At Cisco, I watched video conferencing go from a boardroom luxury to the backbone of how the world worked almost overnight. At Aptiv, I saw intelligent edge computing quietly transform entire industries—automotive, aerospace, robotics—in ways most people didn’t notice until suddenly they couldn’t imagine working without it.

I’ve always been drawn to inflection points, those moments when a technology shift and a market opportunity line up. ​So when the chance to join Neat arose, I didn’t need much convincing.

​We’re at one of those rare moments now, where two major technological shifts are happening at the same time. The devices in your conference room are now powerful enough to run AI locally on the edge, while language models have advanced to the point that AI can do powerful things with them. Combined, you can embed AI directly into the devices powering your meetings and enable a whole new class of experiences that weren’t possible before.

​Neat’s founding team knows this space better than almost anyone because they built the previous generation of it. They built many of the legacy video conferencing systems that power conference rooms today. And in 2019, they decided that the only way to build for the AI era was to start over because you can’t layer modern intelligence on top of a decade-old operating system. This mission has only become more pressing as AI and edge computing have advanced at such a rapid pace.

What amazed me was seeing how much the team has already achieved. Neat devices have become the go-to hardware for Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and they added Google Meet support last year, meaning the product portfolio is deeply integrated with every major platform enterprises actually use. BYOD has been a persistent headache for enterprise IT for years, and Neat Open is the first approach I’ve seen that actually solves it rather than works around it. And the company’s investments in building distributed architecture are bringing AI into large, complex spaces that have historically been too expensive or complicated to outfit well. That’s an impressively strong foundation to build on.

To Neat’s customers and partners: you’ll continue to see the same commitment to simplicity and quality that brought you to Neat in the first place, with some more powerful capabilities to come. To the Neat team: I’m looking forward to working with you all as we enter this next era for our hardware and software.

​I’d also like to take a moment to recognize Janine Pelosi, who helped build so much of what makes Neat worth joining, particularly the company’s operational foundation and growth over the past couple of years.

​The founding team, many of whom are still here at Neat, set out to build the collaboration platform this era deserves. That work is well underway. I’m here to help see it through.