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9 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective's Craig Durr talks with Sam Sabet, Executive Vice President & CTO at Shure, live from ISE 2025. Their discussion explores how Shure is integrating AI into collaboration solutions, the significance of high-quality audio for AI-driven meetings, and new product innovations designed for modern workplaces like the IntelliMix™ Room Kits.
Their discussion covers:
- AI & Audio Collaboration: Why pristine audio is critical for AI-driven meetings and transcription accuracy.
- The Human Element in Tech: How Shure designs adaptable solutions to meet evolving workplace collaboration needs.
- Shure’s IntelliMix™ Room Kits: A Microsoft Teams Rooms-certified portfolio built for scalable meeting room experiences.
- Expanding the Microflex® Portfolio: New wireless microphone and loudspeaker solutions designed for enterprise flexibility.
Listen to the Audio:
Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everybody. This is Craig Durr, Founder and Chief analyst at the Collab Collective. We are here at ISE 2025, and we're bringing you some exciting interviews Direct from the Expo–we're talking to the thought leaders and the executives who are actually influencing our industry in making things happen.
I am really excited to have Sam Sabet here–Executive Vice President and CTO from Shure. Now I'm excited because Shure, with your legacy of 100 years of audio excellence, you have a lot of great things to talk about at this show. Thank you for coming.
Sam Sabet: Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here at ISE 2025. This show has been amazing so far, it's packed. I think it's the highest number of people that have been here for a really long time. And for us, it's a lot sweeter to be here this year, especially because we are celebrating our 100 year anniversary, and you know it's a huge milestone. Not a lot of companies get to be 100.
Craig Durr: No, not that, especially with the long legacy of what you guys put together. Let's talk about that a little bit right now. We are now in this era of always talking about AI and how it's important in collaboration, but one of those key elements that is really needed to be successful in that is audio. Talk to me about what you believe about audio, how it's important in collaboration with AI.
Sam Sabet: Absolutely. Let me first say, you're absolutely right–to get to 100 years, there's a lot of things you concentrate on; you're always innovating, you're always keeping up with the times, you're always transforming essentially to keep up with technology and the way people work. It’s not just being stagnant for 100 years. Obviously, in today's day and age, that big thing that's affecting us every day is AI. I mean you can't go to a meeting without talking about AI. And it's really interesting because, I mean, I'm a big fan–It has been a lifechanger, it's a game-changer for me at work, it's made me much more efficient, I got a lot less meetings.
But guess what: what I found is that when you do go to these meetings or you don't actually go to the meetings and you see the summaries or the action items, you really have to trust what AI is telling you. And the only way you can really do that is by trusting the input into AI. And not a lot of people think about this, but for it to transcribe meetings and action items and be able to have speaker attribution properly and know what's happening in the meeting, it's got to have pristine data–and that data really is the audio in the meeting. Without that pristine audio, without that high quality capture, you really can't use it efficiently, right? You end up actually wasting time rather than being more efficient because you have to double check everything it tells.
Craig Durr: Right, so audio in those meetings becomes like a lynchpin on how you have successful AI experiences.
Sam Sabet: Absolutely
Craig Durr: I agree with that. Great. Let's go ahead and pivot a little bit here and talk about something that you're doing here at the show. Shure is sponsoring an event called the Human Element. Tell me more about that.
Sam Sabet: Yeah, so I'm actually presenting at a panel between myself and Mick Heys from IDC, and we're really looking at one side of the story, which is the surveys and statistics and research that we've done to see what are people doing today related to AI, what are people doing related to sustainability and security because it all goes together, right? It's a package. But essentially, I don't want to give away the whole panel, I'd love people to come and see me on the panel–it's on Thursday, this Thursday in the afternoon–but what it really comes down to is that when we make a design for a product, it's not enough to just concentrate on technology. What we really want to do is be able to understand the human element, which is how are people using this? How is it going to affect their life? Where do we design to be flexible? And a big portion of it is really around people coming to work, and they return to office, and we talk about a hybrid. And I don't know if hybrid is the right word anymore–it's become…
Craig Durr: It's just the way we're working now. It's modern work.
Sam Sabet: Yeah, but I don't think we figured that out completely yet, right? I mean, as people come in, they're going to change their behavior based on all these moving parts, they're going to be able to want to collaborate more. Does that mean more rooms? Does that mean huddle spaces? It's really going to change, and I feel there's no one-size-fits-all. And so, knowing that, we design our products to be flexible, adaptable–you're able to easily change things around to be able to reconfigure based on the needs of the user. That's where the human element comes in.
Craig Durr: It does. I'm glad that you mentioned products because what is a show without Shure bringing to market some incredible new products? And you guys have wonderful ones I want to talk about. Let me start with the first one–the IntelliMix™ Room Kits for Microsoft Teams Rooms. Now, this isn't just a single product, this is actually a portfolio solution serving a variety of room sizes. Why don't you tell me more about that?
Sam Sabet: Yeah, I mean it goes with the theme we just mentioned, right? There is no one-size-fits-all. Things are changing constantly, and what's really really really nice about these kits is that there's a foundation element of it that's common to everything, but then it scales to where you need it to go–whether there a small room, medium, large, or even the complex larger rooms and multi-function rooms–each kit is purposely built to fit into any one of those. And it's built on the same foundation, so you figure it out once, and it applies to all of them.
More importantly, we did two things here when we started really thinking about how we want to enter this market, how we want to be able to present a unified solution that's a MTR Windows solution. Well, we were thinking–one it's got to really be easy to deploy and reconfigure, right? I mean, if you believe that we're going to be in flux and changing constantly for the foreseeable future, that system's got to be able to adapt to that. So simplicity of use that we're actually showing in our Innovation Lab here, a show demonstrating that you can put this whole kit together in 5 minutes and be up and running with a full room. And it’s really impressive to watch.
The second part to that is obviously the end user. You want to be able to seamlessly get into a meeting–you want to be able to have that one touch experience, which of course is a given today. But more importantly than that is that you want to be able to know that–no matter how you're sitting around, where you are in the room, how people are configured– it just works. And that's the beauty of the Shure system–it adapts. We have our own IntelliMix™ Room DSP software on there, which runs the entire room and adapts to changing acoustics within the room. And it's just a seamless–which is where technology really should be, right? The human element we just talked about is if the technology can blend in the background, and you just don't think about it and do your job, and it helps with efficiency–that's where we want to be.
Craig Durr: Well this is one of those subtleties that I really appreciate about the solution–the fact that you have the IntelliMix™ DSP actually sitting on the same device at Microsoft Teams Rooms, and it's certified. This is a very important statement about the partnership because that compute is precious to that Microsoft Team's experience. But what you guys have crafted was a piece of software that's not only powerful but is still lightweight within that whole experience as well. It's a very powerful solution there.
Sam Sabet: Absolutely, and this talks to the strong relationship and collaboration we have with Microsoft. To be able to get them to coexist and work seamlessly and not affect each other in performance, you're absolutely right. That is one thing where we had to work hand in hand with engineering teams and Microsoft and get the solution that just fits for all of our customers.
Craig Durr: Right, if this was any other show we might stop there, but you actually have two other new products we can talk about as well. The first one is the Microflex® Wireless microphone, there's an expansion to that portfolio. And then the other one is the Microflex® Loudspeaker portfolio. Why don't you share both of those with us?
Sam Sabet: Absolutely. So first of all, you're right, this is a crazy show. It's amazing for us. I mean, between how busy the booth is to our 100 years to now, all these new products–it's just been amazing. We carry that theme of flexibility throughout all of our portfolios, so the Microflex® Wireless next… We had introduced a two-channel variant of it last year, but now we're expanding the portfolio–we have a four-channel and an eight-channel. It scales up to 160 channels with multiple receivers.
And the really interesting thing here is that it fits a need that a lot of people don't know they have until they run into the problem, which is how do you do a multi-function room? How do you do a presentation in a meeting at the same time? We just talked about flexibility and the fact that the way we do things is changing, well, you don't know ahead of time that this meeting is going to be a presenter or a lecture or a training… and at the same time, you're going to bring in remote speakers, you're going to bring in remote participants over Teams, be able to do that with the ability to have form factors like a handheld, a loft, a table mic–all that into a conferencing system and it is Microsoft certified as well. So it's just such a flexible solution; you can put it anywhere.
Craig Durr: I love it. That USB connectivity into that Teams environment, again, is a very powerful story. But then, you also have the loudspeaker portfolio as well.
Sam Sabet: Absolutely, so now, how do we cover the entire span and how do we get more flexible? Great. We have the capture, we have the center of the room, and we have the IntelliMix™ Room Kits. Well, you need the audio out as well, right? So we have just come out with a line of different loudspeakers, all different form factors from ceiling ceiling speakers to pendants that fit probably any architecture I can think of and look elegant in any situation. But the beauty of it is they are really purpose-built and optimized for conferencing. They are expandable–we can have up to eight different speakers driven by a very small amplifier that's PoE fed. And the great thing is–it's a little box, one cable, and then you empower all your speakers in the room.
Craig Durr: You know what's interesting is: that brings together a lot of things we just talked about–the human element of the design and what's taking place, the simplicity of the IT deployment you just talked about, the diversity of the portfolio. I mean, there's a lot of great value you just brought there. Let's go ahead and talk about some of these key takeaways here right now.
So I really like that you guys are leaning into this human element, recognizing the importance of this. I think it's obvious with your 100-year legacy that you guys play a strong part in how AI is being brought to the collaboration space. It's paramount, what's taking place. But let's not forget this is a show where you guys have three fantastic product announcements to talk about as well. You have a lot going on, you're going to be a busy man.
Sam Sabet: Absolutely, yeah. Not only that, let me just say if there's one thing we take painstaking efforts to make sure happens is that we look at the problem holistically. So it's not just a product, it's a full-blown solution with all the different parts you need to be able to build it, and it's flexible, adaptable, scalable.. and what I forgot to mention is we're talking about that ease of deployment and managing the system and our IT customers as well, you know, all this is supported by Shure Cloud. So it gives you the ability to remotely monitor, manage, and deploy systems–update them. It just gives you the full-blown solution.
Craig Durr: This was the cloud that was launched last year about this time, but now we're talking about not only having the ability of the audio portfolio in there but also the IntelliMix™ Room Kit as well. So you're bringing all this together in a cloud management platform. It's fantastic. I love it.
So Sam, if our listeners want to find out more, what should they do?
Sam Sabet: You can visit shure.com, where we'll have all this information. You can certainly come to the booth and join us. There's all these exciting products that are being shown. We're in 3N300, and please ask while you're at the booth: how do I get to the Innovation Lab? Because, there, we will be showing the nitty-gritty details and giving you a lot more insight into these products.
Craig Durr: This is great, Sam. Thank you for your time, I really appreciate you giving us an update. Everyone, this is Craig Durr from the Collab Collective. We're here at ISE 2025, bringing you some insights from thought leaders like Sam. Stay tuned for some more insights coming.
