Enterprises still put one or two people in meeting rooms built for eight

Two people in a room built for eight. There are still many examples of that in corporate offices, according to Enterprise Connect's Eric Krapf, who wrote up a point Rich Bayes of Cisco raised during an Enterprise Connect 2026 session in Las Vegas. Krapf reported hearing the same complaint in other sessions and in hallway conversations throughout the March show.

The cause, as the discussion Krapf described framed it, is usually the floor plan rather than the equipment. Offices do not have enough small private spaces or modestly sized video-enabled rooms, so small groups end up in the larger rooms. The technology to fix this exists, Krapf wrote, but enterprises are still stuck on the basics of utilization and getting different room systems to work together.

For the IT or workplace lead who signs off on the next room refresh, that gap is the whole story. The camera vendors on the show floor are ready. The question is whether the building is.

Counting heads before buying hardware

Bayes pointed to one practical use of AI that does not require rebuilding anything: room systems can track how many people actually attend each meeting and report utilization, according to Krapf's account. Krapf's caveat was that this only helps if it is used appropriately. The data is the easy part.

None of this is new capability. Back in April 2024, Gartner analyst Christopher Trueman told No Jitter's Nathan Eddy that occupancy sensors and monitoring tools were increasingly being used by firms to gather data for decisions about further meeting room investment, even though employees rarely notice them. What Enterprise Connect 2026 suggests is that two years of collecting that data has not yet reshaped many floor plans.

For an organization whose booking and occupancy reports show eight-seat rooms routinely hosting one or two people, the evidence from the show points in one direction: more small video-enabled spaces, not a hardware upgrade in the large rooms. That is a real-estate and facilities decision as much as an IT one, which may be part of why it moves slowly.

Standard builds turn the camera into a line item

More companies are moving to a cookie-cutter approach, standardizing how every meeting room is built, videoconferencing consultant Andy Howard of Howard Associates said in the same session, per Krapf. Howard's verdict was that hardware is less of a consideration now. Instead of dwelling on which camera or microphone to buy, IT and AV teams are focusing on which platforms are used in the rooms and whether to enable BYOD so end users can simply plug in.

Krapf noted that a separate Enterprise Connect 2026 session by Peter Kolak, an enterprise user, went into specific detail on standardization. UC Today's Rob Scott, previewing the show in February, identified Kolak as being from Intuit and said his Wednesday presentation would make the case for why conference room standardization is critical. UC Today also flagged platform interoperability as a floor theme, framed around building rooms that support Teams, Zoom and Webex without overwhelming the people using them.

The camera is a line item. The platform decision is the standard.

Howard added one condition that does not commoditize: the underlying network still has to carry enterprise-grade audio and video into every room, according to Krapf. UC Today's preview made the same point from the other side, listing Verizon Business, Spectrum Business, Lumen and Bandwidth among exhibitors and citing a session titled around network plumbing in the AI age. Shure, Biamp, AudioCodes and Sennheiser were on the floor for the room audio side, per UC Today.

This shift has been building for at least a year. Writing for TechTarget after Enterprise Connect 2025, David Maldow observed that keynotes had gone heavily to AI while video hardware trends were still easy to spot on the show floor, and that AI meeting summaries had moved from novelty to something users would not give up. The room hardware did not disappear. It stopped being the headline.

Microphones in the ceiling tiles, mixing done by software

David Danto, the analyst and AV veteran behind TalkingPointz, took the standardization argument to its endpoint, per Krapf's account. As hardware commoditizes further, Danto suggested microphones and cameras could eventually be embedded in room décor, in picture frames and ceiling tiles, with AI combining every device's input to produce the best available audio and video. In theory, Krapf wrote, that could reduce or even eliminate the audio engineering work that goes into each room today.

There is a documented path toward that vision. In the 2024 No Jitter piece, Trueman described how vendors first added a second front-of-room camera: typically a wide 120-degree view paired with a narrower 90-degree one, both 4K so the system could pan and zoom while still delivering the 1080p most meeting platforms target. The wide camera tracked people near the front, the narrow one picked up speakers at the back.

The more recent step, per Trueman, allows more than half a dozen cameras mounted across all four walls, with the AI dynamically composing, swapping and framing in-room participants. He named Crestron and Cisco as vendors doing significant work there. Danto's picture-frame microphones are that same idea taken one notch further, from six visible cameras to sensors nobody sees.

The reason any of this matters to a remote worker comes down to presence. In a hybrid meeting, in-room participants struggle to achieve the same sense of presence as virtual attendees, Trueman told No Jitter. In-room attendees have traditionally appeared to remote colleagues as a single thumbnail of the whole room, perhaps panning and zooming toward whoever is talking, while every remote participant gets their own framed square. UC Today's preview listed meeting equity, meaning no second-class remote participants, as a live theme on the 2026 show floor, which indicates the problem Trueman described in 2024 is still on the agenda.

For teams writing room standards now, Danto's scenario would matter mostly on the network side Howard raised. A room with a dozen embedded endpoints feeding one AI mixer would carry more traffic than a room with a single bar, so a standard that fixes switch ports and PoE budgets per room today would be worth revisiting before that hardware arrives. That is an inference from the two speakers' points, not something either quantified.

The order of operations the show revealed

Krapf's own takeaway from Enterprise Connect 2026 was blunt: the technology exists to transform office meeting rooms, and enterprises are still working on utilization and interoperability. The immersive room Danto described sits at the far end of a sequence that starts with counting how many people walk in.

That sequence gives the IT or facilities leader a sharper question for the next budget cycle than which camera to buy. It is whether the occupancy data the room systems already produce has changed a single floor plan. Where it has not, the eight-seat room with two people in it will still be there when the picture-frame microphones ship.