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11 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo, Craig Durr catches up with Sam Kennedy, EVP of GTM Strategy at NetSpeek, live from InfoComm 2026. Their conversation explores NetSpeek's vision for AI-driven operations and the evolution of its Lena platform from administrator-assisted troubleshooting to autonomous problem detection and resolution. Sam shares how NetSpeek is leveraging AI to reduce alert fatigue, improve operational efficiency, support multi-vendor technology environments, and introduce guardrails that give organizations greater control over autonomous actions within their collaboration and IT infrastructure.
Their discussion covers:
- The Evolution of Lena: NetSpeek's journey from stealth mode to commercial deployment and the progression toward autonomous troubleshooting
- Reducing Alert Fatigue: How AI can identify, diagnose, and resolve issues before administrators or end users become aware of them
- Natural Language Operations: How Lena enables IT teams to interact with systems using conversational language instead of traditional dashboards and commands
- Expanding Multi-Vendor Support: New partnerships and integrations that extend Lena's visibility across collaboration, AV, and networking environments
- Autonomous Troubleshooting in Action: A live demonstration showing how Lena detects, diagnoses, and resolves infrastructure issues without human intervention
- Guardrails and AI Governance: How organizations can control autonomous actions through granular policies, permissions, approval workflows, and security controls
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I want to welcome you to another edition of Direct from the Expo. We are live at InfoComm 2026, and it is an incredible event, a lot of executive interviews, a lot of product announcements, and we're going to bring you updates here. I want to start with a really good friend of mine, Sam Kennedy, EVP of GTM Strategy at NetSpeek.
Sam, how are you doing?
Sam Kennedy: I'm doing fantastic.
Craig Durr: Now, the reason I say you're a good friend of mine is because I've been fortunate. You and Erik at NetSpeek have brought me along on this journey. The audience may or may not know, but we've had this incredible 18-month conversation, all the way from when we started, from when you were first previewing the product, to the announcement, to where we are now. Can you bring us up to speed and take the audience through this journey? Give us a preview.
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, so we've been working on the platform for about three years. We came out of stealth mode at ISE in 2025. We launched our product in October. Lena is the product, and then we got our first paying customers in Q1 of this year. We launched the administrator-assisted troubleshooting in April, and now we are on to the next step here at InfoComm 2026, showing lots more capabilities.
Craig Durr: This has been an incredible journey, and I don't even think you're doing it justice because it's so much. But there's one key idea. You had a vision in the beginning of how you were going to try and make operations within the IT infrastructure better. What was that initial idea, that AI can solve it?
Sam Kennedy: So we took advantage of this moment in time where AI was really starting to proliferate, and what we did was we built a platform around that. What we're trying to do is solve some of these problems that have plagued our industry for so long, leveraging AI to solve a very specific problem of the technology in conference rooms and classrooms within an organization, to autonomously find problems and fix problems before the end users even realize there's a problem. That's been the vision from day one.
Craig Durr: That's incredible. But what does that mean? What is the pain point today? What is the common problem IT administrators are seeing?
Sam Kennedy: In a traditional sense with IT, where the industry has been for 20 years, it's been built off of dashboards. So an alert comes in, or a ticket comes in, and that's when the work begins. They receive that ticket, and then they start working. Where's the problem? Where do they start? From zero. So what we're trying to do is, in certain cases, solve that problem for the administrator so they don't even see the ticket.
In other cases, do some levels of troubleshooting so that once the administrator does get involved, Lena has gone through a bunch of steps to figure out where a problem may be, and assist that human being. So it cuts down the mean time to resolution.
Craig Durr: You just introduced someone, and in case the audience doesn't know, who is Lena?
Sam Kennedy: Lena is the name of the platform, the name of the product that we have at NetSpeek. Lena stands for Language Enabled Network Administrator.
Craig Durr: What does that mean?
Sam Kennedy: Well, the reason we call it Lena is that you're able to use natural language to communicate with Lena, so I don't have to type commands. I can, but I don't have to go to a dashboard and dig into a bunch of menus. You can just speak naturally, or type naturally, to Lena and converse in a very natural way to get to that problem resolution.
Craig Durr: It's interesting. So I want to go back to the pain point you identified. Monitoring alert fatigue is real out there. I think there's so much noise and not enough of a way to get to the signal. So you're saying you've got a novel approach that's actually taking care of this alert fatigue?
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, so that's what we're demonstrating at the booth, this ability for Lena to find these problems. What we announced and showed earlier this year, available since April, is this administrator-assisted troubleshooting capability. A ticket comes in, and then I can kick it off and leverage Lena to figure out what the real problems are. But what we're now showing in our booth is this ability for the full circle, that Lena can find a problem and fix the problem before the administrators ever get involved. So it's really that full-circle moment for us.
Craig Durr: But that's not the only thing you're announcing at this show. You also have some new technology partners as well.
Sam Kennedy: Most customers don't have a single vendor within their environment, so they inherently have all these different vendors they're working with. What we've built Lena to be able to leverage is a lot of those manufacturers, and so we've expanded our partnerships with DTEN, Avocor, Jabra, Cisco, and expanded some of the other ones as well.
Craig Durr: And what are the other ones? Let's lean into one of those announcements.
Sam Kennedy: So the biggest one, I think, for us is NETGEAR, and it's a whole new category of device for us.
Craig Durr: You're absolutely right. This is not traditional pro AV gear. Talk about this.
Sam Kennedy: So when we launched Lena, we targeted it at the verticals of UC and AV, and then as we launched, we added digital signage. What we're showing and previewing here at InfoComm is the ability to go into a whole new vertical of networking gear.
Craig Durr: And that's an important element because one of the common misconceptions, especially in multi-vendor environments, is that the problem doesn't just stop with the video conferencing equipment. That IT administrator is usually responsible for that entire room, and it's a networked room to begin with, right?
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, and you never know where the problem is coming from. So being able to look at the whole path, where the technology doesn't end in the room—it expands out, and by looking at it as a holistic system, Lena is able to find the problems and fix the problems truly where they ultimately are.
Craig Durr: Wow, I love this. You've actually been using a term which is a little bit nuanced in the market. You like to refer to it as AI operations, and I think this leans into the fact that your DNA, your origin, is AI-first. Tell me, what does AI operations mean?
Sam Kennedy: So we're really trying to avoid a lot of the buzzwords that a lot of people are using. There's a lot of noise around AI. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What we're really trying to do is get across that we're leveraging AI to solve very specific problems. It's not just AI as a buzzword. Three years ago, we saw that AI was really a thing, and what we've been able to do is build around that. So it's not just AI for AI's sake. We're leveraging all these new capabilities in a new way to solve problems that have plagued our industry for so long.
Craig Durr: You keep referring to the booth. What are some of the demonstrations you're showing in the booth?
Sam Kennedy: One of the things we're going to be showing is this real-time monitoring that kicks off autonomous troubleshooting. Again, find a problem, fix a problem, that full-loop autonomy is one of the most major things we're going to be showing. We're showing in the booth some of the new vendors, like we talked about, with NETGEAR and Cisco. We'll also be showing some of the guardrail capabilities.
One of the challenges in an autonomous environment is just not letting AI do whatever it wants. So one of the key capabilities organizations talk to us about is, in certain conference rooms, in certain spaces, say my huddle spaces, I want full autonomy, find a problem, fix a problem. But in my boardroom, in my high-impact spaces, I want Lena to go in, find problems, troubleshoot, come up with what the solution could be, but I want that to be implemented by the human beings.
Each organization is going to be different, and even within an organization, they may have certain locations or certain spaces where they want to apply AI differently. So we've built a lot of guardrails around this. We take security extremely seriously, not only data security, but AI security, and so building and wrapping a true guardrail solution around it, we think, is really critical.
Craig Durr: And this is what you're showing.
Sam Kennedy: This is what we're showing at the booth.
Craig Durr: We keep talking about what you're showing in the booth.
Sam Kennedy: There's a lot there.
Craig Durr: If there's a lot there, why are we here?
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, let's go. I want to show you.
Craig Durr: No, really?
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, absolutely. Let's go.
Craig Durr: But do we have time?
Sam Kennedy: Definitely
Craig Durr: You want to go?
Sam Kennedy: Let's go. Follow me.
Craig Durr: All right. Okay, Sam, you got my steps in. We're all the way at the show floor. What are you going to show me here?
Sam Kennedy: We have some really exciting things to show you. So the first thing we're going to do is show you autonomous troubleshooting. To do that, I'm going to invite Spencer Wise to help.
Craig Durr: Good to see you again, man. All right, so we were talking about autonomous troubleshooting back on stage. Now, you're going to walk me through what this looks like.
Sam Kennedy: Again, just as a reminder, what we launched earlier this year is the administrator-driven troubleshooting. But now, what we're going to do is take you through that next step where we have full autonomy. We're going to go into the base station, which is the configuration of our booth, and we're actually going to leverage Lena to break the system. We're going to go into this NETGEAR switch, and we're going to use Lena to change the VLAN for this Neat Video Bar here that's configured for Teams.
Craig Durr: One of your new partners.
Sam Kennedy: One of our new partners that we just announced at the show. So what Spencer's doing is he's changing the VLAN for port one, which is the Neat device in the NETGEAR switch. He's changing that VLAN port, which is going to take that system offline.
So Spencer is now going to execute this change of the VLAN for the device, and what you're going to see here shortly is the Neat Video Bar. You can see now it just went offline. No internet.
Craig Durr: So we got a notification here that this system is down.
Sam Kennedy: So this video bar is now down.
Craig Durr: As an IT administrator, instead of the alert fatigue we talked about, what's taking place now?
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, so what's happening now is the device just went offline. Lena is now looking at these devices, and momentarily you're going to see an alert pop up within the Lena screen, right here in the little alert screen. We're just waiting for some of the time to happen.
Once that happens, we'll go into the new screen that's just been added in Lena as part of the trade show. You can see the alert happened, the Neat connection is unreachable. So we'll go into that, and now we're starting to get some details. What's happening behind the scenes now is Lena has kicked into the troubleshooting capability.
Craig Durr: This is what we talked about that came out recently, like in the April time frame, correct?
Sam Kennedy: Correct. So the alert kicked off this, which up until now has been something the administrator had to kick off. Now, this is all happening behind the scenes autonomously. So now we're actually seeing Lena work within the context of this particular space, and you're starting to see her figure out, this is her troubleshooting. She's looking at all the capabilities, she's looking at the room, she's looking at the device, she's looking at the campus, she's taking in all the context of all the different devices, pulling together the details, and she's starting to realize what actually happened in this scenario.
What she realized is that it was a VLAN issue. She went and set the port configuration back on that NETGEAR switch. You can see here, this is just another visual of that. So this is the LG display, the Neat Bar, and it's green again. Now it's all green where before none of this happened. And if you look at the Neat Video Bar, that error is now gone.
Craig Durr: So this is a walk-through of what you talked about. This is truly autonomous. We're taking the troubleshooting element as well. You've given Lena permission to go ahead and resolve the issue as it was. That's exciting. But we also talked about guardrails.
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, one other thing I want to point out before we go there. In many cases, the Neat Video Bar going offline would have alerted the AV team, where this issue ultimately was an issue with the switch. So again, instead of, in some of the demos we were showing at ISE where it was the wrong device getting blamed for another issue, in this case what we hear a lot of times is the wrong team getting blamed. So we're really taking that to the next level.
But again, as you talked about the guardrails, as we are delivering this autonomous capability, we want to build in these guardrails so that organizations have a lot of control to let that autonomy happen, or not. In this case, we're leveraging Lena to autonomously reconfigure a network device, and there are many organizations that wouldn't want that.
Craig Durr: So this is where we're going to start talking about the granularity you can drive. Some of the things we talked about before on stage were at the device level, the floor level, the personnel level.
Sam Kennedy: Yeah, so again, as we're building out some of the guardrails, some of these capabilities are like read-only and destructive. We're getting into some of the capabilities at a very tenant level, a big capability level, and as we start to go down on the screen, I'm able to start narrowing down the focus.
At a tenant level, here are all the capabilities I want from a guardrail perspective. As I go down, you can see this is at an operator level, a junior operator, how we have this configured. So I'm starting to get more granular on the guardrails of what can happen autonomously and what cannot. Here we have just a total kill switch, a master switch, where when I turn this off, it shuts down all autonomous capabilities within Lena. I can continually go down and give organizations a very, very deep, granular level. If we scroll all the way down to the bottom there, you can see some of the policy capabilities. So some of these organizations that are building AI capability around policies, they can just load their own policies that they may have already had as an organization.
So it's really taking this to, you know, when we say we are an AI company, we are an AI company, and we're building in a lot of those policies and capabilities and guardrails that organizations are looking for when they're going to deploy something autonomous.
Craig Durr: I love this. Your energy right now is electrifying. So let's go ahead and wrap this up here. We're talking about the full journey. This is what's taken place over these 18 months, and what you just shared with me was one of the initial visions that you, myself, and Erik talked about, right? Leveraging an AI-first platform to autonomously make that IT administrator's job easy.
Sam Kennedy: It's amazing, isn't it?
Craig Durr: I'm excited for this. When do you think you might see this part of the market?
Sam Kennedy: So we are in development right now. We're just previewing this here at InfoComm. It's something we're working extremely hard to get to market, and we expect to see this within the second half.
Craig Durr: I love it. Good deal. All right. Well, shall we wrap it up?
Sam Kennedy: Absolutely.
Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr. I want to thank Sam for breaking the wall here on my Direct from the Expo videos. It was great to get on the show floor, Sam, and see this in real time. I can't wait until we talk again, maybe at ISE.
Sam Kennedy: Absolutely, sounds good.
Craig Durr: Everyone, join us here. We are still live at InfoComm 2026, and we'll bring you more updates from executives and solutions that we find along the way. Take care.
