Transforming Meeting Spaces with AI: The year ahead, Mehryn Corrigan, WW Channel Sales Teams Rooms

Mehryn Corrigan, Microsoft Global Channel Sales lead, Microsoft Teams Rooms, discusses the evolution of Teams Rooms and AI and the future of meeting spaces.

• AV and IT Convergence: Exploring the integration of AV and IT in meeting room setups and how partners are evolving their roles

• AI in Meeting Rooms: Enhancements such as speaker recognition, AI assistants, and Copilot are transforming meeting experiences

• Simplifying Room Deployments: Efforts to streamline setup and management are making modern meeting rooms more accessible

• Future Opportunities for Partners: With the addition of Microsoft Places and AI, partners are poised to expand their service offerings beyond hardware

Thanks to Jabra, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support.

Transcript

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Mehryn Corrigan: Think about this not just as a physical Meeting Room and these devices. It's kind of like a mindset change for the industry. We talked about AV and IT convergence. This is a whole shift in focus and starting to think more about value-based services and less about hardware.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast this week we have a familiar face in the Microsoft Teams community, particularly in the rooms community. Mehryn Corrigan at Microsoft who looks after worldwide channel sales of Teams Rooms. We talk a little bit about her journey before and into Microsoft, the Teams Rooms journey, some of the numbers around that, the partner opportunity.

What we are hearing from customers and then partners and Mehryn was also at InfoComm at the time of recording. So a little bit of perspective, but from her on the Infocom conversations and looking into the next, uh, fy uh, Microsoft year and what might be coming. Many thanks to mem for jumping on the podcast.

Really appreciate it. And many thanks to Jabra who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their Support, everything that they are doing. On with the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This has been a long one coming, uh, tracking down my diary and Mehryn's diary. Considering we talk every couple of weeks at least, it's, uh, it's funny how long it's taken.

Mehryn, thanks so much for being on the pod. For those who don't know you, can you just, uh, introduce yourself a little bit in your role? 

Mehryn Corrigan: Of course. Yeah. Um, my name is Mehryn Corrigan. Um. Been at Microsoft for about five years now, and I'm responsible for worldwide, um, channel sales of Teams Rooms, particularly on the partner side.

So if you are a Distributor or a Reseller or integrator or any type of partner, um, that works with Microsoft, um, I would sort of be the lead when it comes to that. So, very excited to be here, and I know Tom, we're on, I think. On a group chat, several group chats where I feel like I'm always in constant contact with you.

Um, so pleasure to be on here. I appreciate it. Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: no, thanks for coming on. I'm excited to, uh, get a little bit of your background. I say as the start, I, I, I, I know it from kind of looking up, but you, I know you didn't, you didn't start in the IT space. You've done distribution kind. Take us through that journey to Microsoft.

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. Um, honestly, going through college, like it's funny where you like, like land, I probably would not have seen myself at Microsoft. Like I was all into, I was actually in sports marketing in college, um, and turned at Nike and kind of saw myself headed in that direction. Um, got into like retAIl and merchandising, but what I kind of felt my passion was, was really, um, analytics.

Um, and so I went from retAIl. I. Ended up getting a job at Tech Data. Um, and so from there, that really started my journey in the world of technology. So. Yeah, there, I had, you know, merchandising jobs. I, I mAInly was in the AV space. I did things with like views and Sony and hp. Um, but I did, you know, sales marketing actually did supply chAIn logistics as well.

So kind of did a little bit of a tour duty. Quite varies. Yeah. All over the place. I kind of liked knowing the whole circle of how things get done, but probably my coolest role there was, um. Supply outsource supply chAIn. Honestly, you would think like, I'm in sales today and I love it, but that was really interesting to sort of figure out how things get from point A to.

Point B and how to do it more efficiently. So that was pretty fun. Um, and then, yeah, I ended up at Sharp Electronics doing the hardware thing after that. Uh, and then, yeah, I landed at Microsoft about five years ago in the middle of the pandemic when we were building out our Teams Room team. So it's been a fun, fun ride at Microsoft so far.

I've really enjoyed it. Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: it's been a, it is been a tear in the room space, hasn't it? I guess that, and that's how you kind of end up in the. Rooms part of the Microsoft world, is that kind of Yeah. AV and partners and then definitely into, into the room story. And you were relatively early five years back on the, the rooms journey?

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, so I actually at, at um, sharp Electronics, I was, um, managing alliances. And had a product called, I don't know if you remember the Windows Collaboration display, but that's what opened my eyes up to the world of Microsoft. And at that time, that's when like Platform was starting to drive some decisions of having, you know, rooms that were native.

And I really sort of fell in love with that and I felt like. The AV space or the world that I was coming from didn't know a whole lot about software and it, and I, I was really excited about trying to kind of open the door up to that ecosystem, into the IT world. So I've learned a lot along the way and hopefully I've, I've carried a lot of our community with.

With me along that journey. Definitely. I think things 

Tom Arbuthnot: like the, uh, yeah, the SMTR weekly show and things, there's a wealth of knowledge and seeing that stuff develop has been great. What, like, gimme your perspective on that AV and IT coming together. 'cause that, that has been the theme of the last few years is this change in how people do rooms in a very IT kind of centric way, rather than a classic AV way.

Yeah. And AV partners have had to adapt as well. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, I remember our first like, um, us trying to set up a video of like, Hey, this is how you set up a team's room. And this was at the beginning of, you know, our journey. And like any standard AV person that just goes to open the box like then realizes, oh, I've gotta set up an account and I've gotta assign a license to it.

And they're like, just not familiar with that step of the process. And so getting that. Provisioning concept through, I think that that was sort of new. Um, and I think that that's been probably a theme to our overall story for the last five years. Like there's. That has not gone away. It's still a continued education like you would think like, okay, AV and it met like a long and, and it feels like 

Tom Arbuthnot: it's been in both, it's been in both directions.

Yeah. That's something I've come from the IT rather than the av, so I feel like I've been skinning up on the. AV world. Yeah. And I'm still an absolute, I would call myself a novice in that world, but it feels like there's been a lot of good pushback in the av mm-hmm. Partnership community to, if you really wanna scale rooms into the as it is now, into the well over a million plus.

Yep. You, you, Microsoft and partners are gonna have to do this, this, and this. And the same thing back in the av. Community. It's like, well, actually we, you know, from the PCIT world, we're used to the millions and millions and millions of units. So actually we are thinking this, this, and this. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, it's been a very interesting evolution.

I would say. Um, a lot of our, I'm really proud of the evolution of some of our traditional, what you would've sAId, you know, five years ago, or traditional AV partners are true. You know, it stack, you know they've even added security phone places. Yeah. You know, they're not just in the room space anymore.

They've really dove into Microsoft like full bore. So that's been a really cool thing. But it's also been cool to see. Sort of your traditional MSPs or IT bars dip into the teams room space where they might have not touched it a couple of years ago. I think it's becoming maybe a little less intimidating.

Um, I think we've put a lot of work and effort into it, and I think our product team at Microsoft has done a great job in trying to simplify and streamline and, and sort of cut out and even our manufacturers as well, um, make that out of box experience, not so, um, mysterious, I would say. Yeah. Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, definitely.

It definitely feels like in the last few years it's got easier and quicker to deploy these things and manage and things like the pro portal and all the work that's gone to the management side as well. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, very exciting. I think the pro portal, I would say, hopefully is a big theme going into next year.

Um, you know, it's maybe not as like dazzling and exciting as all the hardware stuff that we love to get excited about, but manageability stream, honestly the big. The big thing that everybody wants is they just want it to work and be 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It come that, that it comes up all the time. Like we're, I think people in the industry are always excited about the next thing, the next piece of hardware.

Yeah. And there's definitely a place for that. And AI obviously we will talk about later on your, your info comms we record, so there's some, some interesting conversations there, but like, actually. Simplicity in scaling out the deployments, manageability, reliability. Those come time and time agAIn, my enterprise customers and they would always trade anything, flash for like, actually we've got hundreds of these to manage.

Like just make it like scalable, manageable, not need a team of 20 to manage these things, that kind of thing. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, and I think with AI, and I can speak about it this week, um, there are things like our AI assistant getting added to the pro portal that, you know, you don't have to be. You know, diving into the depths to go find things like he can just through natural language, ask it, Hey, what are my.

You know, things that, what are my rooms that are dual displays? What are my rooms that, yeah. Do an upgrade on this firmware. Like it's, it, it's becoming, um, a lot less friction, you know? Yeah. That natural language we're used to 

Tom Arbuthnot: in Copilot of just asking questions you could even think of that over the management surface is really interesting.

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. Um, I was thinking about Ilya. I think he always references this of, um, you know, how many users actually go in when you're in the team's environment to settings, and it's like less than 1% where. It's hard to design like a UI and all these great features and help people understand where they are and how to access them.

Where I'm hoping that AI like pulls all those things to the forefront for people and makes it a little bit easier so 

Tom Arbuthnot: it'll Yeah. Yeah. Or even has some context of when, when things might make sense for you. Certainly some of the, you know, you see in the partner systems that AI direction, multi-camera stuff is really interesting.

That's awesome. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. So lots of new, exciting announcements this week. I feel like you and I are always like on the. On the pulse of what's happening, there's a few things around team's phone with AI, um, like, Hey, when I transfer a call, if it's a customer service call, like all my call history will go with it.

I think that's really exciting. That one's been talked about for a little bit and I think I. The biggest one that we've been anticipating for a really long time is, um, speaker recognition. Um, we had it on Windows for a long time and then it just became available on Android. So I'm excited to see all of our Android OEMs here at InfoComm sort of showcasing what Speaker attribution can do and the value that it can bring to your Meeting Room.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and I think that's really gonna help the general adoption of this feature. 'cause I have lots of customers that won't, they, they're mixed state between Windows and Android, but they want. Core features to be there. So actually they've been holding on until we can do it everywhere and trAIn our users won't do it.

So I think that will see a big push and it makes so much sense for those investing in the Copilot journey to have those proper named transcripts. Like I think in, in a few years, that'll just be, I. Total table stakes for a meeting. Like obviously it knows who I am. Obviously it takes the minutes. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. And if you've been using Copilot like you and I have for even six months, like you, it becomes a crutch.

And when you don't have it Totally in a meeting, you're like, oh my, like I, I can't believe I don't have the transcript 

Tom Arbuthnot: for Yeah. I hate, I hate not having a Yeah. Or, or, or being able to ask a question mid meeting, I'm like, oh, what was just said. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, exactly. So I, I think, like you sAId, it definitely will be table stakes and there's so much more.

Exciting things coming. Like it's hard to even, um, imagine sometimes like all these cool copilots that are coming out. Like I think that there's a lot of new and innovative ideas coming out of our product team about how we might be able to evolve Meeting Rooms in the future. So it should be fun. I think we're just at the very beginning of this exciting rooms journey.

You know, five years. It's like a long time in Microsoft world, but at least when it comes to workplace, like we're very, very early. Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, yeah. I think, uh, the AI stuff as well, it's interesting. I, I, I, I dunno if anybody's gonna take credit for envisioning this or not, but like, the fact that their software based devices means this AI journey has been an upgrade to a lot of things people are already invested in.

So it's not a new hardware scenario in nearly all cases. It's, here's extra features and extra value you get. And things like, things like facilitator come in for a pure in person meeting and using the room system as a. Note taker and I can definitely see, I think IIya has alluded to this in some of the keynotes, like facilitator, getting much more proactive in the meetings.

Like, you've got five minutes left. Be sure that everybody had a chance to speak. Like the room over here don't seem very engaged. Those kind of things. That's really interesting. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, they, they. They kind of throw out this example a couple times and I'll, I'll just use it where like, apparently they have an issue at headquarters where every time the cleaning crew comes in, um, they move the chairs around and whatever else, and they always put the chair in front of where the camera is and then they go to start a meeting and there's a chair in front of the whatever where they talk about like, wouldn't it be nice if the room told you like, Hey, for a better experience, you might wanna move this chair so we can see everybody, like things like that.

That seems so. Obvious. Um, you know, it's just really eliminating the friction. Um, so there's the, the mind can kind of go a lot of different directions with that, of ways it could help your space. Or like, Hey, I see there's 20 people in this room and you guys are getting a little tight. Can I recommend a 40 per person room down the hallway?

It's open, available here for the rest of the day, blah, blah, blah. So cool. Things like that when you integrate places and all that fun stuff. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So what, what does your day to day look like? Mary, you, you do an awesome job of being at loads of loads of the events. I see you around all, all the partners.

What does that, what, like what does your day to day look like for your role? Um, 

Mehryn Corrigan: so I have a worldwide responsibility, um, for partners. And so, you know, my responsibility is to set strategy. Um, and so I do tend to be deep into the numbers. Um, you know, I, I wish we could give you more numbers than, Hey, we hit a million meeting rooms.

Um, we're usually a little bit private. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: You've got them there and you could, it might not be good for your career, but 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. But we're a little private about that. But like, you know, going into industry opportunity of like, Hey, let's look at all the different markets. Like, hey, actually there's 80 million rooms out there, um, in the world right now.

And, and what are they doing? What do they look like? What's innovating? So kind of having a pulse on the market. And so a lot of that. It's not just coming from analysts, but it's also coming from our partners firsthand, um, and kind of getting their feedback. So it's a lot of partner calls. It's our team sort of rolling out like what's happening in the field and funneling up feedback.

Um, so we do, I'm, I'm pretty proud of the entanglement that we've, um, created with our engineering team. So a lot of that feedback does sort of go up in our, you know, we do work with our partners to meet, like this week we're gonna be doing a lot of. You know, our partners are bringing their customers in to meet with our engineering team and provide feedback, so I do love that we've got a nice, like closed loop.

System. Um, and we're constantly, uh, focusing on providing value to our customers. So I think that's cool. I think the secondary thing is really around education. Um, we do a lot around trAIning enablement, which you've seen, like that's what our Friday podcasts are with Jimmy and I, and that was, yeah. Let's dive into the 

Tom Arbuthnot: Friday podcast because I think that's amazing.

Like it's, um, I feel like Microsoft, I've been working with Microsoft App partners doing things for. Way, way too long. Like, like well over 15 years probably. Now, the way Microsoft as an org communicates has changed massively. Yeah. In the SaaS world. You said there, there's lots of direct customer engagement.

That piece the, the communication and the training, everything moving so fast. Uh, I feel like what you and Jimmy have done and the others, the rest of the team selling Microsoft Teams Rooms with the show. Yeah. Like it's very, uh, very fast paced, very organic, very, here's what it is. It's not the traditional way Microsoft kind of communicated.

Change. How, how did that come about? 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. Well, I gotta tell you, like, it, it, um, was a leap that Jimmy and I did, and it, it is probably more on the, I would say, unsanctioned Microsoft side. Like, we always put a slide at the beginning and the end, like, we're doing this on our personal time and our, you know, our personal efforts.

But I think we've, because it, like you said, it's so fast paced. Like literally every week we struggle to fit in like all the news of the week, um, into 10 minutes or less. But like that. Consumable format of like, here's your links for the week, and thank you very much for helping us to kind of share that out each week like.

That's really what people want. Like tell me what I missed. Tell me the big things that I should probably dive into a little bit further. Um, and it's very consumable. Um, so I think it's helpful. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think consumable is a key word. Like, like I, I know a lot of people, like, we see a lot of people in the chat that join live, but then more people, um, get the email or watch the YouTube afterwards on their own, their own placement.

It's right for them and they know. 10 minutes, give or take, depending how busy it is. Like they're gonna get all the key highlights and they've got all the links to click on demand, right? If they, they want the links in the deck, they've got them. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Well, and that's the key is like, it is all like publicly facing information.

So it's not like we're diving in and getting secrets and then needing to go to like Microsoft Legal to get approval. Yeah, release this. Like it's all things that are publicly available and we kind of know all the. Secret spots, like even just the roadmap and things that are happening and coming through in tech like that can be a lot to keep up with.

So 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, you're saying public, it's interesting, isn't it? It is public, but there's so much that job of curation and, and, and explAIning. It's, it's, I think it's so, so powerful who not many people have time to comb the roadmap, keep up to date, understand the context. So just a quick snip. And I think for partners in particular as well, we all know they're super busy.

So actually, and they might have multiple. Vendors, multiple solutions. So, so that 10 minutes of his everything I his know in the Microsoft space with the OEMs with and, and now more with places and premium everything else. Yeah, it's really, really good. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Awesome. And it makes, I think Jimmy's obviously like super fun.

I feel like he must have been, obviously he's got like his WWE background, but he's got such that radio voice and everybody loves his personality. Like, so he, yeah, yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: He brings some energy, doesn't, he brings 

Mehryn Corrigan: the energy every week and it's always like a. Guaranteed good time. So, and, and you step in for me every now and then too, so we've got a fun like group of contributors and you're, if you're listening to this podcast, um, just know that you can submit.

Any of us, like, Hey, could you get this on the podcast this week? And we will throw it in there. Um, so it's a community contributed. We take anything that people send us throughout the week and we add it into just an ongoing organic deck up for the minute before. So yeah, we want your contribution if you're listening.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's the thing With a weekly show, it often comes down to the wire, doesn't it? Of who's, who's available in which place and what time and is the deck together and Yeah. You say it's a Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a real. Uh, kind of an effort to be consistent with that kind of stuff, especially when you have as schedules, as busy as you and Jimmy do.

And we all do that. That I think that's a Yeah. Uh, but you see in the feedback, I think it's doing such a, I, I'd love to see more comms outta Microsoft be that kind of more agile friendly and like imperfect in the sense of we don't all know everything that's going on. Yeah. We're just trying to share and add value.

Mehryn Corrigan: And we always add our fun AI music at the beginning of the end. So it, it's a little bit creative about, I would say we, we have a, a fun time bothering Jimmy with all of our AI music. So it's, it's good times. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, I don't wanna keep you too long because I know you've gotta get back to InfoComm, but just a quick perspective as we've record, we're coming into new.

New FY and, and what, what are you most kind of excited or interested in for the next year? 

Mehryn Corrigan: Um, I honestly think there's a lot of opportunity for the partner community. Um, you know, you've watched the rooms landscape evolve. Like I sAId, there's like 80 million meeting rooms across the globe, and if you take our public info of only having 1 million teams rooms, um, there's boundless opportunity.

But I think the addition of. Um, Microsoft places in the last year, uh, the addition of Copilot in the last year and a half. The services opportunity for partners to help think about this, not just as a physical meeting room and these devices, like I really think, and, and it's kind of like a mindset change for the industry we talked about like AV and IT convergence.

This is. A whole shift in focus and starting to think more about value-based services and less about, um. Hardware, I would say, which I, I love hardware. Like it's my, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, we, we all like the toys, but it's, it's the business conversation you want to be having. It's like, here's, here's how I can impact your organization, not, here's how I can bring you the next, uh, you know, super zoom camera.

Mehryn Corrigan: Like, think about yourself as like the meeting are, or the workplace evolution technologists, you know, and think about your workplace evolution plan, like what's that gonna look like in the next five years. And I think it takes like. A commitment to really understanding this AI journey. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I, I love that as a recommendations partners actually, to kind of clAIm your authority in that space because you do have a lot of knowledge about how it'll hang together, how meetings happen.

We have the analytics Yeah. You know what's possible in the room. You, you are absolutely in the right position to be having that conversation and, and skill up a bit more on. Places, co-part, the wider conversation. And then you are not coming to customers saying, can I have a conversation about how many rooms have you got?

Or where do you want them? It's like, what's your a AI strategy when it comes to physical locations? That's a completely different conversation opener. It 

Mehryn Corrigan: is, and I, I, I think we've chatted about this previously, like. If I'm a customer, like I don't wanna be doing business with 10 different partners when it comes to team's phone.

I'm gonna do this with this partner and with teams rooms, I'm gonna meet with this partner. Like, if you can be a one-stop shop, um, partner that can really talk to the full stack, you provide so much greater value to the customer. And we've seen a lot more of our deals be multi-stack. Like they're, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. It was notable at the bootcamp as well.

There was like a hands up scenario. 'cause the bootcamp was day one, room day two. Phone and mm-hmm. It was a lot of people, but their hands up for Yes. We have, we are doing some places stuff. We're doing some AI stuff. We're doing phone. Phone and rooms were like the most natural. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Conversation as well as like an, uh, you are already talking teams.

You're already talking how people communicate. Yeah. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah, it's all about that. Like, hey, they made the decision to be on teams as a platform. Like, okay, now where do you go? Like, what's the journey from there? And you can go anywhere. But yeah, there's, there's lots of opportunities. So the, the partner community is an exciting place to be and, and we have a good time.

I, I love our ecosystem. I think we really have more fun than, than anybody else at Microsoft. Yeah, you've 

Tom Arbuthnot: got, so haven't you? 

Mehryn Corrigan: Yeah. Like we really do, um, have such a passion for the business and I think people that have been in this. Space for a long time, like truly do love it. And I think, um, you see that in our team too.

Like it's, 

Tom Arbuthnot: it's one of the things I love about teams actually, because it, it is one of the workloads at Microsoft that absolutely depends on ecosystem. Like it wouldn't work without the partners, the device vendors, contact center recording, right? Like physical devices. So, and, and, and it's always going to be that way by the virtue of how teams work.

So yeah, I think it's a nice community spirit and appreciate everything you do to kind of. Be super open and communicate with the community. It's really, really appreciated. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Of course. And likewise for you, I mean, I think your fireside chats are amazing. Um, I, it's like the ongoing chat that, that I love to kind of see and check in with what people are talking about.

So you do such a good job building up the community as well. And, um, I really appreciate what you do and having me on this is awesome. Appreciate it. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Oh, thanks Barron. Enjoy the rest of Infocom as we record and uh, we'll we'll catch up when you're back. 

Mehryn Corrigan: Sounds good. Thank you Tom.