On this episode of Direct from the Expo, Craig Durr sits down with Erik Vaveris, VP of Product Management and CMO for Shure, live from InfoComm 2026. Their conversation starts with how audio is evolving from a collaboration necessity into a strategic enabler for both human communication and AI-powered workplace experiences. Erik discusses the growing importance of audio quality in hybrid work environments, how Shure continues to innovate across its collaboration portfolio, and the company's approach to helping organizations deliver better meeting experiences while simplifying deployment and management.
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Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of The Collab Collective. I want to welcome you to another edition of Direct from the Expo. This is the InfoComm 2026 edition. What I love about this show is we have an opportunity to talk to executives and learn about new solutions and bring them to you so you can make more informed decisions. Today's guest, Erik Vaveris.
How are you doing?
Erik Vaveris: I'm wonderful. How are you, Craig?
Craig Durr: Erik is the VP of Product Management and CMO for Shure. Now, this is really interesting. I love the fact that you have insights into both the product side and the marketing side.
Erik Vaveris: Well, I think they're incredibly related, and I view them both essentially as strategic marketing functions. They're both rooted in understanding what customers really need and being able to put that into action in the form of both your product offering and the way that you communicate it and get people to understand why you're doing it. So the core of both is exactly the same, and it's really rooted in our customers.
Craig Durr: It's a fantastic approach. Speaking of which, Shure is coming off of its 100-year anniversary. Actually, you corrected me before, it's 101 years now. But it is incredible to understand that you have this legacy, this DNA within audio for so long. And in fact, you're hitting some other great milestones. One of your marquee products, the MXA, is now at 10 years. How do those two play together?
Erik Vaveris: Well, it's an evolution, and it's amazing. I've been lucky enough to actually be at Shure for 25 years. I've been able to see so much in that period of time, and it's really humbling, and it brings up a lot of thoughts when I think about it. The MXA line was an evolution of work that had been happening long before I had gotten there. Shure had been working on how to make meeting rooms work better, and meeting room audio work better. I even remember, right after I had joined, seeing the first ceiling array prototype in a conference room, and thinking, what's that thing up there? It's been an incredible run.
Craig Durr: I think you guys were leaders in changing how we think about audio in the conference room. That's actually a great segue for us to talk about something. These days, audio is becoming so pivotal, especially in the age of AI. We've gone from meetings being just conversations to meetings now being streams of very important data.
Erik Vaveris: Correct
Craig Durr: How do you wind up thinking about audio in this context?
Erik Vaveris: Well, I think there's two sides to it. There is still the human side, and the way that you are able to effectively communicate with people, both presenting yourself and listening to and understanding what they're saying. That's as important as ever. In fact, more important than ever, because I think we'd all agree the number of virtual meetings we're doing is not decreasing. There's almost always somebody remote, even if you do have a number of people in a conference room together.
But as you mentioned, AI has raised the bar yet again. You said what happens in a meeting is data, and that's absolutely spot on. For AI tools to do their job, to summarize what happened in the meeting, to put together action items, to schedule follow-ups, all the wonderful things they can do, they have to get an absolutely perfect transcript of what happens in the meeting. Anything less than that, and you're risking the outcome of the meeting not actually being everything that it should have been.
Craig Durr: So all of a sudden, audio becomes pinnacle in this meeting flow, because it connects being present in the room all the way to driving these outcomes, which I think is a very key way to frame this. In fact, your partners, Microsoft with their Copilot, and people who may be using Zoom AI Companion in the future, have stated themselves how important audio is, in addition to video, in this context. It is something that's not going away.
Erik Vaveris: It's not going away, and it's only going to become more important as AI tools improve, and we know the pace at which they're improving. It's been remarkable just the last six months. As AI tools get to do more and can discern more from what you say, the value of that accurate audio data will only increase.
Craig Durr: I can imagine. Now, you led with something I do want to go back and visit. You were talking about audio being the human side, the human factor. You may not mention this, but I want to mention it to the audience. You were recently featured on a podcast by MIT Technology Review, and you dove into that topic a little bit more. Will you share some of the insights from that conversation?
Erik Vaveris: Yeah, I will. It was a really interesting conversation, and it was with a professor from Yale, Brian Scholl, who was one of the authors of a study that looked at the impact of audio quality on the listener's perception of the person talking. And what they found would be no surprise to people who have focused on audio for much of their life, like me, which was that the quality of the audio directly impacts how trustworthy you are, how credible you are, really, everything about yourself. The results were crystal clear, and it was a very interesting discussion, in particular in relation to video.
What Brian pointed out was, we all know how we look on the conference call because you get the little box down there, and you have the selfie, but you have no idea how you sound. And people are very tolerant, and they have been for some time. I know you know this extremely well, of good-enough audio. If they're able to parse the words and at the most basic level understand what a person's saying, not everyone is likely to speak up about it.
But if you're the talker, and you're just barely understood, you're not getting the full force of your message and yourself across to the people who are listening. That is not how you want to be perceived by your employees, your partners, your suppliers, your customers. You want people to be able to engage with you at the highest level.
Craig Durr: And so the takeaway I'm getting from you is, in this age of AI, audio is as important as ever, but we're not losing sight of the human factor of how it relates to how we communicate.
Erik Vaveris: No, certainly not. And the nice thing is, those two things are not in any way in conflict.
Craig Durr: No, they're not.
Erik Vaveris: Good audio is good audio. If you're getting clean, clear, full-bodied audio, it's going to help the people talking and the people listening, and it's also going to make the AI tools do what you expect them to do.
Craig Durr: Well, let's lean now into some of the audio products you guys are announcing at this event. We talked about the MXA line. You now have updated the MXA to the MXA925.
Erik Vaveris: Yes, the flagship is now the MXA925. It replaces the MXA920. But for anybody who's familiar with installing or using the MXA920, it'll be a seamless transition. The great thing about the MXA925 is it's a much more advanced hardware platform, so it's going to be capable of running more and more of our sophisticated AI-trained algorithms.
Craig Durr: Which is part of the update that's coming to that product as well.
Erik Vaveris: Yeah, we have a new AI echo canceller, an acoustic echo canceller, that is already part of the MXA925.
Craig Durr: It's an interesting thing. You just mentioned this, the 920 has been in the market for four years. But I think what we're seeing here is that it was a very robust product when it came out. To our earlier part of the conversation, the importance of audio and what's being asked of it from the UC platforms leveraging it, you really need to keep that hardware up to date with that overhead.
Erik Vaveris: You do, and one of the things that's been really exciting at Shure is to see engineering evolve. Their platform approach has gotten really sophisticated, and so they're able to do this hardware rev but keep the software piece moving along and evolving in tandem without missing a beat. Again, it's really exciting to see that with the MXA925, and it keeps the whole flow of everything you were used to with the MXA920 intact.
Craig Durr: I love what you lean into with the software, because that leads into the second part of the announcement. The MXA901, which is an existing product, actually has a software update.
Erik Vaveris: Yes, a major software update. So the MXA901 is our smaller, round form factor. It does not have the AI signal processing built into it, but the update does allow it to transmit the individual lobes. You can customize your coverage area with it.
Both the MXA901 and the MXA925 now allow you to create groups of up to four together to do enhanced positioning data for camera-tracking systems. The benefit of the 901 is its size. The beauty of it, though, is we also have a product that I think you're probably going to want to ask me about, which is the IntelliMix Foundation. The IntelliMix Foundation runs our IntelliMix Room software, which has our AI reverb algorithm and our AI denoiser algorithm in it, and the MXA901 is a perfect front end to that device, as is the MXA925.
Craig Durr: It's a great segue because I've been fortunate to be part of the journey as you guys have introduced your IntelliMix Room Kits and the Foundation System. I would love to recap for the audience. Why don't you walk us through that part of the portfolio?
Erik Vaveris: We have a number of Room Kits which have at the center what we call the IntelliMix Foundation. That's a compute device and a touch panel that runs Windows, and on the compute we run our IntelliMix Room software.
Craig Durr: Which is powerful software
Erik Vaveris: So all of the audio runs through our signal processing there, and it's a great software platform to be able to update and add features and capabilities over time. Those have been available for over a year now for Microsoft Teams, and we are thrilled to have at this show them available also for Zoom.
Craig Durr: That's another announcement. I'm glad to hear that as well. So we're talking about the IntelliMix Room Kits, which are pre-configured for different sized rooms, with both single-camera and multi-camera solutions. And you have a partnership there as well, right?
Erik Vaveris: We do. The Foundation device is sold standalone, and you can use our Designer software to configure it with any of the products in the Shure portfolio.
Craig Durr: So this ties right to that pro AV audience that you're core with.
Erik Vaveris: Exactly. It's perfect for integrators as the basis for the system to do what they need to do and put together whatever they need. But we do also have what we call the Room Kits, which are pre-configured, and the software is set up so that they can more or less go together plug and play, and save you the hassle of doing the configuration in Designer, which is a wonderful and very powerful tool. We were able to do some pre-configuration, and those come in different sizes. We have them with one or two MXA925s, depending on the size of the room, and that includes the built-in loudspeaker. So you get a complete audio system there. We have a partnership with Huddly to provide the cameras for that system, and again, we have the software all set up so that everything goes together right out of the box for you. We start with their smallest camera, but for the largest rooms we go up to their three-camera Huddly Crew system, which works fantastic.
Craig Durr: And then this leans into the fact that you have announced your own video bar in the past year too, which is a very powerful product. I love this.
Erik Vaveris: Yeah, it does, and you should definitely go by and take a look at it here at the show if you have a moment. The thing that's exciting about that is it's an all-in-one product. We did a lot of thinking about the problems customers were having, especially on the video side, which is not where Shure has traditionally come from. I'm so proud, and the team is so proud, of the fact that we did all of the AI video processing algorithms in house, and the picture just looks absolutely fantastic. We also have a patented feature where we've put two of the cameras on the ends of the bar. The bar is about three feet wide, and having them on the ends, angled a little bit, means for the people down the sides of the table, especially if they're facing forward, you get a much better view of their face, closer to as if they were looking at the camera. It makes a striking difference.
Craig Durr: Now, all of this wraps into something which I think is the secret sauce. This is ShureCloud.
Erik Vaveris: Oh, ShureCloud is so exciting. It's been adding features at a rapid pace. It allows people to connect their Shure devices, and you can do all sorts of things, update firmware, manage the extended warranties we have on some devices right now through ShureCloud. You can schedule things, configure alerts, all the kinds of stuff you would expect. But there are some really exciting new things right now. In fact, we have in beta, live, our cloud API. I have to grab my phone for this because I'm going to forget the number of partners that already have this.
Craig Durr: Impressive list
Erik Vaveris: So we have partnerships and integrations already live with Utelogy, PepperDash, Xyte, AVI-SPL, Symphony, XiO AV, NetSpeek, Pivot, Legrand, and Innomate, in no particular order.
Craig Durr: That is an impressive list right out of the gate. The key idea, the secret sauce I was leaning into, is the fact that you've taken these pro AV experiences and leaned into management in an IT way, which helps bridge that gap that has been one of the challenges in our industry, bringing that professional audio and video quality into IT constructs. ShureCloud seems to be that answer.
Erik Vaveris: Yeah, that's exactly the goal with it, to make it easier for people to manage. If you take it up a level, why do IT people do things this way? Because they don't have to run around from room to room. They can actually see what's happening. We wanted to provide that same experience for them when they have Shure gear.
And one thing I forgot, Craig, that's also really important. We've had most of our newest products capable of talking to ShureCloud, but we now have the ability to bring all of the legacy MXA products into ShureCloud as well, through either the P300 or even the MXA920, which has now been replaced with the MXA925. Those can function as IoT proxies to ShureCloud, and anything else on the network with them will now show up in ShureCloud.
Craig Durr: I love the ongoing investment in this. Well, you have a lot to talk about. We've talked about the Zoom integration, the new MXA 925, the software update to the 901, the update to ShureCloud with the cloud API. I'm running out of fingers here with new ideas for the show. You are a perfect example of all the exciting things taking place at the show, and for the audience that's not here, they can go online.
Erik Vaveris: shure.com/infocomm
Craig Durr: Fantastic, that's perfect. Erik, this has been a very informative update. I appreciate your time sharing this with me.
Erik Vaveris: Thanks for talking with me, Craig. I appreciate it.
Craig Durr: All right, and everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst of the Collab Collective. We'll be bringing you more updates like this one from InfoComm 2026. Join us again. Take care.