On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Erik DeGiorgi, CEO of NetSpeek, recorded live at ISE 2026. Their conversation explores NetSpeek’s evolution from concept to a shippable, enterprise-ready platform, unpacking what it means to be truly AI-native, how orchestration brings harmony to complex AV and UC ecosystems, and how NetSpeek’s Lena platform uses memory, advanced troubleshooting, and expanding partner integrations to improve reliability and scale in modern collaboration environments.
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Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. I want to welcome you to another episode of Direct from the Expo. We are here live at ISE 2026, and I'm here visiting with a really good friend, Erik DeGiorgi, CEO of NetSpeek.
How are you doing?
Erik DeGiorgi: I'm doing great. I can’t believe we're here a year later.
Craig Durr: I'm actually saying this because I've had a chance to speak to you several times here over the industry conferences. We first met at Enterprise Connect, where we talked about what was coming.
Then came InfoComm, and you guys actually had some announcements and brought things forward.
Here we are, just less than eight months from now, and you have got a lot of great excitement here on the show floor. Tell me about the evolution.
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so we actually launched here at the show in the Innovation Park just last year. What we were showing at that time was largely conceptual, like we knew we could build it, and we were testing and seeing how the market would respond. Here we are a year later with a shippable product, really following up on all of the things that we promised.
Craig Durr: I love it—from concept to innovation part to you engaging with customers in a very live, real, generally available product, right?
Let's talk about this something here though, you know, a lot of companies that I've seen here talk about being an AI native company, but it doesn't seem natural for some people.
You talked about being AI native. What does that mean in terms of NetSpeek?
Erik DeGiorgi: Well, we had the benefit of starting from scratch, right? So we had a clean sheet of paper, and we made the decision to just be an AI-forward, AI-focused company. So what does that actually mean, practically or tangibly?
Let's just take an example of a simple utterance or statement. I need to reboot a room, and I need to talk to our platform, Lena. I need to say, “Hey, reboot this space.” It's one sentence. We translate in a matter of a few seconds that sentence to over 10,000 words, just to process the context and everything. It's very easy to get a response from an AI. It's very hard to get the right response every time. And that's what this industry in any enterprise deployment demands, right?
You're controlling equipment. It needs to be right every single time. And so we architect the platform from day one to go and take that one sentence and translate it into 10,000 words in order to make sure that the reboot works every single time.
Craig Durr: You know, another phrase that was very popular last year was agentic AI, right? And this year,there's a new phrase: orchestration. I've heard a lot about that, but you've talked about orchestration in the concept of NetSpeek for a while. That's when we talked about this back in InfoComm. What does that mean to you?
Erik DeGiorgi: So let's get out of our industry for a minute, okay. Just think about orchestration in a symphony orchestra with musicians. What happens in that space is you have all these horn players, string players, and percussionists that are playing these instruments, and they're coming together to play in a symphony. But what brings them together? It's the conductor.
The conductor orchestrates the orchestra, right? So just think about it like that. It’s the act of orchestration. It brings harmony to all those disparate musicians and instruments. To bring it back into our industry, we're not musicians playing instruments, but what we are is an industry of hardware and software coming together to create collaboration spaces and communication spaces.
It's the hardware, software, all the information, telemetry, and signals coming from all of that. We see our platform as the conductor that understands when each device or when each instrument should be played. What's the crescendo and the emotion? But what we're doing is we're really putting that into the workspace. And it sounds simple, but the end result is just having it work.
So we bring it all together, and we bring harmony to the technology.
Craig Durr: I love that. So in the space of a UC ecosystem or signage ecosystem, you're actually conducting and making beautiful music.
Now you're also bringing to market a couple of new instruments this time. The one I'm really excited about is what you call a concept of memory. What does that mean in this context?
Erik DeGiorgi: Our platform as it has been built is very capable. You've got an intelligence that has encyclopedic knowledge of all the different technologies and vendors and everything that we have here, but it's kind of sight reading to bring it back to the musical analogy. Now, what we're doing is we've put a multi multi-layer memory platform in place.
So everything that Lena does, every interaction Lena has with a human being, everything that Lena does with a device, everything that the device admits, all of the stuff that's going on is committed to memory in a very kind of intelligent way. So when something happens, Lena is able to not just respond to it as like sight reading a piece of music. But Lena is able to tap into that memory and say, “Well, there's a quirky thing that happens in this space. Every week, on Thursday, this thing gets unplugged, and it so happens that that's when the cleaning crew comes in.”
So and stuff like that, that Lena wouldn't be able to understand and discover and work through just on looking at it at a singular moment in time, but committing things to memory at the device level, at the space level, even at the user level or the tenant, the entire organization.
I had something update and it broke over here. Well, I'm in my other European office instead of my North American office, but I have the same topology or same equipment, and now Lena knows. It’s going to be like, “Well, that broke over there. Maybe I should tell the user not to update this.
Craig Durr: You're talking about memory within the context of my own deployment, my own ecosystem. And one of these great analogies I think you and I talk about is the idea that you may hire that PhD student who has subject matter expertise, but this is now taking that person and giving them eight, nine years of experience specific to that company or industry.
Erik DeGiorgi: Every time Lena works, Lena learns. And that's been a missing component that's not part of it.
Craig Durr: Okay, great. Let's talk about a couple of these other ideas. One of the things that you're also talking about as an instrument is troubleshooting, right? AI-enabled troubleshooting. What does that mean?
Erik DeGiorgi: To date, we started off with a kind of a room check or a health check. What that basically did is you could deploy Lena to say make sure the space is set up how you intended it to be. And it's looking at a configuration that a user set up very easily and is saying it should be configured like this in reorienting the room in order to match that target state or goal.
Now, you're actually able to communicate with Lena and say, “My screen's black. It's not working.” And Lena’s smart enough to work through that and talk to that person, establish an understanding of their location, survey that location, look at the technology, read the information from it, and say, “Well, you might be saying that this device isn't working, but actually the root cause of this problem is this other device.
Lena’s smart enough to go into those spaces to probe the technology, understand how it's supposed to be working, and actually work with that human or even fully autonomously solve those problems to make sure the spaces are functioning as they should.
Craig Durr: And you're talking about this as being an element of troubleshooting. But you've alluded to something. I hope I'm not giving it away. But in the time frame, maybe InfoComm, you were talking about proactive troubleshooting.
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, phase one, where we are now, with that advanced troubleshooting and reasoning is it's human initiated. So the person reports that there's an issue, and Lena will go to work just like a tier one or tier two kind of technician. But what we're building towards is a situation where Lena is kind of constantly observing those technologies and can actually see when those problems happen, even when a human is not reporting them, to ensure that spaces are functioning as they should all the time.
Craig Durr: I love it. Now let's talk about the other instruments you're bringing out as part of your fleet program. These individual musicians, if you will. You've already got some, including BrightSign and HP, but you're bringing other ones that you're announcing here at the show.
Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, we've got a great lineup of partners from within the industry. We're actually adding Shure and LG to that list here at ISE.
Craig Durr: That's great. All right, we're getting this idea of instruments to overplay this story, but bring it back to orchestration. Tell me again how does this play into an entire orchestration picture?
Erik DeGiorgi: Again, orchestration is really bringing harmony to all of that. I mean, look at how many technologies are here. It's overwhelming, right? And they're not necessarily designed to work together… I mean, in some sense, but they're different companies building different technologies and all of that.
So again, orchestration is kind of like a big foggy word. What does that even mean? It's jargony. But it really says getting back to that point, just having it work. And by deploying our central intelligence and Lena into those networks, Lena understands what should be happening, understands all of the nuances of the individual technologies, has been instructed by human operators on how to work, and is really just managing that space to make sure all those technologies are working harmoniously.
Craig Durr: Even your excitement is infectious, I have to tell you right now.
Erik DeGiorgi: It's science fiction, Craig. It's like we're building something that ten years ago would only be in science fiction, and now it's real in front of us.
Craig Durr: AI native orchestration, expansive fleet partnerships... You're doing a lot here. All right, so if people want to learn more, what should they do next?
Erik DeGiorgi: We've got a few different tracks we supply to certainly our platform to end users, and we supply through the channel. Even vendor partners can leverage it. Visit us online or at the booth here at the show. Perfect.
Craig Durr: Perfect. This has been a great update. I can't wait until the next time we talk again. Erik, thank you so much.
Hey, everyone. This is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective with some more exciting information here from ISE 2026. Stay tuned as we bring you some more updates. Take care.