Exclusive interview with Mark Turner, President EMEA, Rezolve Ai

What made Shoptalk Luxe Abu Dhabi a priority platform for Rezolve Ai this year?

For Rezolve Ai, Shoptalk Luxe Abu Dhabi brings together the right audience at the right moment. Luxury retailers in the region are no longer exploring ideas, they are making decisions and investing. It is a practical forum to exchange views with brands that are actively shaping their customer engagement and commerce strategies, and to have grounded conversations about what is working in real retail environments. Abu Dhabi also reflects how influential the region has become in global luxury thinking.

How is AI changing the way luxury retailers think about customer engagement today?

Luxury retailers are becoming far more intentional about how and when they engage customers. AI is helping them move away from broad personalisation toward more contextual, timely interactions that respect the brand experience. The focus is on supporting customers at key moments, whether online or in store, and ensuring engagement feels consistent and considered rather than automated or intrusive.

What distinguishes meaningful AI adoption in retail from short-term experimentation?

Retailers that see lasting value from AI are those that embed it into day-to-day operations rather than treating it as a standalone initiative. Meaningful adoption is driven by clear commercial goals, fast implementation, and solutions that work within existing systems and teams. Short-term experimentation tends to stall when it lacks ownership, scale, or a clear link to performance outcomes.

Why is the Middle East, and the UAE in particular, becoming increasingly important for luxury retail innovation?

The Middle East, and the UAE in particular, has created an environment where luxury retail innovation can move quickly. Consumers are digitally confident, infrastructure is strong, and there is a clear push at a national level to adopt advanced technologies. This combination allows retailers to implement and test new models at scale, which is why the region is increasingly influencing global luxury strategies.

Looking ahead, where do you see AI delivering the most value for luxury brands over the next few years?

The greatest value will come from AI that directly supports growth while reinforcing operational discipline. For luxury brands, that means more relevant engagement that improves conversion and loyalty, alongside better forecasting and inventory decisions that protect margins. The priority will be practical use of AI that enhances the customer experience without compromising brand integrity.

Exclusive Interview with Fadi Costantine, Sales Manager – Business Communication, Middle East at Sennheiser

Sennheiser has leveraged its role in shaping professional audio to build strong hybrid communication products for use across business and education environments. We caught up with Fadi Costantine, Sales Manager – Business Communication, Middle East at Sennheiser, to discuss the brand’s presence at the show, its integrated product ecosystem, and the growing importance of software-driven audio solutions.

What are your most innovative products currently serving the business and education sectors?

Sennheiser operates across several business units, with Business Communication being one of our most important. This unit is entirely dedicated to the installation market, where many of our most dynamic and innovative solutions are positioned.

Professional audio is at the core of Sennheiser’s brand identity. Through our ownership of renowned brands such as Neumann and Merging Technologies, we have established ourselves as a global leader in audio communications. We leverage this expertise to develop advanced meeting and conferencing solutions that enhance business performance.

Crucially, our products are not designed to operate in isolation. They are engineered to work together as a unified ecosystem, enabling seamless communication across devices and platforms. This ecosystem approach allows system integrators and end users to design complete, end-to-end audio solutions tailored to a wide range of applications and project requirements.

Which industry verticals are currently driving demand for these solutions in the region?

While we are active across multiple verticals in the region, we have a clear strategic commitment to deliver innovative, scalable, and future‑ready audio solutions tailored specifically for the needs of higher education and the modern corporate environment.

In corporate environments, our microphone solutions are widely deployed in meeting rooms to support modern collaboration and video conferencing scenarios. In the education sector, our technologies are extensively used in lecture halls and hybrid learning environments, including classrooms and auditoriums designed to accommodate both in-person and remote participants.

A strong example is our ceiling microphone solutions. These are frequently used not only in traditional meeting rooms but also in lecture halls for audio capture, video conferencing, and recording. They are also ideal for voice-lift applications, enabling students to hear the lecturer clearly without the need for wearable microphones. This creates a more natural, seamless teaching experience while minimizing complexity for the user.

Software and integration are critical in these environments. How does Sennheiser support this alongside its hardware solutions?

Workflow optimization has always been central to our product strategy and will remain a key focus going forward.

Introducing a new era in AV Management, at ISE 2026, Sennheiser will officially launch DeviceHub, a secure, cloud-based platform designed for IT and AV managers, as well as system integrators. DeviceHub centralizes device visibility and remote management, streamlining workflows across enterprise, education, and corporate settings.

DeviceHub provides real-time insights, simplified setup, and unified control, supporting organizations in creating better spaces for communication, learning, and teamwork. Following a successful private beta, ISE marks the transition to public availability. Visitors can explore DeviceHub’s capabilities and speak directly with product experts about how it can transform their AV and IT operations.

Exclusive Interview with Mig Cardamone, Sales Director, Sennheiser

In 2025, Sennheiser celebrated 80 years of audio innovation. From shaping the early days of wireless microphones to redefining modern enterprise communication, the Sennheiser brand continues to evolve alongside changing work and collaboration environments.

Over the past five years, Sennheiser has spotlighted its enterprise and hybrid communication solutions, designed to support seamless collaboration across meeting rooms, lecture halls, and professional content environments. We spoke with Mig Cardamone, Sales Director at Sennheiser, about the brand’s presence, its regional focus across the Middle East, East Africa, and Central Asia, and technologies shaping its future.

We’ve seen Sennheiser’s meeting and conferencing solutions increasingly showcased to the ICT community in recent years. How has that engagement worked for the company?

Engaging with the ICT sector has been a strategic focus for us for several years, both directly and primarily through our distribution partners. Our meeting and conferencing solutions are designed to make business better, and regional platforms such as ISE, GITEX and Infocomm have been instrumental in helping us communicate that message.

Together with two of our most important distributors in our region, Venuetech and Avientek, we regularly demonstrate our TeamConnect (TC) family and related enterprise solutions at major trade shows in the Middle East. These events give customers the opportunity to experience our technologies first-hand, and the response from the enterprise and corporate technology communities has been extremely positive.

Our enterprise solutions are purpose-built for hybrid work and collaboration, enabling seamless, natural communication. They draw on decades of Sennheiser audio expertise—experience that has kept us at the forefront of the industry for over 80 years. In 2025, we proudly celebrated Sennheiser’s 80th anniversary, both here in the region and globally. Our business communication portfolio clearly reflects how the brand has evolved while staying true to its core strengths.

Which products have you focussed on in the enterprise sector?

Sennheiser’s current product focus reflects a clear shift toward software‑enabled, fully integrated audio ecosystems designed for modern collaboration and learning environments. Rather than relying solely on hardware‑centric approaches, the company is increasingly investing in intelligent software layers, automation, and interoperability.

Sennheiser highlights three core application scenarios:

Meeting and Collaboration Spaces 

Ceiling‑mounted microphones and software‑based audio processing create a touchless, highly scalable solution for modern meeting environments. These systems integrate seamlessly with leading UC platforms and third‑party control systems.

Higher‑Education and Lecture Capture 

Ceiling microphones paired with DSP routing and SpeechLine Digital Wireless systems support clear, consistent audio capture for lectures, hybrid classrooms, and campus‑wide communication workflows.

Integrated Solutions

Through partnerships with technology alliances, Sennheiser also incorporates automated transcription and other software‑driven enhancements, reflecting its evolution into a more holistic, integrated solutions provider.

Beyond the UAE, which regions does Sennheiser Middle East cover, and how are you approaching expansion?

Sennheiser Middle East is responsible for a broad and diverse territory that includes the Middle East, East Africa, English-speaking Africa, and Central Asia. Our expansion strategy is built around strong distribution partnerships.

We work closely with partners who offer both wide regional coverage and deep expertise in the verticals we serve. In the ICT space, we specifically look for partners capable of addressing both IT and AV markets, including unified communications and professional AV system integration channels.

After 80 years of innovation, if you had to choose one Sennheiser product that stands out personally, what would it be and why?

Over 80 years, Sennheiser has consistently pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in audio. We introduced one of the first commercially available wireless microphone systems for broadcast, pioneered RF condenser microphones, and created Orpheus—the world’s finest electrostatic headphone. There have been countless milestones along the way.

That said, I’m very much focused on the future. What excites me most today is Spectera. Launched last year, it is the world’s first wideband, bidirectional wireless ecosystem. Spectera fundamentally changes how wireless microphones are used across applications such as broadcast and live sound, and it is entirely software-defined. It represents the next major step in wireless audio innovation.