For decades, innovation in the AV and collaboration industry has largely followed a familiar path.
Manufacturers build products. Consultants and integrators assemble those products into systems. End users compare and evaluate the proposed solutions, and eventually deploy what the market has made available.
Over time, that model has arguably become even more linear. As enterprise collaboration scaled, the industry moved further toward standardization, repeatability, and solutions designed for the “average user” and the “typical” room. That shift had good reasons behind it.
Standardization helped the industry scale. But it also made it easier to forget how differently real people and real organizations actually work.
More and more, the opportunity to contribute innovation value moved away from the many and into the hands of the largest and most resourced players, where scale and efficiency were greatest. And I’d propose that it is both a problem and an opportunity as we move further into an AI age of change and uncertainty.
I have never sat in the chair of an end-user technology manager, but I have spent much of my career pushing back against the status quo in how our industry operates and builds business models that serve more than the transaction itself. From that vantage point, I believe one thing very strongly in this moment: the end user community has more power to shape the future of collaboration than it exercises today.
The entire industry is hungry for direction. Manufacturers are trying to understand where AI-enabled value will actually land. Integrators are trying to determine how their role evolves. Consultants are trying to rethink what guidance looks like when best practice itself is changing. Everyone is trying to see around the corner of transformative shifts that may only be 12 to 24 months away in a legacy that operates on five-plus-year lifecycles.
Of course, that makes the role of a collaboration technology leader incredibly difficult. As the future of work, collaboration, and workplace experience becomes more intelligent, adaptive, and critical to organizational success, collaboration technology leaders cannot simply wait for the supply chain to bring them tomorrow’s answers.
They need help, but more importantly, they also need to help shape the answers. In this unprecedented environment, particularly where AI is shifting many elements of best practice back from ‘standardization’ and toward hyper-personalization, customer clarity can become a true force for innovation.
But my argument for deeper end-user engagement and leadership goes beyond specific problem-solving. Across the end-user community, there are organizations whose entire market position is built on the foundation of their capacity for transformative innovation. They have world-class research and development capabilities, defined digital transformation teams, data scientists, formal AI programs, innovation infrastructure, and cultures built around a mandate to fail fast, learn quickly, and move forward with intent.
And yet, too often, that innovation muscle is applied outward to the products, services, and markets the organization serves, while rarely being applied with the same intent to the internal operational ecosystems that power the organization. And as we well know, that very much applies to their collaboration infrastructure. Not only do we spend too little time fully understanding the needs and workflows of these collaboration power users to serve them, but we also fail to leverage the opportunity to learn from the innovation capabilities and best practices they maintain.
That matters because we, as the collaborative enablement industry, need those skills. From vendor to integrator to technology manager, innovation is not deeply embedded in our DNA. If we are going to remain relevant in the AI era, we need to learn, understand, and apply innovation far more deliberately.
Deliberate Innovation
So, I ask you to imagine an enterprise collaboration leader proactively convening three groups.
A combination of internal modern workplace stakeholders: real estate, HR, IT, AI, security, procurement, learning, workplace strategy, and others, with organizational context, technical imagination, and human workforce insight.
The most progressive external partners from across the supply chain: mainstream vendors with scale, emerging vendors with agility, integrators with delivery knowledge, consultants with strategic perspective, and service partners with operational understanding.
A selection of the organization’s own innovation leaders, both as catalysts for innovation itself and as users with lived experience of what is broken, missing, or possible in their own collaboration workflows.
Not for a one-off workshop. But as contributors to an ongoing strategy, structure, and process of ideation, experimentation, validation, and iteration. A group that could explore critical questions, such as whether AI has created new opportunities to:
>> Allow collaboration spaces to adapt more intelligently to equip different meeting types?
>> Offer utilization data, employee experience signals, and business workflows that could be interpreted together to build entirely new operational models?
>> Enable support models that become predictive and proactive rather than reactive?
>> Reduce many of the frictions and effort we currently face before, during, and after people come together?
This is where the process of innovation becomes less like procurement and more like chemistry. The point is to create an environment to “play” with different technology and human ingredients. To discover catalytic combinations that, when brought together, might release transformational new energy into the collaboration process.
Of course, just as in chemistry, not every combination will create a useful reaction. Most will fail—that’s the nature of innovative explorations. But occasionally, that experimentation will create something far more valuable than the sum of its parts. It may even become the foundation for a whole new line of exploration and opportunity that serves every participant well beyond the original initiative.
The Broader Collaboration Ecosystem
The challenge, of course, is that this is not an insignificant undertaking.
There are models that point in this direction. Microsoft’s Hive is one well-known example. So, there is precedent and business case. But examples like this remain too rare across the broader collaboration ecosystem.
In my recent conversations across the end user community, very few reject the value or need for this kind of approach. Their hesitation is rarely because the concept lacks merit. More so, it is because of everything that would need to change internally to make it viable.
Undoubtedly, this type of innovation model requires the supply chain to evolve. But frankly, we all know most manufacturers, integrators, and consultants would jump at the opportunity to support a serious initiative like this with their best customers if a true win-win partnership is on the table.
The AV and UC supply chain has for years sought to offer more service-centric models, risk-sharing models, managed lifecycle approaches, and outcome-based relationships. We know AI now makes many of those models far more viable than ever. Some past efforts absolutely fell short because the offerings were immature. But many also struggled because customers were simply not ready or equipped to buy, fund, govern, or evaluate them differently.
That is why I would argue the first work starts with the internal foundations on the customer side. Procurement approaches. Capital planning models. Security review processes. Real estate strategies. Support expectations. Sustainability priorities. Risk tolerances. Departmental silos.
So, if we believe that collaboration powers innovation and innovation creates competitive advantage, in a world where the rate of change in markets has never been faster, and amid all the other priorities the AI era is creating, is enhanced innovation capability seen at senior executive level as a distraction, or as an imperative?
That matters because that executive sponsorship is where the silos driving the lack of confidence in the models I describe can be overcome.
It’s here that the leadership opportunity begins! Building consensus, finding advocates, identifying the internal and external thought leadership to create momentum, connecting collaboration enablement to the bigger organizational priorities already on the table.
None of that is easy. But what is new is that there may never have been a stronger story to tell, or a moment of greater willingness across organizations to listen to progressive ideas for change. This is a moment of leadership opportunity and strategic relevance that many in this industry have been seeking for their entire careers.
So the practical challenge I put to the end user community is this: in moments of uncertainty, the party that controls demand has more power to lead than it often recognizes. You have an opportunity to build a plan, articulate a vision, and start designing the conditions and initial steps required to drive the experimental collaborations that will underpin the future of your career, of this industry, and of your organization.
I do not pretend there is a single recipe or destination for this shift. Each organization will have different risk profiles, cultures, governance models, and collaboration patterns. But the message is clear.
For leaders within organizations where innovation, change, and human collaboration are central to future success - do not wait for the market to define your future. Let’s find the ways to invite the right people into the room, bring the real challenges and opportunities to the table, and create the conditions for better answers to emerge.
In the AI era, the most valuable end user collaboration leaders may not be those who simply buy the best technology, but those who become the best collaborators in shaping what that technology, and the human and digital innovation ecosystem around it, need to become.
For an industry still learning how to innovate, let alone at the speed of AI, that kind of customer leadership may be exactly the catalyst we collectively need.
