Your Next Collaboration “Room Standard” May Be Adaptability

Technology leadership does not only mean asking an industry for better products or faster roadmaps. Sometimes it means looking back at the assumptions that have served us well, and asking whether they still serve the future we now need to build.

One of those assumptions in the AV industry is standardization.

For years, standardization has been one of the most important operating principles in enterprise AV and collaboration. It has helped organizations scale, reduce complexity, improve supportability, control cost, and create more consistent user experiences. Indeed, I spent more than a decade leading an organization that built its value proposition on the principle of Scale, Standardization, Simplification, & Speed.

We all know our industry's journey. There was a time when AV-enabled spaces were relatively few. Organizations invested only in the most important rooms. Bespoke design was possible because the volume was manageable.

Then the world changed.

Collaboration became more central to how organizations worked. Video became normal. Hybrid work expanded the pressure on meeting environments. Costs came down. Expectations went up. The challenge was no longer a handful of premium rooms. It was tens, hundreds, or thousands of spaces. In that reality, standardization was not only logical. It was a rational and required response to scale.

We have seen similar patterns in other industries. Local, highly human-scale models gave way to larger systems built around consistency, efficiency, and scale. Then, disruptive digital platforms introduced a third possibility: combining scale with greater personalization and relevance. We all know those stories, from Amazon to Netflix and beyond.

I believe that moment has arrived for our industry!

Change in an Era of AI

There will always be a place for highly customized spaces: executive environments, boardrooms, innovation labs, teaching studios, immersive rooms, command centres, and other spaces where deeper tailoring is justified. But for the broader enterprise estate, the old trade-off between scale and personalized fit is going to change in an AI era. Not because AI is a magic wand, but because it is relevant to addressing the very frictions that standardization was designed to manage.

We know that in the past, more capability meant more complexity. More flexibility meant more support burden. More customization meant more cost and inconsistency. That was not practical, which is why we simplified and standardized. Simplified room types, user interfaces, and feature sets. Exactly what was required to make the overall experience usable and manageable.

But there is a difference between simplifying because users have simple needs, and simplifying because our legacy systems and workflows could not manage complexity.

And that distinction matters.

Meeting and learning spaces were not simplified because users all wanted the same experience, but because more capability created too much friction to justify otherwise. So we designed interfaces to meet the lowest common user denominator. And in turn, we answered the needs of the supporting stakeholders as well, because the cost of variation was too high.

That made sense, but it also created a hidden effect. One of the hidden risks of standardization is that it does not only standardize solutions, it can standardize imagination. Over time, the constraints of a model become so familiar that we stop seeing them as constraints.

But what if some of those assumptions were actually just necessary coping mechanisms? Did we standardize because it represented the best possible experience, or because variation was too difficult to deliver, support, govern, or evolve?

That is not a criticism of the past, but a challenge for the future. It is not that we built the wrong rooms in the past. It is that in a new AI reality, the game itself has changed.

And that is what makes this new era so difficult.

Decisions in a Period of Unparalleled Uncertainty

End-user AV technology managers are being asked to make decisions in a period of unparalleled uncertainty, yet with traditional inertia. The investment decisions being asked of them today are expected to serve organizations for years ahead, yet they are being made in a reality where AI will change workflows, user expectations, interface models, support structures, and the role of the physical workplace itself in ways we cannot yet fully imagine.

That is a hard position to be in. It is easy to say “be more innovative, evolved, prepared” from the outside. It is much harder to put your name to decisions when the crystal ball is murkier than ever, and the consequences of getting it wrong may become visible sooner than ever.

So, the practical question is not whether every future capability is ready to deploy tomorrow. The better question is whether today’s standards, partner relationships, and decision criteria are preparing your organization to take advantage of that future potential or constraining it.

I do not believe the future is a pendulum swing from standardization back to customization. The better proposition is that the very definition of standards needs to evolve to create an entirely new paradigm.

Consider that historically, a room standard meant a fixed room type, equipment package, UI, capability set, and lifecycle expectation. A comprehensively defined answer built heavily upon the realities of traditional physical construction and real estate lifecycles.

In the next model, a standard may need to become more than just a defined answer. It may need to become more of a foundation.

The physical infrastructure, network requirements, security model, platform architecture, interoperability principles, and support processes may still need to be standardized. But above that foundation, the experience layer must become increasingly adaptive and digitally agile. One that can behave and equip users differently for a project review than for executive alignment. Differently for training than for ideation.

The room may be physically the same. The experience may not be.

That is the new possibility. The emergence of standardized infrastructure with adaptive experience.

That is how we can truly serve diverse users, activities, and outcomes, while leveraging that diversity as the very reason we convene people in the first place. All the reasons that were not possible in the past are eroding before our eyes.

Embrace that concept, and it frankly changes the role and importance of the end-user AV technology manager. The job is no longer simply to define the right room standards and defend them over a five-year lifecycle. Rather, the job is to build the conditions through which collaboration environments can evolve as capability, user expectation, organizational need, and AI-enabled possibility change around them. It is to recognize that we cannot deliver tomorrow’s adaptive collaboration expectations through models built around yesterday’s static propositions.

So the next leadership question is not simply “what can we standardize?”

It is “what should our standards enable?”

That is a very different question.

Manage and Mitigate Opportunities and Risks

Of course, I am not suggesting we all just embrace AI enthusiasm and unbridled optimism. But as in any time of change and lack of clarity, it means developing a strategy to manage and mitigate both the opportunities and risks ahead.

That strategy will, of course, not look the same for every organization. A global bank, university, healthcare provider, government agency, technology company, law firm, and manufacturer will each have different collaboration realities. But here are a few universal questions you might ask of your current standards to catalyze the mindset shifts we all need to embrace.

>> Which current standards still deliver value because they improve reliability, consistency, security, supportability, or user confidence?

>> Which exists because variation was historically too difficult to manage?

>> What infrastructure truly needs to remain fixed and physical, and what could become more flexible and digital?

>> Where might today’s standards, even unintentionally, limit tomorrow’s capability?

A “medium meeting room” is not a meeting purpose. A classroom is not automatically a learning experience. As we move from an era of equipping rooms to enabling outcomes, true leadership will be about understanding what people are actually trying to achieve in these spaces: deciding, creating, teaching, selling, learning, aligning, innovating, or responding to change. Understanding those patterns will become the critical capability in enabling spaces to adapt to real-time context and application.

Of course, that should change conversations with the supply chain: vendors, integrators, consultants, and service providers. They should not only be challenged on what they can deliver today, but on their vision of the future, and how they can help you prepare for it. In an AI era, the value of a partner may increasingly depend less on whether they can deliver an agreed standard today and more on how they can help that standard evolve tomorrow.

The risk of not making these sorts of foundational adjustments is not just technical debt, financial write-off, or user dissatisfaction. If collaboration is becoming the critical infrastructure of innovation, then the cost of rigidity becomes a constraint on organizational speed. A room standard anchored in yesterday's thinking that cannot evolve may slow more than a technology refresh. It may slow how quickly an organization can embrace the new ways of working of an AI age. And that should be a critical concern for every organization.

Across the industry, we need to embrace the fact that the game has changed. The constraint set is changing. The expectations of users, teams, and organizations are changing faster than traditional meeting room lifecycles were ever designed to absorb. So if that old model treated standards as fixed answers, the next model should treat them as adaptive foundations. The goal is not to choose between consistency and personalization. It is to create the conditions where consistency, governance, supportability, and scale can coexist with far greater human relevance, flexibility, and transformative future capability.

The industry can build products. Vendors can develop platforms. Integrators can deliver systems. Consultants can advise. But end users live in the real organizational context. They know the workflows, constraints, cultures, frustrations, security realities, support burdens, and business priorities that determine whether technology creates value and impact, or merely fills rooms.

So, whether you are an end-user Collaboration Enablement leader, or wherever else you might sit in the industry, I leave you to consider this.

Will the next “standard” you develop be anchored on a room type at all? Or might it be based upon the foundational principle of adaptability itself?

And if that is indeed the case, what might need to change in you, your team, and your organization to make that a reality?