MIT Technology Review · Feb 16, 2026 · Collected from RSS
When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined what clear, reliable communication can mean in a hybrid world. For major audio and communications…
When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined what clear, reliable communication can mean in a hybrid world. For major audio and communications enterprises like Shure and Zoom, that transformation has been powered by artificial intelligence, new acoustic technologies, and a shared mission: making connection effortless. Necessity during the pandemic accelerated years of innovation in months. "Audio and video just working is a baseline for collaboration," says chief ecosystem officer at Zoom, Brendan Ittelson. "That expectation has shifted from connecting people to enhancing productivity and creativity across the entire ecosystem." Audio is a foundation for trust, understanding, and collaboration. Poor sound quality can distort meaning and fatigue listeners, while crisp audio and intelligent processing can make digital interactions feel nearly as natural as in-person exchanges. "If you think about the fundamental need here," adds chief technology officer at Shure, Sam Sabet, "It's the ability to amplify the audio and the information that's really needed, and diminish the unwanted sounds and audio so that we can enhance that experience and make it seamless for people to communicate." For both Ittelson and Sabet, AI now sits at the center of this progress. For Shure, machine learning powers real-time noise suppression, adaptive beamforming, and spatial audio that tunes itself to a room’s acoustics. For Zoom, AI underpins every layer of its platform, from dynamic noise reduction to automated meeting summaries and intelligent assistants that anticipate user needs. These tools are transforming communication from reactive to proactive, enabling systems that understand intent, context, and emotion. "Even if you're not working from home and coming into the office, the types of spaces and environments you try to collaborate in today are constantly changing because our needs are constantly changing," says Sabet. "Having software and algorithms that adapt seamlessly and self-optimize based on the acoustics of the room, based on the different layouts of the spaces where people collaborate in is instrumental." The future, they suggest, is one where technology fades into the background. As audio devices and AI companions learn to self-optimize, users won’t think about microphones or meeting links. Instead, they’ll simply connect. Both companies are now exploring agentic AI systems and advanced wireless solutions that promise to make collaboration seamless across spaces, whether in classrooms, conference rooms, or virtual environments yet to come. "It's about helping people focus on strategy and creativity instead of administrative busy work," says Ittelson. This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Shure. Full Transcript Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Megan Tatum and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. This episode is produced in partnership with Shure. Now as the pandemic ushered in the cultural shift that led to our increasingly virtual world, it also sparked a flurry of innovation in the audio and video industries to keep employees and customers connected and businesses running. Today we're going to talk about the AI technologies behind those innovations, the impact on audio innovation, and the continuing emerging opportunities for further advances in audio capabilities. Two words for you: elevated audio. My guests today are Sam Sabet, chief technology officer at Shure, and Brendan Ittelson, chief ecosystem officer at Zoom. Welcome Sam, welcome Brendan. Sam Sabet: Thank you, Megan. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation with both you and Brendan. It should be a very exciting conversation. Brendan Ittelson: Thank you so much for having me today. I'm looking forward to the conversation and all the topics we have to dive into on this area. Megan: Fantastic. Lovely to have you both here. And Sam, just to set some context, I wonder if we could start with the pandemic and the innovation that really was born out of necessity. I mean, when it became clear that we were all going to be virtual for the foreseeable future, I wonder what was the first technological mission for Shure? Sam: Yeah, very good question. The pandemic really accelerated a lot of innovation around virtual communications and fundamentally how we perform our everyday jobs remotely. One of our first technological mission when the pandemic happened and everybody ended up going home and performing their functions remotely was to make sure that people could continue to communicate effectively, whether that's for business meetings, virtual events, or educational purposes. We focused on collaboration and enhancing collaboration tools. And ideally what we were aiming to do, or we focused on, was to basically improve the ease of use and configuration of audio tool sets. Because unlike the office environment where it might be a lot more controlled, people are working from non-traditional areas like home offices or other makeshift solutions, we needed to make sure that people could still get pristine audio and that studio level audio even in uncontrolled environments that are not really made for that. We expedited development in our software solutions. We created tool sets that allowed for ease of deployment and remote configuration and management so we could enable people to continue doing the things they needed to do without having to worry about the underlying technology. Megan: And Brendan, during that time, it seemed everyone became a Zoom user of some sort. I mean, what was the first mission at Zoom when virtual connection became this necessity for everyone? Brendan: Well, our mission fundamentally didn't change. It's always been about delivering frictionless communications. What shifted was the urgency and the magnitude of what we were doing. Our focus shifted on how we do this reliably, securely, and to scale to ensure these millions of new users could connect instantly without friction. We really shifted our thinking of being just a business continuity tool to becoming a lifeline for so many individuals and industries. The stories that we heard across education, healthcare, and just general human connection, the number of those moments that matter to people that we were able to help facilitate just became so important. We really focused on how can we be there and make it frictionless so folks can focus on that human connection. And that accelerated our thinking in terms of innovation and reinforced the thought that we need to focus on the simplicity, accessibility, and trust in communication technology so that people could focus on that connection and not the technology that makes it possible. Megan: That's so true. It did really just become an absolute lifeline for people, didn't it? And before we dive into the technologies beyond these emerging capabilities, I wonder if we could first talk about just the importance of clear audio. I mean, Sam, as much as we all worry over how we look on Zoom, is how we sound perhaps as or even more impactful? Sam: Yeah, you're absolutely correct. I mean, clear audio is absolutely critical for effective communications. Video quality is very important absolutely, but poor audio can really hinder understanding and engagement. As a matter of fact, there's studies and research from areas such as Yale University that say that poor audio can make understanding somewhat more challenged and even affect retention of information. Especially in an educational type environment where there's a lot of background noise and very differing types of spaces like auditoriums and lecture halls, it really becomes a high priority that you have great audio quality. And during the pandemic, as you said, and as Brendan rightly said, it became one of our highest priorities to focus on technologies like beamforming mics and ways to focus on the speaker's voice and minimize that unwanted background noise so that we could ensure that the communication was efficient, was well understood, and that it removed the distraction so people could be able to actually communicate and retain the information that was being shared. Megan: It is incredible just how impactful audio can be, can't it? Brendan, I mean as you said, remote and hybrid collaboration is part of Zoom's DNA. What observations can you share about how users have grown along with the technological advancements and maybe how their expectations have grown as well? Brendan: Definitely. I mean, users now expect seamless and intelligent experiences. Audio and video just working is a baseline for collaboration. That expectation has shifted from connecting people to enhancing productivity and creativity across the entire ecosystem. When we look at it, we're really looking at these trends in terms of how people want to be better when they're at home. For example, AI-powered tools like Smart Summaries, translation and noise suppression to help people stay productive and connected no matter where they're working. But then this also comes into play at the office. We're starting to see folks that dive into our technology like Intelligent Director and Smart Name Tags that create that meeting equity even when they're in a conference room. So, the remote experience and the room experience all are similar and create that same ability to be seen, heard, and contribute. And we're now diving further into this that it's beyond just meetings. Zoom is really transforming into an AI-first work platform that's focused on human connection. And so that goes beyond the meetings into things like Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Events and Webinars, the Zoom Contact Center and