Javed Khan is aware of the codec enterprise from the within. Earlier than becoming a member of Neat as CEO in March, he ran Cisco Collaboration as SVP and Common Supervisor, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar portfolio that included its room system line. Neat’s co-founder and CTO, Ivar Johnsrud, was one of many engineers behind the Tandberg C90, later the Cisco C90, nonetheless extensively cited because the excessive level of codec design.
Neither is arguing these methods have been poorly constructed. Khan’s argument, set out in a weblog put up this week, is that the mannequin behind them has hit a ceiling. The trade’s response has been to scale the issue moderately than clear up it: extra compute, extra cabling, extra sensors across the identical central structure. Prices and complexity develop. What the room can truly do doesn’t.
“The perfect model of a legacy mannequin continues to be the outdated mannequin,” he writes. “The world has modified, and the potential of AI has shifted the goalposts.”
Why Distributed Structure Works Higher in Massive Assembly Rooms
Khan’s proposed different attracts on his time at Aptiv, the place he ran Clever Programs and constructed distributed edge compute platforms for automotive, aerospace, and robotics. The comparability he reaches for is a self-driving automobile: cameras, sensors, and compute distributed throughout the automobile, processing in actual time, co-ordinating with out routing every little thing via a single central unit.
Massive convention rooms, he argues, have the identical structural downside. Folks transfer. Conversations shift throughout an area. A centralised system was not designed to trace that dynamism. Including extra {hardware} round it doesn’t change that. “A centralized system can’t sustain,” he writes. “It wasn’t designed to.”
Neat’s reply is to distribute compute, sensing, and AI inference throughout each system within the room. Cameras, microphones, and companion models every course of regionally and co-ordinate over IP. Rooms scale by including or eradicating units moderately than changing core {hardware}. Khan frames this as evolution moderately than rejection: “This isn’t abandoning the codec. It’s redefining what it turns into.”
He additionally distinguishes Neat’s strategy from partial makes an attempt by legacy distributors. Some distribute units however nonetheless route processing again to a central unit. That, he argues, simply recreates the bottleneck in a special kind.
How Edge AI Modifications What a Assembly Room Can Do
For Khan, AI is a part of the structure, not a function on high of it. When inference runs on the system, latency drops to milliseconds, information stays within the room, and efficiency doesn’t rely on community situations. The route he factors towards is rooms that transcend capturing conferences to understanding them: monitoring who’s talking, the place consideration is shifting, how a dialog develops throughout a big house.
He indicators a 2026 product roadmap with out detailing it: “I can’t wait to share our roadmap for the remainder of the 12 months and among the wonderful new capabilities now we have within the pipeline.”
Can Neat Tackle Cisco and Poly within the Massive Room Market?
Neat enters this argument from a powerful place. The corporate reported $250 million in income forward of Khan’s arrival, gained the 2026 Google Cloud Accomplice of the 12 months Award for Google Workspace: Innovation in April, and helps Google Meet, Microsoft Groups, and Zoom natively. It has additionally joined the Microsoft Machine Ecosystem Platform, geared toward enhancing safety and manageability for enterprise workspace units.
However Cisco, Poly, and others have deep incumbency in massive rooms, and enterprise patrons transfer slowly. When Khan’s appointment was introduced, Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, advised UC At present the rent places Neat “on a a lot larger degree once they promote to bigger firms,” whereas noting Khan “actually has his work minimize out for him in a extremely aggressive market.” Lazar additionally flagged the central stress in Khan’s argument: “there’s additionally the dynamic of how a lot will reside within the {hardware} versus the software program.”
That query will get answered by what Neat ships. The roadmap promised for later this 12 months is the actual take a look at of whether or not this structure has moved past a place into one thing enterprises can deploy at scale.
