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9 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo the Collab Collective's Craig Durr talks with Sean Bowman, Associate Vice President of North America Sales at Shure. Recorded live at InfoComm 2025, this conversation focuses on the evolving role of audio in collaboration and AI, and how Shure is adapting its technology and partnerships to meet enterprise needs. Sean shares insights into Shure’s IntelliMix™ Room Kits, their partnership with Microsoft, and the introduction of new speaker solutions tailored for hybrid workspaces.
Their discussion covers:
- AI + Audio Synergy: Why high-quality audio is essential for transcription, translation, and automation in AI-enhanced workflows
- IT and AV Efficiency: How Shure’s IntelliMix™ Room Kits streamline deployments for integrators and administrators
- Expanding Audio Ecosystems: The launch of the modular “foundation kit” and its support for Microflex® peripherals
- New Networked Speaker Tech: How the MXN-6 pendant speaker simplifies installation and cloud-based management
- Shure’s 100-Year Legacy: Celebrating a century of innovation with a concert at InfoComm 2025 and a forward-looking vision for AV and collaboration
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder at the Collab Collective, and I am excited to bring you this next episode of Direct from the Expo–InfoComm 2025. I've got someone from Shure joining us to help talk us through some of the innovations that Shure's bringing to market this year–Sean Bowman, who is the associate vice president of North America sales. How are you doing?
Sean Bowman: Yeah, I’m doing really well. Thanks.
Craig Durr: I am really excited for you to be here. We are at an event that is so core to your market right now. What you do within this North America AV community is fantastic.
Sean Bowman: We love to give back to the community, and InfoComm is a chance for us to really come together, as an industry but with our partners and with our customers, to explore what's possible. And there's so many new innovations that Shure is coming to market with–not just some of the best audio products that we're well known for, but really providing solutions for customers and ecosystems where they can achieve what they do.
Craig Durr: I love it, you are like the belle of the ball. When I go out there, I see the Shure signs everywhere. The booth is the size of a football field, so there's a lot of exciting stuff going on there. But before we jump into what you're talking about at the booth, let's take a step back here. You know, I really like the story that you guys are bringing to a very common topic today, which is AI. But you're bringing to it the importance of audio in the AI experience. Talk to me about that for a moment.
Sean Bowman: That's right. Yeah, so when we work with customers, they are at all different points in their journey with AI. They are thinking about, you know, how they're going to play it across the organizations, what kind of efficiencies and productivity they're going to do? And it's impressive, right? I mean, you think about how far it's come in a short amount of time and where it's going to go.
But particularly in collaboration. You know, we have customers who are looking to do, of course, you know, transcription and using a copilot facilitator and things like that to summarize meetings and identify talkers in a room that can be one of the challenges sometimes with using AI. You know, making sure you've got good speaker identification and even some of the more progressive customers, they're already thinking about live translation in multi-languages. All of those advancements require not just good audio, but great audio–and without great audio, there's sacrifices that would come along with the productivity and the ultimate output that people would be able to gain from AI.
So that's one of the ways that we're really kind of working with customers to help them understand that it's great to implement AI, it's great to have some goals and a real vision for your enterprise on what you want to accomplish, but great audio is really part of the key to that productivity and unlocking some of those advanced features.
Craig Durr: It goes to that basic concept of bad data in is bad data out, right. And if you can't understand what people are saying in the room, then how can you go to the next level of attribution, translation, transcription, and even actions that this AI is enabled for? This is why I think you guys have this really wonderful tight partnership with partners like Microsoft, for example, right?
Sean Bowman: That's right. We have a great partnership with Microsoft. And you know, it's evolved from certified devices and extending the portfolio to now complete systems. There's a lot of benefits that come into a single vendor–complete solution, particularly when it's scalable, when it's configurable, when it's comprehensive. You know, you can do small, medium, large, extra large, but then also, presentation spaces and classrooms.
A lot of times Shure gets called in to projects when there's some audio challenges. It could be a large space or multi-use, or if there’s some acoustic challenges. And to be honest, that's actually one of the areas where we, as a company, are implementing AI into our products.
To take things that previously required a lot of technical know-how to deploy, in a high quality, high performance way in a complex space, customizable solutions, and make that easy, make that faster to get those great results at scale consistently.
Craig Durr: So this is an IT administrator story and benefit of what you're doing around AI. Actually, I've seen it in action, and what you just referenced, which is the new portfolio of room kits that you guys are bringing to market. The IntelliMix™ Room Kits for Microsoft Teams. Let's talk about that portfolio for a moment.
Sean Bowman: That's right. Those IntelliMix™ Room Kits are a complete Microsoft Room package. It's built in the Windows ecosystem on Windows 11. And what we did with those kits is a single vendor solution where it's extremely scalable, so no matter the size of the room–small, medium, large–you can all work with a single vendor.
Also, there are benefits to having some commonality across different room types as you scale with the devices that you use. Of course, that includes the outstanding performance that you'd expect from Shure solutions.
But you mentioned the benefits to the IT person, particularly in kits like that. We’ve built in our DSP into that MTR, and as you're connecting those devices, it's recognizing this is all part of an ecosystem. It knows what to do, it knows how to configure and calibrate these solutions for those room types in those room sizes. So it's extremely efficient and helps accelerate deployments.
We're seeing benefits for the IT folks, but we're also seeing benefits for our AV integrators who are also thinking about how they can save time as they're out on the job site, working to deploy a large number of rooms for customers. They're always looking to save time and for things to go on track and on schedule. That's one of the ways that we're thinking about automation and thinking about complete solutions benefiting both.
Craig Durr: I've seen that room audio calibration feature in operation. It's fantastic. It's really powerful. And it's interesting that you speak about the Pro AV audience because at this event, you also are announcing a new variation of this IntelliMix™ Room Kit. Why don’t you tell me about that?
Sean Bowman: That's right. So with those kits, the heart of the kit was the MTR on Windows, and the control, and all the accessories that come with that as far as switching cables and things like that. We call that the foundation kit because as you're scaling in the different room sizes, you might have different combinations of array forming microphones or speakers or camera solutions depending on the size of the room.
But that foundation kit, what our customers told us is that they love these standard approaches, and this works for the majority of spaces. But they also have rooms that they want to do something different with. They want to bring in some additional peripherals, perhaps, multiple types of radio or a presenter mic or multiple cameras. And so the foundation kit allows an integrator to really customize the design, fine tune it, and make it perfect for the customer who they're playing with.
Craig Durr: So this is the opportunity for them to bring in the rest of the Microflex® portfolio, which is outside maybe some of those standard kits right now and expand and go beyond that. Right?
Sean Bowman: That's right.
Craig Durr: And the power… I mean, this is unique in the market to have that compute and DSP in that same box, and then, that very flexible, touch panel, which can be both wall mounted and on the table as well. It's a great foundation of how they can build off of this. Right?
Sean Bowman: That's right. It can be the foundation of your AV ecosystem, foundation of your collaboration solution for your company. And you mentioned the DSP–I have to highlight the DSP because that's really what sets it apart from other MTR on Windows solutions that's out there. It’s that you have a software DSP that's built right into the MTR. And that's so helpful to have one less device in your signal chain, to have it all included there. It's an extremely powerful software DSP with some unique AI features built in to eliminate reverb in the room, to eliminate background noises, to really just consistently get great audio every time, no matter what the scenario is in the room. It's a great system.
Craig Durr: This is the American debut at a large show for this whole portfolio. But it's not the only thing you guys are releasing here. Actually, you have some other additions to your speaker portfolio as well too, right?
Sean Bowman: That's right, that's right. And it's all about listening to customers, and being flexible and providing them the types of solutions that they need.
Craig Durr: Well, what does that mean? Tell me about that.
Sean Bowman: Yeah, so when it comes to speakers, of course,Shure is very well known for microphones, particularly for conferencing spaces and collaboration spaces. But when you complete the full ecosystem of the audio signal path, there's a lot of efficiencies that you can gain.
Firstly, we can tune the speakers to do exactly what they're intended to do in the room for voice–for conferencing. Other speakers may be made for music reproduction or things like that, and they might not give you the kind of clarity that you would need to facilitate collaboration in a hybrid space.
The second benefit of Shure’s speaker portfolio for conferencing is how they're all on the network. And so this latest speaker that we announced–the MXN-6, is a purely powered, overworked loudspeaker, designed for open ceilings. So it's a pendant concept, and you can just run a Dante connection off of that speaker back to your network switch and away you go. You can recognize that device from the cloud. You can manage, update, and monitor it securely, which is the real benefit we saw from customers who are refreshing systems and wanting to get the entire system together, visible from the cloud.
Craig Durr: So with a single cable running to it to get out and rob, you have an active speaker to compliment the passive speakers in the portfolio well. So you've really rounded out this whole pendant portfolio of speakers, it sounds like.
Sean Bowman: That's right. Yeah, when it comes to audio, a lot of people want the room to be highly integrated and make sure that it's not an eyesore in the room, you've got to work with the architecture beautifully.
Craig Durr: They're beautiful, that architecture. I love the design of them and the different sizes. I had a chance to see them earlier. Well, since I had a chance to see them, what should people do if they want to see these new MXN speakers or the foundation kit? What's the next step for them?
Sean Bowman: Yeah, there's obviously several things they can do. They can come see us at InfoComm. We're here at the show, and we've got all of these products on display and a demo environment to be able to compare side by side, we've even got an innovation lab.
Craig Durr: I saw that. That is really exciting. I love that.
Sean Bowman: Yeah, it really shows the different ways that you can scale, to use your products in multiple spaces and all the different types. But it makes it easy to understand where the future is going and what you can do with your solutions.
Shure.com, of course, is a great place to go to schedule a time to meet with a Shure rep or to get a demo of our product or just to talk to our technical folks. If you've got an opportunity or a project that you're working on, we'd love to talk to you to find out more.
And then I have to also mention that we are celebrating our 100th anniversary.
Craig Durr: I heard about this. It is a big year for you as a company.
Sean Bowman: It is, it is. It's a great milestone. And it does make me think about all of the partnerships that we have and all the people that we get to celebrate here at InfoComm with. They've been part of that journey with us for 100 years, and they're going to be part of that journey with us for the next 100 years.
Craig Durr: I'll share with the home audience that you are hosting the concert to celebrate that 100 year anniversary here at this event. You have a very special artist playing. I don't know if you've announced them as of yet, but I'm really looking forward to that the next day or so.
Sean Bowman: We are, too. And that's part of what makes us unique, actually in this industry. It’s that we have been a part of the music industry for as long as we've been here and been helping musicians perform at scale. And we can bring that here to InfoComm. We can bring that into the collaboration space–that expertise in audio.
Craig Durr: All right, well, this sounds like you have an incredible show presence, a lot to share with your customers. I'm really excited for what you, the partners, and the customers get to see here at the event. This is gonna be exciting, Sean.
Sean Bowman: Yeah, it is. Thanks so much, Craig, for having me.
Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, we're going to close out this episode of Direct from the Expo at InfoComm 2025. I want to thank you, Sean, for the update. Everyone take care. Stay tuned for some more updates from InfoComm 2025.
