Crestron: Engineering a Culture of Collaboration
How intelligent technology can transform nearly every space
January 20
Crestron: Engineering a Culture of Collaboration

In the early 1970s, a graduate of NYU with an electronics engineering degree founded a company called Crestron. That engineer, George Feldstein, was part inventor, part entrepreneur — and the first product that made a mark for him and Crestron was a system designed to make business meetings more efficient.

Feldstein saw a way to improve what was then state-of-the-art technology for presentations: the slide projector. The control device Feldstein developed went beyond advancing and reversing a carousel of slides — it added features such as fades and dissolves, as well as the ability for the user to program multiple stacks of projectors into a timed presentation. Feldstein’s solution wound up going well beyond the projector to ultimately include functionalities that could draw the shades closed as a slide presentation began.

The devices that came after Feldstein’s first “hit” evolved into much more than inventions that made existing products better — the company turned its attention to engineering purpose-built solutions.

Collaboration — and Content and Control

In the company’s infancy, though, that first foray into business solutions neatly predicted the areas of focus that Crestron would really lean into: It was a control solution that presented content in a way that improved collaboration among the attendees of a given meeting.

By building devices that help coworkers focus on the task at hand without having to pay much attention (if any at all) to the technology driving the meeting, the electronics that make that possible disappear into the background. The company’s “secret sauce” is at work here, as Crestron’s EVP of Customer Success and Marketing Brad Hintze notes: “Content, collaboration, and control must work together. Most vendors excel at one — we integrate all three.”

Fast forward 50 years from Crestron’s first forays into the business of engineering those three, and the modern workplace has evolved into a universe where constant collaboration is absolutely vital. Ensuring that devices facilitate collaboration without friction for the user is key to their success.

The New Normal: Hybrid Work and AI Tools

Hybrid work is now the norm for many, many organizations. AI tools are part of the mix of most meetings. And with those developments come challenges: How do you deliver excellence across hundreds of rooms without the time and expense of custom integration every time? How do you ensure that every collaborator has a consistent, intuitive, and user-friendly experience, whether they’re in-person or remote? And how do you create the infrastructure that best leverages the AI functions that are at your disposal?

Crestron set out to engineer solutions that are purpose-built to meet those challenges. As Hintze says, “Our engineers strove to answer what amounted to a single question: What if collaboration just worked — everywhere, every time?”

Crestron: Engineering a Culture of Collaboration
Crestron: Engineering a Culture of Collaboration
Crestron: Engineering a Culture of Collaboration

Meeting the Moment with New Solutions

One of the solutions Crestron has engineered to operate at the heart of a truly effective collaboration ecosystem is the new Collab Compute, a purpose-built hardware platform that powers Microsoft Teams® Rooms and Zoom Rooms® software on Microsoft® Windows® operating systems. This isn’t a device that’s been adapted for this purpose — it was designed from the outset to deliver intelligent, scalable, and future-ready collaboration across almost any space.

In addition to the Collab Compute platform, Crestron is also introducing a suite of hardware and software products that work seamlessly in concert to deliver outstanding collaboration experiences. They include:

  • The Automate VX 6.5 multi-camera speaker tracking solution, a powerful firmware update that simplifies intelligent video deployments and offers greater device support. This update includes AutoMeasure, a feature that utilizes computer vision and ArUco markers to precisely detect the position and orientation of cameras and microphones, resulting in a calibrated system that delivers consistent, high-quality video performance without requiring manual measurement.
  • The new 80-Series Touch Screens, intelligent, purpose-built user interfaces that deliver intuitive control, flexible scheduling, and enterprise-grade security across nearly every space and workflow. This next generation of Crestron touch screens brings the user a single interface for scheduling, UC control, and room automation.
  • The 1 Beyond i12D Camera, an intelligent PTZ camera with built-in speaker tracking, delivering advanced video features like group framing and intelligent switching in a single, elegant device — with no complex programming. These 4K cameras feature built-in microphones and Visual AI for speaker tracking all in a single, streamlined device that enhances everyday meeting rooms by providing high-quality, intelligent video without the extensive infrastructure required by larger systems.
  • The DM NAX Intelligent Audio Processing Platform is a scalable platform built with an ecosystem of mic pods, speakers, and AES-67 devices, delivering AI-ready audio that scales from huddle rooms to high-impact spaces. Features include Direction of Arrival Audio (a beamforming function that tracks a speaker’s location), advanced DSP, noise reduction, and auto-mixing. Specifically tuned for Microsoft 365® Copilot and Zoom AI Assistant, the platform delivers speaker tracking, crystal-clear audio, and AI summarizations and transcriptions.

The result: we've engineered five innovations that work together as one ecosystem.

“By bringing together content, collaboration, and control in ways that truly integrate, we're making great collaboration the default experience everywhere,” says Joel Mulpeter, senior director of product marketing at Crestron. With AI-powered deployment that reduces setup time, the purpose-built Collab Compute features edge AI for professional AV environments, unified interfaces that work the way people naturally do, and intelligent peripherals that deliver premium experiences without complexity. Crestron solutions can tackle it all.

 

How It All Works Together

Alex Peras, Crestron VP of product management, illustrates how these solutions create that collaborative experience: “Imagine you’re checking the availability of a room on a touch screen as you walk by. You’ve booked the room, and when it’s time for your session, a single tap launches the meeting. Your camera automatically frames everyone for a perfect view of every gesture and nuance, no matter how far away meeting attendees might be. Intelligent audio captures everything for ‘broadcast’ — and for Microsoft Copilot transcription.”

“That’s just one layer of what’s happening: behind the scenes, Collab Compute connects to the third-party meeting service that includes embedded AI functions (like transcription and translation), AutoMeasure has ensured that every camera and microphone in the room is properly set up, and the XiO Cloud technology operations management platform has made it simple to deploy, monitor, and manage all your devices from one dashboard.”

The AI that’s driving much of this — in all its various iterations — brings something powerful to the table. It’s creating what Craig Durr, chief analyst and founder of the Collab Collective, refers to as a “trust multiplier.” "Effectiveness is about doing the right things better. That's where AI becomes empowering — as that trust multiplier," he says.

“Each innovation is powerful alone, but together they transform the experience,” adds Hintze.

The Benefits

“What this is about, ultimately, is what sets us apart: Thoughtful design at the outset, not taking existing solutions and trying to adapt them in ways that meet the challenge,” says Hintze. “When you engineer solutions for a specific challenge from jump, you wind up creating spaces that people find worth returning to — it’s what we sometimes call ‘making the commute worth it.’

“Effective hybrid solutions deliver experiences in which the technology fades away,” he adds. “It just works — and you don’t notice it.”

There are other benefits at work here, too — benefits that become more obvious over time. “IT departments soon understand how helpful these solutions can be,” says Mulpeter. “They’ll see faster deployment of the necessary system, fewer tickets to the help desk, and they’ll eventually realize that this infrastructure is ‘future-ready.’”

“For the C-suite, these kinds of solutions can create a real competitive advantage,” he adds. “When it’s easy for your people to come to work and simply get started without thinking about the technology at all, that’s terrific for retention and recruitment.” Of course, that means greater productivity, too. That leads to pluses like a measurable ROI for each solution and gives the whole organization more confidence when it’s time to scale up.

“Collaboration isn’t an afterthought. It’s engineered into every Crestron product,” says Hintze.

“And when collaboration works effortlessly in every space, it becomes cultural.”

Collab Compute, the Automate VX 6.5 multi-camera speaker tracking solution, the new 80-Series Touch Screens, the 1 Beyond i12D Cameras, and the full suite of DM NAX® Intelligent Audio processor products are slated for official release in the coming months. We’ll be offering live webinars on each solution, too. For more info, watch the Crestron blog, the Crestron Webinars page (you can sign up for updates at the bottom of the page) — and stop by our booth at ISE® 2026 Expo.

featured products

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Crestron Control

The brains of your technology ecosystem, Crestron Control Solutions ensure that everything in the room that makes your organization work–from A/V to lighting, and temperature–works together seamlessly. Designed to help you deliver consistent, intuitive in-room experiences–from a single room to a global footprint. Intelligently. Efficiently. Securely.

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Crestron DM NAX Audio-over-IP technology

Send high-fidelity sound from any source to any space. Every note. In no time flat. It’s done with DM NAX Audio-over-IP technology. From video conferencing to background music, networked audio distribution gives you a flexible, scalable, and secure solution.

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Crestron Intelligent Video

From small rooms to multi-purpose rooms, from lecture halls to town halls, Crestron’s portfolio of intelligent video solutions brings everyone closer together and keeps them fully engaged.

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