be connected, monitored and managed as part of a larger estate rather than treated as isolated deployments.” Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows combined with the Q-SYS Platform delivers the consistency and flexibility today’s meeting rooms require, suggests Bhagat. “Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows and the Q-SYS Platform are highly complementary,” he says. “Teams Rooms on Windows provides a powerful, enterprise-ready foundation for Microsoft’s most advanced collaboration, management and AI-enabled meeting experiences. The Q-SYS Platform extends that foundation with professionalgrade audio, video, control, automation, monitoring and management across a wide variety of room types and workplace environments. The result is a faster path from functional meeting rooms to intelligent, high-performance workplaces.” “ Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows and the Q-SYS Platform are highly complementary”
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