Remote and hybrid work stopped being a temporary arrangement. Robert Half reports that in Q4 2025, 24% of new job postings were hybrid and 11% were fully remote, and that most employers offer some form of hybrid option. More work now happens inside online meetings with AI being layered directly into that workflow. Platforms are rolling out assistants that transcribe discussions, generate summaries, capture action items, and automate follow-ups, so the meeting becomes a documented input for execution after the call. The quality of that output depends on whether the AI can accurately understand what was said. That, in turn, depends on consistent, intelligible speech. Many AI-ready rooms still fall short, as when the audio input is uneven, the AI produces uneven results.
That is why the role of a sound and commissioning engineer has become a more important part of hybrid-work infrastructure. This specialist does not just connect equipment. They make speech capture stable enough for transcripts, summaries, and action items to be accurate from one meeting to the next. Ihor Kovalenko is a senior audio engineer and AV commissioning specialist based in Seattle, with 20-plus years across live sound, enterprise AV, and system design. He has commissioned and optimized enterprise conferencing systems at AVI-SPL, including work at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters campus. His work there includes AI-assisted DSP concepts and advanced signal processing techniques focused on speech intelligibility and system optimization. Ihor also remains connected to the creative side of the industry through the Recording Academy's membership program for emerging music creators and professionals, a community built around mentorship, peer networking, and career development across multiple U.S. chapters.
The question is what has to be engineered before those AI outputs can be trusted.
Where Meeting AI Breaks First
The fastest way to break AI meeting output is not a bad platform. It is an uneven speech signal, where some voices are captured cleanly, and others arrive as room wash. Once that happens, the transcript starts to drop words, confuse speaker attribution, and miss action language. The summary and action items then inherit those gaps, and teams end up spending time re-deciding what was already agreed on.
To make enterprise meeting rooms produce consistent, reliable speech capture, companies invite specialists like Ihor. In his role as a commissioning specialist and senior audio engineer at AVI-SPL, a global workplace collaboration and AV systems integrator serving enterprise clients, Ihor takes meeting rooms that are already installed and makes them reliable sources of speech for online calls. He sets and confirms the gain structure so voices land at stable levels, configures the digital signal processing so it prioritizes speech intelligibility, and aligns the microphone pickup so the system responds consistently to different speakers. He also calibrates the room's acoustic behavior so the space does not blur speech clarity. Finally, he tests the room the way it will be used in real life, running live call scenarios instead of stopping at a quick local check. The conferencing environment captured speech evenly across the room, which is what accurate transcripts, summaries, and action items depend on.
"My favorite diagnosis is when someone says, 'The AI isn't working today.' The AI is working. It's just being honest about what the microphones are giving it," the expert says.
In a hybrid setup, meeting audio quietly becomes infrastructure: when capture is inconsistent, transcripts wobble, summaries lose signal, and follow-ups get fuzzier than teams expect. As more organizations treat AI meeting output as an input for execution, commissioning starts to function less like AV polish and more like a reliability layer that keeps this workflow consistent across rooms and calls.
How Engineers Make Speech Behave
Once you view the meeting room as an input system for downstream execution, commissioning becomes easier to describe. The engineer is stabilizing three levers that determine whether speech becomes usable data: who the room can hear, how clearly it captures intent, and whether the result repeats from one meeting to the next.
Ihor's work at AVI-SPL is built around those same levers, and one example is Microsoft Experience Center One in Redmond, the company's flagship demonstration center with immersive rooms, meeting spaces, and larger collaboration areas operating within one integrated AV environment. There, his role was to help bring those spaces into dependable service by improving speech intelligibility and overall system performance under real conferencing conditions as part of an AV integration project valued at about $20 million. He achieved this through advanced signal processing and DSP techniques, including beamforming, noise suppression, AEC, and AI-enhanced features that improve intelligibility and system behavior across different speakers and meeting formats. The result was more consistent speech capture, i.e., the difference between a room that sounds acceptable in person and one that also produces reliable transcripts.
This type of work combines audio, networks, and applied signal processing, which connects to Kovalenko's membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a worldwide engineering group recognized for influencing how technologies are developed and tested through its societies, conferences, publications, and standards.
"Microsoft's Redmond headquarters campus is basically a small city of meeting rooms. When you bring a space online, you're not tuning for a single team. You're tuning for constant use, across many rooms, where inconsistency shows up immediately in the far-end experience and in the transcript," the expert remembers.
The practical point is that AI-enabled meeting features raise the quality bar. A room can be technically connected and still fail at the job that matters: capturing speech clearly enough that people and AI interpret it the same way. For the industry, this is a shift from deployment to quality assurance. Organizations are starting to treat meeting rooms the way they treat other critical systems: tested, tuned, and accepted against clear performance expectations.
Stop Chasing Sound Start Chasing Clarity
The most overlooked idea in meeting-room performance is repeatability. Many rooms pass a demo and fail in production because nobody verifies that the room will behave the same way across time, voices, seating positions, and meeting styles. AI makes that weakness impossible to ignore, because inconsistency shows up immediately in the transcript.
That is why commissioning work includes verification and performance validation as a deliverable, not an afterthought. Ihor's scope includes the step that most organizations skip: proving that the room's speech capture is stable enough to be trusted from meeting to meeting. The task is to move from installed to repeatable. He does that by validating the room under real call conditions, confirming that microphone pickup and processing are consistent, and ensuring the system is optimized so intelligibility holds up across typical meeting scenarios. The outcome is not audiophile sound. It is operational reliability: fewer moments where participants have to ask for repeats, fewer gaps in transcription, and a stronger foundation for summaries and action items that teams can actually execute. That validation is reflected in his professional affiliation with the Audio Engineering Society, an international professional society devoted exclusively to audio technology, with a global member community.
As the expert recommends, "If you want to run hybrid work off transcripts and AI summaries, speech capture has to be your quality gate. When the transcript is shaky, everything downstream is shaky. You're assigning actions based on a record that isn't reliable."
For the industry, the implication is structural. As AI assistants become standard in meeting platforms, commissioning is becoming the control layer that determines whether meeting AI produces dependable work products or just polished noise.
Hybrid work made online meetings central. AI made meetings actionable by turning them into transcripts, summaries, and follow-ups. Commissioning is the link that determines whether those AI outputs are reliable or noisy. By focusing on speech intelligibility, system optimization, and repeatable conferencing performance in enterprise environments, commissioning specialists like Ihor Kovalenko help organizations treat meetings as dependable inputs for execution, not just time spent on a call.
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