The Future of Workspaces Revealed at UCX 2025

This October, the proAV team attended UCX 2025 at Excel London, the UK’s leading event for unified communications and collaboration technology. The exhibition brought together global vendors, each showcasing how workplaces are being transformed by smarter, more connected, and user-centric solutions. One message stood out above all: the future of meetings is arriving faster than ever, driven by a focus on premium experiences, simplified user journeys, cost-saving efficiencies, and surprising innovations that will shape the next generation of collaboration. 

Elevating the Premium Meeting Experience

One of the standout themes at UCX 2025 was the drive to deliver premium meeting experiences that raise the standard for how people connect and collaborate. The emphasis is no longer just on reliable connectivity, but on creating intelligent and engaging environments that feel effortless for users while delivering the highest-quality performance. Vendors are pushing high-end, user-centric meeting spaces, with a strong focus on simplicity, adoption, and ease of use.

As Craig Abrahams, Senior Estimating and Vendor Manager at proAV, explained:

“When we talk about premium meeting experiences, it comes down to how effortlessly the technology performs without creating complexity. The best solutions combine high-quality audio and video with reliability and streamlined integration, so users can focus on the meeting, not the system.”

Cisco

Cisco showcased flexible collaboration with their range of Webex devices compatible with both Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom. The Webex range combines guest mode, SIP dial-in and built-in AI noise cancellation to deliver clear, adaptable and high-quality meeting experiences. The Webex devices can provide each video conferencing platform’s familiar interface. Whatever your platform of choice, Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Webex, users benefit from the layout and functions they already know, making the experience both flexible and intuitive.

This becomes particularly powerful when combined with Cisco Spaces, which connects meeting environments with meaningful insights. Organisations can track occupancy, monitor environmental factors such as temperature, humidity and noise, and identify whether scheduled meetings are taking place. Features like auto-releasing unused bookings and wayfinding for available rooms further enhance space utilisation, helping businesses to make better use of existing real estate and reduce wasted resources. For IT and business leaders, this data supports smarter, more cost-effective decision-making, while tools such as Control Hub and ThousandEyes add advanced analytics, troubleshooting and security monitoring. Together, these capabilities ensure that Cisco delivers not only premium meeting experiences but also actionable insights that optimise performance, efficiency and value.

Neat

We were also impressed by Neat’s focus on premium meeting experiences, combining elegant design with user-centric functionality. The portfolio of devices Neat provide range from their BYOD Neat Bar solution to the collaborative Neat Board and their philosophy is clear: if technology is not intuitive, adoption will suffer no matter how advanced the hardware. This is where Neat Pulse really stood out. The platform provides flexibility by giving organisations control over which applications run on which devices, while also offering a clear overview of estates regardless of size. For IT and engineering teams, the ability to filter by unpaired or offline devices, monitor updates and access real-time meeting status such as occupancy and environmental data makes management far more efficient. Neat Pulse also allows administrators to add contextual notes about rooms and spaces, helping teams keep track of details that make day-to-day use simpler. By combining a premium design ethos with powerful management capabilities, Neat delivers solutions that are both high-end and practical.

Q-SYS

As part of its “Activate: Go Beyond” launch, Q-SYS introduced two new cameras that push its ecosystem further into advanced video. The NC Series NC-90-G2 adds a wider field of view with intelligent AI framing that naturally keeps speakers in focus throughout a meeting, while the NC-Pro 15x developed with Canon brings production-grade performance through powerful optical zoom and colour clarity. What stood out to us was how these additions move Q-SYS beyond traditional conferencing setups and into spaces such as executive boardrooms, training environments and even small studio applications.

User Experience, Simplified

Another key theme at UCX 2025 was the drive to make meeting technology easier to use, manage and adopt at scale. Simplicity is now an expectation, and vendors are responding by making solutions more intuitive for everyday users. From cross-platform compatibility to BYOD flexibility and straightforward room controls, brands like Biamp and Lenovo showed how streamlined experiences can encourage adoption, save time and ultimately make collaboration more effective.

Biamp

In the drive for simpler user experiences, Biamp showed how it is bringing together room management, monitoring and audio innovation into one cohesive approach. Biamp Evoko supports smarter space management, allowing users to check in and out of meetings, automatically release unused bookings and sync directly with Outlook and other calendars, while also giving facilities teams live floor plans and clear insights into how rooms are being used.

Alongside this, the Biamp platform provides IT teams with detailed device monitoring and fault diagnostics, helping to reduce downtime and improve system reliability. These capabilities are underpinned by Biamp’s strength in audio, with features such as echo cancellation and sound masking provided by their Cambridge qt X platform helps improve clarity and privacy in open-plan environments. Together, they highlight how Biamp is focusing on both usability and manageability to make collaboration spaces easier to run and more reliable day to day.

We also had the opportunity to explore Biamp’s focus on the flexibility of its hardware, with solutions designed to make meeting spaces easier to scale and support. The EasyConnect MPX hub simplifies BYOD and content sharing by providing direct access to USB and HDMI connections at the table, ensuring users can connect their own devices without barriers. Portable amplifiers such as the AMP-450BP add further versatility, while the option of both optical and digital PTZ cameras gives organisations more choice when tailoring room setups. Together, these additions reinforce Biamp’s practical approach, combining user-friendly access with the technical depth needed for reliable performance.

Lenovo

Lenovo’s focus at UCX was on Microsoft Teams Rooms, highlighting the choice between Android and Windows setups. Android came across as the quick, cost-friendly option for smaller deployments, but Windows stood out for its stability, performance and support for AI-driven features. The hardware itself is built with a fan less, low-noise design but still packs strong processing and graphics capabilities, making it fit for purpose for the next few years. What really caught our attention, though, were the practical touches things like resilient touch controls and a built-in BYOD switch that make it easy for users to connect their own devices. Combined with support for Zoom and Webex alongside Teams, it felt clear that Lenovo is aiming to give organisations flexibility without adding unnecessary complexity.

Driving Efficiency with Netgear

While many vendors focused on the meeting room experience, Netgear made its case in the infrastructure that powers it. Netgear, already well known for its AV-centric switches, has built Netgear Engage as a management layer that makes configuring and supporting large estates far simpler. Instead of engineers setting up every switch individually, Engage enables software-based configuration across multiple rooms at once. For large buildings, that means an entire floor can be set up consistently in half the time, with settings easily replicated across spaces.

From a commercial perspective, this saves both time and cost while making rollouts far more predictable. Netgear Engage also supports day-to-day operations by giving IT teams a single view of the network. It becomes easy to see which devices are online or offline, identify issues and even power cycle equipment remotely. This avoids engineers going in blind and helps resolve problems faster, improving uptime. Combined with benefits such as lifetime warranty and global engineering support, Netgear showed how infrastructure choices can deliver both technical flexibility and measurable efficiencies for organisations.

New Innovations and What to Look Out For

Known for its action and 360° cameras, Insta360 is now applying its expertise to meeting rooms with solutions that bridge content creation and collaboration. It felt unexpected to see a company best known for consumer and creator markets showcasing workplace devices, but the results were impressive. The Dual Camera AI Video Bar delivers 4K quality with built-in AI tools for group, speaker and gallery framing. During the demo, the system tracked a presenter at a whiteboard and zoomed in so that writing became clearly visible to remote participants a simple but powerful way of making hybrid learning and meetings more engaging. We also saw devices like the Insta360 Wave speakerphone and the Link 2 and Link 2C webcams, which feature AI-driven framing, noise reduction and whiteboard recognition. Together, these innovations showed how Insta360 is extending its strengths into collaboration, underlining just how critical clear video and audio are for effective communication in any environment.

Meet Insta360 Wave

A particular standout moment for us was seeing the Insta360 Wave, a professional speakerphone designed for both meeting spaces and open environments. Its AI-powered recording suite combines intelligent noise reduction, transcription features and intuitive controls to make collaboration easier. With a 16ft pickup range and directional microphones, the Wave captures speech within a focused “bubble,” picking up the voices you want while reducing surrounding distractions. Even in busy office settings, it delivers clear, precise audio that keeps conversations sharp and productive.

Conclusion

UCX 2025 showed us that meeting technology is moving fast, from premium setups and simplified user tools to cost-saving platforms and even unexpected innovations from brands like Insta360. What stood out most is that the future of collaboration will not be about one product or one platform, but about how everything connects to create smarter, easier and more reliable meeting experiences. For us as an integrator, the real value is in bringing these technologies together in ways that work for our clients, ensuring they are ready for the next generation of workplace collaboration. We’ll be sharing more of this in our upcoming case studies, where these technologies come to life in real projects.