·
6 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Catching Up with, Craig Durr speaks with Andrew Gross, SVP of Sales for Xyte, live from InfoComm 2026. Their conversation looks at how enterprise AV is becoming an integral part of broader IT and AI strategies, and why open platforms, interoperability, and cloud-based management are increasingly important as organizations modernize workplace technology.
Their discussion covers:
- An AI-Powered Single Pane of Glass: How Xyte unifies multi-vendor AV environments into a centralized cloud-native management platform
- Building an Open AV Ecosystem: Xyte's role in Open AV Cloud and its commitment to open APIs, interoperability, and customer choice
- AI-Driven IT Orchestration: How the new Command Line Interface (CLI) enables administrators to manage AV systems through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot
- Connecting AV to Enterprise AI: Why Xyte is positioning itself as the bridge between collaboration technology, AI agents, and modern IT operations
- Xyte Secure Edge: How the new gateway extends device connectivity while delivering secure, IT-friendly communication across enterprise networks
- Bridging AV and IT: How Xyte is helping organizations manage AV infrastructure using familiar IT frameworks, security standards, and operational workflows
Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey everybody, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. We are here live at InfoComm 2026, and I love this event. Not only is it a chance to bring you new solutions and updates, I get to catch up with old friends. I am here at Xyte, and I want to catch up with an old friend that I want to make sure you know, Andrew Gross.
Andrew Gross: Craig, good to see you. How are you doing?
Craig Durr: Andrew is SVP of Sales for Xyte.
Andrew Gross: That's right.
Craig Durr: You guys have had an incredible run here over the last couple of years, and I've watched you grow, which is a lot of fun.
Andrew Gross: Yeah, not just us, the booth, too.
Craig Durr: I mean, we last met up at ISE, but you've had some great announcements since then, right? If our audience doesn't know you, why don't we take time and update them about Xyte and what the offering is in the market right now?
Andrew Gross: Yeah, sure thing. I know you know Xyte, but if the audience hasn't heard of Xyte AI before, the cool thing is we're really the industry's first and only cloud-native, AI-powered single pane of glass for the AV space.
What's cool, especially at InfoComm, is you walk around a trade show and you see all these brands and devices from different manufacturers. As a customer, whether you're an MSP or an end user, you're trying to find what stuff you've got to bring together to build your best room. The thing that's been missing for so long is, well, how do I now manage that room with all this collection of stuff?
Craig Durr: It's hard for people to have a homogenous ecosystem, right? They wind up having different vendors and whatever else. In fact, that's probably a great opportunity for us to take a look. Come over here. This space is probably a great example of all the different vendors that you have. Tell me some of those.
Andrew Gross: So one of the biggest things we've been focusing on, really over the last year, which sounds like a long time, but honestly it's not, is expanding our ecosystem. Because everything that we do, and we're going to talk a little bit about this in a second, it all depends on what is coming into the platform. If I can't talk to it, I can't control it. I really can't do anything with it. And so to build that single pane of glass, we have expanded our ecosystem drastically. It's now covering well over 99% of all the vendors here.
Craig Durr: Wow, really? And you also have a really proud moment. I love that you're a founding member of OpenAV Cloud, right? Tell me about that.
Andrew Gross: OpenAV Cloud, yeah, that's right. It's really kind of like the ethos that Xyte has always embodied, actually brought into an industry initiative. We're a founding member, along with a bunch of other industry members here. You can walk around and see their booths, from BrightSign to Legrand to Sony and Panasonic. It's a really great group, and what we've set out to do is set an industry standard that says, “Hey, if you're going to sell things in this industry, you've got to give your customer the freedom of control, management, and choice over that device.” That means adopting open APIs, allowing your device to be connected to not just Xyte, but any software platform.
Craig Durr: And I know this isn't directly Xyte, you're a founding member, but that message has resonated. That organization has actually grown a lot since its foundation.
Andrew Gross: Well, because we should eat our own dog food, right? It's one thing to be part of that initiative and say, “Hey, you're going to buy a piece of hardware as an end user, you should be able to control and manage it as you please.”
But from our point of view, we've got to eat that dog food. Once you use our platform, you should be able to take all that data outbound as well. That's key for things like ServiceNow integrations or other business platforms because we're not here to replace business infrastructure, we're here to add on top of it.
Craig Durr: Data becomes this huge powerhouse of information to leverage, where those outcomes are taking place, working with those AI platforms. That's actually a great segue to the next idea. One of the things you guys introduced, I think it's right over here, this is CLI. What is CLI?
Andrew Gross: So CLI stands for Command Line Interface. In a nutshell, what the Command Line Interface is, is like, “Hey, I've got all this stuff coming into Xyte, and our UI is very nice, but I prefer Copilot. I prefer my ChatGPT.” So instead of me having to go to Xyte and find the room that has a problem, and then maybe reboot devices from three different manufacturers, I'd much rather wake up in the morning, go to Copilot, and say, “Hey, by the way, what rooms have problems? Check which rooms have a meeting first, reboot that room first.”
Craig Durr: So an IT administrator can go into that AI tool of their choice, whatever workflows they've already had, and still leverage this data powerhouse we've been talking about.
Andrew Gross: Yeah, in a way, we're almost this IT orchestration platform for data and control now in the AV space, which has never existed before. This whole AI wave is changing how people look at management.
When we first started in this industry around four to five years ago, the focus was, “Give me the greatest-looking interface, show me all my vendors on a single screen, I can point and shoot to control them.” But that's not how the modern CIO operates. The modern CIO operates by understanding vulnerabilities, understanding security patches, and understanding the usage of my rooms through AI tools and AI agents. And for the first time ever, this industry is connected to that AI world through Xyte.
Craig Durr: So we're talking almost like an agent-to-agent communication layer taking place here, right?
Andrew Gross: It is exactly that. It's agent to agent with Xyte as that gateway between them. We actually have an agent built into our platform. It leverages the OpenAI LLM, asking it questions about your spaces. But if you, the customer, if you're the CIO or the AV director, IT director, don't work that way, and you need to use Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise, for the first time ever you can in the AV world.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. So we talked about this wide, broad ecosystem. We talked about working through the interface of your choice. There was another challenge that came up, and you guys announced a product around the ISE timeframe that we talked about before. This is for those organizations and environments that probably want to have something in-network that's more hardened, something with more control. You actually have a new product there, right? Want to grab it off that wall? Right there, this is it.
Andrew Gross: That's great, right? This is the Xyte Secure Edge. The reason for this piece of hardware was for two main items. Item number one, we talked about at the beginning of our chat, the building of this ecosystem. All this AI stuff is great, but if I can't connect to the device, it doesn't matter, and some devices may or may not have that same ecosystem that works. So this helps bridge that gap, to allow more devices to communicate to Xyte, and this allows my AV stuff to start talking IT language. This is what IT world leaders are looking at.
Craig Durr: Half the challenge here is having managed AV in IT language, in IT constructs. This is part of the strategy to help bridge that along the way, right?
Andrew Gross: When we bridge the gap to AI, we can't forget about bridging the gap to IT. This is that internal gateway, it sits on the network, it's fully hardened and secure, outbound-only communication. This device is all SOC 2 Type II compliant, all the acronyms.
Craig Durr: ISO this, ISO that, I know. All right, I have one last question. Where are the popsicles? I know that you have the popsicles.
Andrew Gross: They're in Barcelona, unfortunately, right now.
Craig Durr: If you don't know, this booth has these wonderful popsicles. If we don't have them yet in this Las Vegas heat, now's the time to do it. I'm giving you a hard time, Andrew. This has been a great update, I really appreciate it. So where should people follow up if they want to learn some more?
Andrew Gross: Really, the best area is xyte.ai, it's our website, all of our newest updates and information there, around the expanded ecosystem, Open AV Cloud, agent-to-agent communication, and of course the Secure Edge to make all this work.
Craig Durr: I can't even count that many things to keep up with. That's it. All right. Well, everyone, let me go ahead and wrap this up. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst of The Collab Collective. We're here at InfoComm 2026, this is a powerful update. Stay tuned for some more from the show floor. Take care.