From Reliable Rooms to Remarkable Meetings

A few weeks ago, while doing some research, I came across a Harvard Business Review article titled “Welcome to the Experience Economy” by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.

Turns out I was reading an article authored in 1998.

In technology terms, 1998 feels like another world. Before smartphones. Before cloud collaboration. Before hybrid work. And certainly, before AI became part of the daily operating vocabulary of almost every organization.

Yet what struck me was not how outdated the article felt, but how relevant its underlying logic of value still was.

The article explored two ideas that feel particularly important to this moment.

The first is the progression of economic value—from commodities, to goods, to services, and ultimately to experiences. As markets mature, each layer of value becomes more vulnerable to standardization and commoditization. What was once differentiated becomes easier to compare. So the opportunity for value has to keep moving upward, toward experiences that are more personal, more memorable, more relevant, and harder to reduce to a line item.

The second idea is more commercial, but just as important. Pine and Gilmore argue that companies reveal a great deal about the business they are really in by what they actually charge for. I think the end-user version of that question is equally important: if what we charge for reveals what we value, then what are you actually willing (and able) to pay for?

Those two ideas stayed with me because I believe they ask uncomfortable questions of the enterprise collaboration space in this moment.

The Experience Proposition

For years, the AV and collaboration industry has spoken the language of experience; moving from products to solutions, from systems to services, from rooms to outcomes, and from technology to workplace experience.

Yet, if we are honest, we have moved further in the opposite direction. We talked about outcomes, but optimized for standards. We talked about workplace experience, but bought and sold around equipment, deployment, support, and refresh. We talked about delivering strategic value while creating efficient operational and commercial models.

There were, of course, valid reasons for those strategies at the time. As standardization became the dominant operating principle of enterprise AV, the goal was to create confidence that had been lost in these spaces in the past.

From a user standpoint, could people walk into a room and know what to do? Would the call connect? Would content share? And from a management standpoint, could support teams manage hundreds or thousands of spaces without being overwhelmed by variation?

Personalization, Adaptability, and Differentiation

Today’s AI age, however, makes that contradiction much harder to ignore. While AI can certainly further accelerate commoditization—making the familiar easier, faster, and cheaper to deliver—it also offers the potential for incredible new levels of personalization, adaptability, and differentiation.

Pine and Gilmore’s article reminds us of something uncomfortable. In the experience economy, consistency is not the highest form of value; it is the foundation on which higher value can be created.

Consistency may prevent disappointment, but it is not inspiring. It does not exceed expectations. It does not create the energy, memory, momentum, or meaningful differentiation that anchor exceptional experiences and outcomes.

A reliable room prevents failure.

A remarkable meeting creates value because people came together.

So, if we are talking about “experience” in enterprise collaboration, what experience are we really pursuing? Is it simply reliability and predictability? Or is it, indeed, can it become something far more connected to the purpose of gathering itself?

Let’s stay with that for a moment.

When we borrow the word “experience,” it is easy to imagine theatre, hospitality, immersive design, or event production. Great events are designed around attention, energy, resonance, memory, and motivation to act. They take enormous amounts of preparation and planning, but deliver returns to justify that effort.

Most enterprise meetings will never justify months of planning or event-level production, nor should they. They operate at a different scale. But the objective is not as different as we might think. Our events brethren understand something enterprise collaboration often underplays: just bringing people together is not enough.

So, in meeting or learning environments, the future question should not only be whether the technology simply equips the meeting. It should be whether the environment, and the experience it creates, actually increases the value of gathering.

Here’s an analogy that may help picture one example of that potential future more tangibly.

A great Executive Assistant (EA) is, in many ways, an experience enabler. They anticipate and proactively prepare. They understand context and act in response. They remove friction before it appears. They recall individual preferences and priorities, and add small but resonant touches. They help executives show up better than they would have otherwise.

Great EAs create exceptional experiences because they consistently exceed others' expectations in how well they proactively enable better outcomes.

An AI-Powered Collaboration?

So what if, powered by the increasingly intelligent and human-aware technology capabilities of AI, collaboration environments were architected in the future to behave less like passive containers and more like spaces equipped with trusted and proactive executive assistants?

What if they understood the purpose of the meeting? What if they could sense signals, understand initial objectives, help adjust the room to the activity, leverage and react to real-time context, quickly assemble additional supporting data or reach out to additional parties to contribute. To take collaboration infrastructure from merely operational enablement to something more.

Would that be something worth paying for?

To be clear, I am not suggesting completely abandoning the commoditisation-driven path overnight in a market still struggling to break free of that. But it cannot be the only path.

The actionable path ahead is not only about how your organization completely rewrites the foundations of every RFP (yet). But it is about more actively thinking about how you create some permissions, incentives, structures, and rewards that allow the market to explore something more valuable with you.

The more practical short-term opportunity is to run two collaboration strategies at once. Keep optimizing what is known, though with a new eye to future risk mitigation and objectives. But in parallel, begin to create another protected lane that enables you to actively explore what is becoming possible.

>> That may begin with a pilot, a different partner conversation, or a small proof of concept.

>> It may mean exploring ways to effectively understand and measure meeting impact and outcome.

>> Perhaps creating a shared risk/reward model that allows both customer and provider to baseline, refine, and prove it before the proposition is fully mature.

>> It may also mean broadening the voices in the strategy & planning room beyond traditional collaboration technology stakeholders to include voices who understand the likes of human behaviour, learning, culture, facilitation, organizational change, and how people actually create value together.

The right balances will be specific to your role, your organization’s structures, and ultimately your organization’s ability to embrace AI transformation generally and the “future of collaboration” opportunity specifically. But foundationally, there must be a recognition that organizations cannot procure their way into that future of collaboration if their processes only reward the commoditized providers they already know how to compare.

The question in this moment is not whether your organization can yet deliver the remarkable meeting of the future today. It is whether the decisions being made today increase your ability to pursue it tomorrow. That future will not be defined only by what AI technically makes possible. It will be defined by what organizations decide is worth valuing.

Perhaps that is why a nearly 30-year-old article still matters. It reminds us that technology may keep changing the tools, but value still returns to something deeply human: what people notice, what they remember, what they trust, what helps them, and what they believe was worth more than just what it costs.

For the enterprise collaboration space, generally, AI now forces a choice. Either collaboration becomes even more commoditised as the market gets faster, more automated, and easier to compare. Or the industry, in part at least, led by end-user organizations prepared to value something more, truly redefines its definition of experience around the outcomes people actually gather to create.

That is the move from pursuing reliable rooms to enabling remarkable meetings!

Not simply better spaces, but better reasons to believe that gathering was worth it.