By Rajeev Singh, MD, BenQ India & South Asia
For years, the boardroom sat at the centre of how organisations thought about work. Decisions got made there, and so, in a way, did hierarchy, because whoever had the clearest sightline to the screen usually ended up with the loudest voice too. That room is still standing in most offices today but it’s the assumption behind it that’s gone soft, the idea that this is where work happens. Hybrid work broke that assumption without anyone deciding to.
People started making calls, closing deals and settling arguments from wherever they happened to be that day, and the office lost its claim on being the default. Nobody tore the boardroom down. It’s still there, still gets booked, and still very much shows up on the floor plan. What changed is that it’s no longer where the actual work is happening, and the technology built around it since has mostly been catching up to that fact.
A room that participates instead of just hosting
AI is starting to make the display less of a passive screen and more of an active part of the meeting because it recognises who’s talking and frames the shot so someone joining remotely actually feels present instead of watching from some fixed, awkward angle stuck in the corner of the room. It also pulls up the agenda before anyone must dig through an email thread looking for it, which is extremely useful in last minute meetings. These are small things but anyone who has spent years dialling into meetings from home knows how much they add up to. Joining remotely has always meant a worse seat at the table, sometimes literally, straining to hear, missing who said what, or guessing at context everyone in the room already had.
A device that frames people properly and cuts out kitchen noise closes that gap in a way earlier attempts at video conferencing never really managed and that’s why this small upgrade can feel like a gamechanger. But that’s not where the story ends – where this goes wrong is treating a good camera as the whole answer. A display that only speaks one video platform’s language just brings back the old problem in a new shape because everyone still must gather around whatever the room happens to prefer that day, instead of the tool actually working for them. What matters more is a room that works with whatever platform a team is already using, so nobody must relearn how a meeting starts just because of which room got booked.
Productivity that shows up as an absence
The more interesting shift happens after the meeting ends. Every organisation is quietly sitting on a graveyard of half-remembered decisions: things agreed out loud and never actually written down. By the following Tuesday, most of it’s forgotten anyway. Transcription and summarisation tools are closing that gap by turning conversation into a record without someone typing frantically while also trying to contribute an actual opinion. Having spent the better part of three decades around the people who build this hardware, one pattern keeps repeating – vendors love pitching the room as the innovation, when the unit that actually matters has always been the employee, wherever they happen to be sitting that day.
Boardroom was always shorthand for wherever the decision got made, and for a long time that happened to be a fixed address with a table in it. These days it’s just as often a laptop balanced on a kitchen counter. A display that behaves the same way whether it’s ceiling-mounted in an office or squeezed onto a desk in a spare bedroom does more for productivity than any single AI feature bolted on afterwards. All the transcription and auto-framing in the world doesn’t matter much if that idea, that work follows the person and not the postcode, isn’t built in from the start.
Security, treated as load-bearing rather than optional
This is where the conversation tends to get uncomfortable, and where it deserves more attention than it usually gets. Every microphone, camera and display that makes a room smarter also makes it a more interesting target. A connected meeting room is, functionally, a cluster of sensors sitting inside a space where confidential conversations happen daily. Treating that casually stopped being defensible a while ago.
Forward-thinking manufacturers have started building security in at the design stage instead of patching it in afterwards: encrypted transmission that doesn’t depend on someone remembering to turn it on, access controls specific enough that not everyone in the building can peer into everyone else’s calendar. Firmware that updates itself instead of waiting on an IT ticket helps too, though it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Any organisation letting AI into its meeting rooms in 2026 needs this built in as a baseline from day one.
There’s a practical test buried in all this for whoever ends up responsible for workplace technology. Most displays can already do more, that’s not really the question anymore. What matters is whether the extra capability comes with enough discipline to protect what happens in front of it, and whether it plays reasonably with whatever platform a given team already uses instead of forcing everyone onto one ecosystem because procurement finds that easier.
What this adds up to
This was never really about the meeting room getting cleverer for its own sake. It’s about communication, productivity and the hybrid experience finally being designed around the same assumption: that a workforce scattered across time zones and kitchen counters still needs to feel like it’s in one conversation.
AI-powered collaboration tools and connected displays are the mechanism, not the point. The point is that a decision made by someone dialling in from another city should carry exactly as much weight, and get written down exactly as carefully, as one made by whoever’s sitting closest to the screen in the room. The boardroom, the version with the long table and the good chairs, was only ever a proxy for that. It’s still standing in most offices, and it will probably keep standing for a while yet. But the organisations getting this right have already stopped treating it as the centre of anything. The centre, if there ever really was one, has moved to wherever the work is happening, and the technology’s job now is simply to keep up with that.