You Don't Want a Dashboard. You Want Things to Work.
After serving up dozens and dozens of AI recipes, Chef David Maldow and I finally invited someone else into our AI kitchen. Our first guest on The AI Chefs Live was Sam Kennedy, who leads go-to-market strategy for NetSpeek: a company that isn't simply adding AI to an existing product, but building a business around what AI makes possible.
Sam opened with a somewhat provocative statement:
"You don't want a single dashboard. You want everything to always be working."
Having spent decades in IT and unified communications championing the single pane of glass, I wasn't sure I agreed. But Sam is right; a dashboard is a means to an end, not the end itself. If AI can identify a problem, find the root cause, fix it, and verify that everything works again, why should I spend my time staring at red and green lights?
I still want reporting, visibility, and control over what AI is permitted to do. But perhaps the ultimate measure of a great monitoring solution is how infrequently you need to look at it.
Meet Lena, Your New AV Expert
NetSpeek's AI platform, Lena (Language Enabled Network Administrator), is designed to proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve problems across multi-vendor AV, unified communications, and digital signage environments.
In one demo, Sam deliberately misconfigured a meeting room display, then told Lena the Barco ClickShare wasn't working. Rather than accept his diagnosis, Lena checked the ClickShare, found it healthy, identified the real issue with the display, and fixed it. Lena solved the problem Sam actually had, not the one he described. Anyone who has worked an IT help desk will appreciate that!
What's Still Cooking in the Full Article
In the full article on LinkedIn, I dig into why NetSpeek's approach matters well beyond meeting rooms, including:
Why less AI can be more: why depth, accuracy, and guardrails beat breadth for enterprise use, and why "right 95% of the time" stops sounding impressive once you do the math across thousands of rooms.
Predictable AI pricing: how NetSpeek offers it, and the roughly $100 AI "meal" I recently paid for that wasn't worth the bill.
Helping IT and AV play nicely together: a virtual AV expert for every support person, and the metrics that actually matter.
Five ingredients for a great enterprise AI recipe that apply whether you work in meeting rooms, finance, HR, customer service or IT.
And which food Sam thinks Lena would be. Hint: pizza was only his first answer.
The full article also includes the video of our complete discussion with Sam.
➡️One thing that really caught my attention was the enthusiasm that Sam displays when talking about Lena. He takes great pride in demonstrating what Lena can do, as he believes it can assist many organizations in managing the complexities of AV systems at scale.
Join the Conversation
The comments on LinkedIn are already simmering. One reader sees the same vision for agentic AI on manufacturing shop floors, where years of sensor data need to become contextual, actionable exceptions. Another raised a nuanced point: "working" isn't always measured, or dashboarded, usefully. That sparked a discussion about whether we still want a quick glance at an "all green" dashboard, even when agents are supposed to find and fix every issue.
So, a question for you: if you could apply AI to eliminate the need to regularly look at one of your enterprise dashboards, which one would you choose? Share your thoughts, opinions, or questions in the comments on the LinkedIn article.
Learn more about Lena at netspeek.ai and explore more AI recipes at aichefsshow.com.
