AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Lital Grossman, Executive Director at OpenCloud AV

Most networked AV today is still siloed by manufacturer: each vendor’s devices report into their own closed cloud, their own app, their own dashboard. IT ends up managing a patchwork of parallel systems instead of one network, which recreates the exact problem networking was supposed to solve.

None of these are solved by adding another closed platform. They’re solved by a common, open layer that any device—old or new, any manufacturer—can plug into on equal terms. That’s the case for open cloud APIs: they let IT apply the same security posture and visibility to AV that it already applies to every other networked endpoint, without forcing anyone to rip out working hardware or bet on one vendor’s ecosystem.

Once that data is flowing through an open, standardized cloud layer, AI becomes practical: predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and fewer support tickets, because the models can finally see the whole room instead of one brand’s slice of it.

This is the shift OpenAV Cloud exists to drive—not another proprietary platform, but an industry framework so networked AV works for everyone with every system and every vendor.

None of this gets fixed by another closed platform. It gets fixed by an open layer any device, from any manufacturer, can plug into on equal terms. That’s the case for open cloud APIs: one security posture, one set of tools, across every device on the network, regardless of brand or age.

Once that data flows through a common, open cloud layer, AI becomes practical—predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, fewer tickets—because it can finally see the whole room, not one manufacturer’s slice of it.

That’s what OpenAV Cloud is building toward: not another platform, but the framework that makes networked AV work as one system.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Richard Jonker, Vice President of Commercial Business Development at NETGEAR Enterprise

The promise of networked AV is compelling, but the transition doesn´t require replacing everything overnight. The biggest challenges are existing infrastructure and security, but neither is a dealbreaker. With the right network strategy, organizations can modernize at their own pace while protecting their existing investments.

Infrastructure first: AV over IP is not simply another IT application. High-bandwidth video, multicast traffic, precise QoS, and predictable latency place demands on the network that typical enterprise traffic does not. Convergence does not mean running AV on the corporate LAN. In almost all deployments, AV should operate on a dedicated network, managed using IT best practices but engineered specifically for real-time media.

Security requires the same discipline as any managed endpoint. As AV systems become connected, they need authentication, encrypted communications, access control, continuous monitoring, and regular firmware updates. A dedicated AV network does not reduce that requirement, but it makes consistent policy enforcement more practical and operational risk easier to contain.

AI and the cloud are accelerating this transition. Cloud platforms provide centralized visibility, remote management and lifecycle monitoring across distributed deployments, reducing operational overhead. Network AI builds on that foundation by finding performance anomalies, simplifying troubleshooting, predicting failures before users notice them, and, increasingly, automating routine management tasks. Together, they allow IT and AV teams to spend less time supporting systems and more time delivering reliable user experiences.

Successful AV/IT convergence is not about merging everything onto one network; it is about applying IT discipline while designing infrastructure that meets the unique requirements of professional AV.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Omer Brookstein, CEO and co-founder of XYTE

Every AV vendor now claims a comprehensive portfolio. Yet the more consequential shift is beyond AV: enterprise software is being redesigned for agentic AI. Salesforce’s Headless 360 made that direction explicit by opening data and actions to AI agents through machine-readable interfaces, without relying on a screen.

For AV/IT leaders, this reframes the strategic question. The objective is not to select the dashboard that displaces every other dashboard. It is to make a mixed estate accessible to people, enterprise systems, and agents.

That estate will not disappear. Displays, DSPs, cameras, and controllers from multiple manufacturers may retain years of useful life, making wholesale replacement economically unsound and operationally disruptive. Giving agents access also raises the security stakes. An agent observing device health presents a fundamentally different risk from one that can reboot, reconfigure, or provision equipment. Strong identity controls, least-privilege access, approval gates, and audit trails must be built into the architecture.

Cloud provides the shared data and control layer. It can standardize device data, operational history, and available actions across current and legacy systems, allowing organizations to introduce intelligence without tying progress to hardware refresh cycles.

Agentic AI then shifts the operating model from navigation to intent. Teams can ask an agent to identify devices at risk, investigate a recurring room failure, prepare rooms for high-stakes meetings, or recommend the next action. Near-term value lies not in unfettered autonomy, but in governed automation: agents diagnose issues, correlate context, and prepare remediation while people authorize higher-risk actions.

The next leaders in AV will not be distinguished by suite breadth or interface polish. They will make existing infrastructure understandable and safe for enterprise systems and AI agents to act on.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Bob Bonniol, Chief Innovation Officer at ACT Entertainment

Many productions—global broadcasts, opening ceremonies, launches watched by billions in real time—don’t get a second take. In those instances, the KPI that matters isn’t brightness or resolution; it’s uptime under nation-state-grade observation. At ACT, we call this “Tier Zero.”

When you’ve got one shot, the conversation about networked AV changes completely. Things we call barriers to entry, security, entrenched infrastructure, and equipment costs aren’t reasons to delay the transition; they are specifications the transition must meet.

Take security, for example: A networked AV system is an IT system, and it should be secured like one. That’s not a burden; it’s an upgrade. The moment video, audio, and control enter ordinary network infrastructure—ST 2110 and IPMX for video, Dante for audio, sACN for lighting—they inherit 30 years of hardened IT discipline: segmentation, authentication, and observability.

The real barrier is AV people learning to think like network engineers and network engineers learning that packet loss happens in front of an audience.

Existing infrastructure is the same story, inverted. Abandoning a working pipeline isn’t trivial, and the standards don’t ask you to do so. Open transport migrates one signal at a time. Solutions like tvONE CALICO video processors and Green Hippo Estuary media controllers already operate natively in ST 2110 environments, forming a fabric that integrates the past rather than replacing it outright.

This is where AI and the cloud stop being buzzwords and start being load-bearing. The cloud takes everything, including rendering, previsualization, and fleet monitoring, out of the building and makes a thousand-node network operable by fewer people. That isn’t a gimmick; it’s how you earn the confidence to trust a network with a one-shot event.

For decades, each discipline had its own infrastructure. Now, everything is data on a shared network. The question is no longer when to migrate; it’s which signal moves first.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Andrew Starks, Board Member and Marketing Work Group Chair at AIMS

These days, many vendors talk about offering complete suites of networked AV/IT solutions. For most organizations, however, the real question isn't whether a suite exists; it's whether adopting it means starting over. Security is often the first concern, and for good reason: Networked AV puts audio and video traffic on the same infrastructure that IT teams are already responsible for protecting. Systems that rely on proprietary approaches to identity and access control tend to create more work for IT departments, while those built around established standards for encryption and authentication integrate more easily into existing security frameworks.

Legacy equipment is another factor that’s often overlooked in these conversations. Most facilities have made significant investments in gear that still works perfectly well, and few of them can justify tearing it out on a vendor's timeline rather than their own. Phased migrations, where new IP-based systems coexist with existing equipment, give organizations more room to move at a pace that matches their budget, operational priorities, and risk tolerance.

The real value of this approach becomes even more apparent with the adoption of cloud and AI technologies. Once content moves across standard IP networks instead of dedicated point-to-point connections, distributed production, ground-to-cloud workflows, and AI-assisted capabilities like automated monitoring and quality control become far more practical. These capabilities are still maturing across the industry, but it’s already clear that the organizations best positioned to take advantage of them are those that built flexibility into their infrastructure from the outset.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Randy Dickerson, Vertical Account Manager, Broadcast, Sports, and Enterprise at Panasonic

As network AV systems become the industry standard, organizations face a common challenge: how to modernize without disrupting existing operations. A complete tech overhaul isn’t always the solution, and replacing entire ecosystems can be costly and disruptive to existing production workflows. By taking an incremental approach, broadcast teams can integrate IP-based technology alongside legacy hardware-based equipment, extending the value of existing investments and laying the foundation for future growth across network AV.

Live production and broadcast teams require flexibility and adaptability, making AVoIP ecosystems a game changer. With remote management capabilities, teams can create scalable workflows and streamline control of multiple systems from a central management hub. This enables technicians to manage live video streams, audio inputs, and preset AV assets without the need for additional hardware. For teams with existing AV infrastructure, network AV adoption doesn’t have to be all or nothing. With hybrid AVoIP and hardware-based ecosystems, teams can replace outdated equipment as needed, using network solutions to support existing systems—not overtake them. Over time, teams can adapt to operating over IP networks and use the technology to streamline their workflows. For live production and broadcast AV teams, this means saving time, simplifying workflows, and enabling scalable, large-scale operations.

With incremental tech upgrades and the adoption of AVoIP solutions, production teams are never static. Connected ecosystems can simplify software updates, incorporate emerging AI capabilities, and simplify integration with IT workflows, allowing production teams to evolve without sacrificing existing technology and operations.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Mark Plummer, Vice President and General Manager, Connected Platforms and Ecosystems at Legrand | AV

While many manufacturers are offering networked AV portfolios, significant structural roadblocks remain to truly integrated AV and IT systems. The hurdles are not limitations of the technology itself, but the challenges of integrating networked AV into established ecosystems.

Security is often cited as the tallest hurdle. AV can no longer operate on an isolated network, yet fully integrating AV endpoints into IT infrastructure introduces additional security considerations and places greater demands on AV/IT teams to vet, deploy, and maintain those devices. The right products make meeting those standards achievable.

Existing infrastructure presents a related challenge. Most legacy IT networks were not designed for multicast or high-bandwidth AVoIP streams, and modernizing them requires capital investment and close collaboration between AV integrators and IT engineers. AV product lifecycles also rarely align across a given installation. Bridging old and new through software-defined control platforms and open standards is essential to moving forward without unrealistic capital expenditure.

Cloud and AI each have a meaningful role in addressing these hurdles. The cloud serves as the operational backbone, enabling efficient monitoring, proactive management, and remote service delivery while reducing dependence on expensive on-premises hardware. The key is a secure cloud architecture with robust provisioning, patching, and access management built in. At Legrand | AV, our Unified Cloud Platform is built around exactly this foundation.

As AI matures, it will evolve into a proactive agent, monitoring ecosystems via the cloud or at the edge, flagging anomalies, anticipating service needs, and enabling intelligent device scheduling. Organizations that invest now in thoughtful infrastructure design and strategic lifecycle management will be best positioned to deliver the responsive, automated AV experiences that define what is next.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Joel Mulpeter, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Crestron

Security, existing infrastructure, and major AV equipment that hasn’t reached the end of its lifecycle are all important factors when it comes to making technology decisions to support spaces for today and the future. Security will always be a paramount consideration at the start of any project or technology decision—both now and in the long term—as these technologies extend beyond deployment decisions. Lifecycle then comes into play, as you’ll need support for those products for the entire intended life of the space. This could be anywhere from, say, three years to much longer, but often covers a term of five to eight years beyond deployment. Make-or-break considerations include ensuring one has the right certifications and security patches, and specifying solutions known for their longevity.

AI is helping people better understand their estates and security concerns as we apply these tools across facilities with many spaces. But, AI in the meeting space is also driving these decisions as people look for the latest and greatest meeting room experiences. Specifiers need to ensure people get the most out of their spaces, just as they would at their desktop.

Executive Summary

Risk of Delay: For end-user AV and IT collaboration technology managers, the primary strategic risk of artificial intelligence (AI) is inaction rather than early adoption. Delaying practical AI deployment incurs compounding opportunity costs in organizational learning and workflow transformation.

Focus on Practical Friction, Not AI Hype: Technology managers must separate speculative existential AI debates from immediate workplace challenges, applying available AI capabilities to eliminate friction in collaboration, room scheduling, and user support.

Redesign Workflows for True Transformation: Drawing on the electricity analogy, using AI merely to speed up legacy processes yields incremental efficiency, whereas redesigning workflows around AI capabilities drives fundamental organizational transformation.

Manage the Hidden Risk of Inaction: While the risks of taking action (e.g., product selection error, user rejection) are visible, the risk of waiting is invisible and compounding—costing organizations unaccumulated learning and uncaptured adaptability.

Adopt a Software-Era Foundation Strategy: Organizations must move past static hardware-era purchasing mindsets and choose adaptable cloud and software foundations today that allow continuous evolution alongside maturing AI roadmaps.

It is almost impossible in recent weeks in particular, to have a targeted conversation about a specific AI application without the baggage of much bigger conversations coming into play. Jobs. Human relevance. Safety. Societal disruption. And most recently, even existential risk to humanity itself. That’s before we even begin considering the potentially extraordinary positive capabilities on the horizon.

All those conversations, particularly the difficult ones, matter. We should all have a thoughtful voice in them.

But positive or negative, they largely concern futures that most of us cannot reliably define, let alone individually control or deliver. My worry in this moment is that we cannot allow the scale and emotion of those debates to bleed into the much smaller, but far more practical decisions about what we individually CAN actually pursue and influence with the AI capabilities already in our hands today.

Applied to an end-user AV technology manager, I think that distinction matters enormously.

Deliver Organizational Impact and Outcomes

Your immediate challenge is likely not to resolve the future of artificial intelligence. It is to improve collaboration, remove friction, support users, make better use of space and help people decide, learn and innovate more effectively. Ultimately, it is to deliver the organizational impact and outcomes that collaboration technology has always foundationally existed to serve.

So perhaps, for a moment, we should stop talking about “AI” at all.

Rather, let’s try to just discuss what work we are trying to improve. What frictions are we trying to remove? What valuable capabilities have we historically wanted, but could never justify because some traditional form of constraint made it unviable or impractical?

Only then might we ask whether any of that equation might have changed in an AI age.

Many of us have heard the analogy of AI as the new electricity, and I can’t help but keep coming back to it.

People did not transform their lives because they became enthusiastic adopters of electricity as an abstract and somewhat universally applicable technology. They adopted lighting, refrigeration, appliances, machinery and countless other applications that made useful things newly possible. In industry, simply replacing an old power source with electricity created some value. But the larger transformation came when organizations redesigned factories and workflows around what distributed electric power now enabled.

I think there is a useful lesson in that for us.

Transforming the Workflow with AI

Using AI to make yesterday's workflow faster can absolutely create value. Redesigning the workflow around what AI makes newly possible is where transformation begins.

Consider something as everyday as organizing a meeting.

Particularly in the post-COVID hybrid workplace, we have placed even more logistical work onto a meeting organizer simply trying to bring peers together in person. Having consciously and thoughtfully considered who needs to attend and why, there is huge friction in working through where people will physically be, what room is available, whether it offers the right capability, etc.—let alone what happens when things change in the interim.

Executives typically have EAs to absorb much of that effort and friction. Most of the rest of us do not. So I’m excited as platforms such as Microsoft Places are beginning to address pieces of that problem through more intelligent workforce, workplace, and collaborative workflow coordination. At first glance, the business case is obvious: save somebody ten, twenty, perhaps thirty minutes arranging and managing the logistics of a meeting.

Useful? Absolutely. And that’s primarily the focus of implementation ROI analysis at present.

But I think there is a more important opportunity that sits underneath that efficiency premise.

Every new workflow carries an adoption threshold. The value people believe they will receive has to outweigh not only the practical change effort required, but the cognitive and emotional effort of doing something differently. It’s the “Crossing the Chasm” proposition we all know. If the friction is too high, even objectively better experiences struggle to gain adoption.

Our industry has spent years responding to that reality through simplification and standardization. We reduced choices. Simplified interfaces. Removed capabilities users struggled to understand. We lowered the friction floor largely by reducing the complexity we exposed, often designing toward a lowest common denominator. A significant compromise—even if justifiable—to supporting the diversity premise that gives collaboration so much of its value.

But in this moment, I believe AI potentially gives us a different mechanism.

Intelligence Absorbs Complexity

Rather than removing capability to make an experience manageable, what if intelligence can increasingly absorb complexity on the user's behalf?

Now the meeting example becomes much more interesting.

Yes, an intelligent agent might find the time, the room and the appropriate technical capability. But what if – building upon that new more practical and tactical efficiency foundation - it can also remove enough friction from richer ways of collaborating? That truly transformative new workflow opportunities now themselves become more practical? Premises like identifying and proposing:

• Who should actually be in the room?
• What perspective or experience might be missing?
• What collaborative methodology best fits the intended outcome?
• How should the space or technology respond differently if the purpose is ideation rather than decision-making?
• And what needs to happen to turn conversation into immediate action?

We have always been capable of asking many of those questions. The problem is these are complex and difficult to manage and measure. Applying that level of thought, coordination and facilitation to every meeting would historically have required far more human effort and practical friction than the return could justify.

So most meetings never received it.

That is the equation AI can begin to change.

The transformation opportunity is not simply doing the same work with less effort. It is making valuable new work viable that the old effort equation never practically allowed us to do consistently or at scale.

Efficiency still matters. In fact, I think it may be foundational. But perhaps its greatest value is not the minutes we recover, but in the new foundations it unlocks.

Efficiency Removes Constraints. Transformation Exploits Their Absence.

If collaboration itself, rather than simply collaboration technology, is becoming an increasingly critical driver of organizational innovation and change, that distinction matters enormously. Better access to knowledge, more relevant perspectives, stronger conversations and better decisions can lead to faster learning, greater innovation, greater adaptability and ultimately competitive advantage.

Now the return has the potential to move beyond linear efficiency toward something much more compounding.

[ Check out other insightful collaboration and workplace AI articles from Byron Tarry here. ]

And that is precisely why the risk of “waiting” for bigger AI discussions to progress deserves more attention.

Here’s a different take on that concept. Our organizations and careers have largely been built around managing the visible risk of action. What if I choose the wrong product? What if the platform does not deliver? What if users reject it? What if something better arrives next year?

Those are legitimate questions.

The Risk of Doing Nothing is Always Harder to See.

There is rarely an invoice for value never discovered because we waited. No budget variance captures the capability our teams failed to develop. No project review measures learning we never accumulated, or a collaboration improvement that never had a chance to emerge.

That has always made inertia deceptively comfortable.

While we have spent decades optimising how we manage the risk of action, I think we now need to become much better at considering & managing the risk of inaction.

That does not mean becoming reckless. It means recognizing that risk management can no longer be nearly so synonymous with change avoidance.

Certainly amid an abundance of opportunity sometimes waiting will absolutely be the right answer. Some technologies will be immature. Some risks will be unacceptable. Some opportunities are simply misaligned. Some organizations simply will not yet be ready.

But waiting is not neutral.

If the opportunity we are deferring is merely a small efficiency gain, delay may carry a relatively small cost. But if that efficiency is the first unlock in a chain that enables a better workflow, better collaboration, and ultimately better organizational performance, then the opportunity cost compounds very differently.

And I believe that is where we increasingly sit as an industry.

I recently had a conversation with Sam Kennedy from NetSpeek about the strange relationship our industry has historically had with roadmaps.

In a hardware-centric world, showing customers too much of what was coming next could often create a reason not to buy what existed today. If tomorrow's product offered materially different capability, while today's hardware was largely static and might remain installed for five or seven years, waiting could be entirely rational. Roadmap conversations themselves therefore carried risk.

But I wonder whether we are carrying hardware-era buying instincts into a software-era capability model.

It’s clear that increasingly more of the future will arrive through agile software, cloud platforms, intelligence layers and services layered onto physical foundations already deployed.

That must therefore change the question. Rather than asking "What might I miss if I commit today?", perhaps we should increasingly ask, "What can I choose today to create meaningful value now while also maintaining a credible path toward what comes next?"

In This Moment of Uncertainty, You Cannot Buy the Future.

But you can choose foundations today that give you permission and confidence in a path to evolve into it.

That mindset should influence how we interrogate products, architectures, and partners. Clarity of roadmap should now be seen as an opportunity on all sides to increase confidence in today's decisions, as opposed to exposing a dead end.

This is not about predicting perfectly. It is about maintaining progression when perfect prediction is unavailable.

And that brings me back to where we started.

The current AI conversation is full of questions nobody can answer with confidence. But we cannot allow uncertainty about that future to blind us to the opportunities sitting within reach today, to the leadership we can show, the foundations we can build, and the transformational outcomes we can already begin to pursue.

This does not require us to be optimistic about every possible AI future. Nor does it require us to dismiss its risks. I think it just requires something much more practical: the discipline to separate what is speculative from what is actionable, and to focus our energy where we still have agency.

Today we CAN remove unnecessary friction. We CAN rethink workflows designed around old constraints. We CAN make decisions that preserve a path to tomorrow. And we CAN challenge ourselves as to whether fear of an unknowable future is becoming a misguided justification for preserving a status quo we already know is imperfect.

Because in this moment, standing still is also a bet.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: John Kruse, Solutions Engineering Manager at ViewSonic

The networked AV transition is real, and so are the friction points.

Most AV and IT teams agree on the destination: networked, managed, converged infrastructure with centralized visibility and operational efficiency. The goal isn't in dispute; getting there is. The barriers aren't philosophical; they're practical—and they share a common root.

AV teams are running lean. Managing distributed environments with limited staff is exactly why networked AV is appealing. Centralized visibility, remote diagnostics, and streamlined support would meaningfully change what a small team can manage. This desire isn't abstract; it's an operational necessity.

IT teams are running lean for the same reason. Standing up dedicated AV VLANs, configuring custom QoS parameters, and managing security segmentation for devices that may no longer receive firmware updates requires capacity that most IT organizations simply don't have available. The willingness is there; the bandwidth isn't.

Add the capital reality—functional equipment that doesn't justify replacement based on convergence alone—and the picture becomes clear: It's not a lack of vision, but rather a resource constraint operating from both directions simultaneously.

Cloud management and AI are beginning to change the calculus. Remote monitoring, centralized device management, and AI-assisted diagnostics reduce the operational lift once systems are online. The long-term staffing case for networked AV gets stronger every year.

However, the entry point remains the challenge. The same leanness that makes convergence desirable is what makes the transition difficult to initiate. Recognizing that tension honestly is the first step toward planning around it.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Adam Sowers, Senior Manager, Business Development at Sony Electronics

As the industry shifts toward fully networked AV/IT environments, the conversation is no longer centered on hardware alone. Cloud platforms, AI, and software-defined management are critical components of modern AV deployments, helping organizations improve efficiency, scalability, and operational visibility. However, there are still barriers to adoption that must be addressed.

Security remains the primary consideration. Any new solution must align with IT governance requirements, reduce organizational risk, and integrate into existing security frameworks. Organizations must also consider the realities of their installed base, including existing infrastructure investments, legacy systems that have not yet reached end of life, and the operational complexity of adopting new standards while maintaining business continuity.

AI is accelerating this transition by enabling greater automation, predictive analytics, intelligent troubleshooting, content management, and personalized user experiences. From virtual assistants to proactive system monitoring, AI is helping organizations maximize uptime, reduce support burdens, and improve customers’ experiences.

Cloud platforms deliver centralized management, remote visibility, and actionable insights across distributed environments. When combined with content, collaboration, and device management platforms, cloud-based solutions create more consistent, scalable, and repeatable user experiences while reducing operational complexity.

Interoperability is equally important. No organization wants to be locked into a single ecosystem. Success depends on open architecture and strong partner integrations that allow customers to leverage existing investments while adopting new capabilities at their own pace. At Sony, we believe innovation happens through partnership. We continue to work across the AV and IT ecosystem to deliver integrated, end-to-end solutions that simplify customers’ deployment and management.

The transition to networked AV/IT requires thoughtful planning, but the industry direction is clear. Organizations that prioritize security, interoperability, remote management, and operational intelligence are best positioned to modernize their environments and realize the full value of cloud and AI-enabled solutions.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Jakub Kolacz, Manager of Product Management Software at Sennheiser

Without centralized visibility into how networked audio devices are behaving across a deployment, AV and IT teams are effectively reactive. Problems surface when users report them—not before. That dynamic is what cloud-based device management is designed to change, and it is where the most meaningful progress in networked audio is happening right now.

When every device across every room and every campus reports into a unified, browser-accessible interface, AV and IT teams gain a shared, real-time view of the entire environment. Firmware alignment can be maintained consistently without technician dispatch. Anomalies can be identified and addressed before they affect a meeting or a class, and configuration changes can be applied at scale rather than room by room. For organizations managing distributed deployments across multiple buildings or campuses, that kind of oversight should be viewed as an operational requirement rather than a convenience.

The longer-term case for cloud management is what these platforms become over time. As they accumulate operational data across deployments, they create the foundation for AI-driven capabilities that can shift teams from reactive troubleshooting toward proactive management. Routine diagnostics, firmware validation, and performance monitoring can move from manual processes toward automated workflows, allowing AV and IT staff to focus on governance and exception handling rather than break-fix cycles.

Critically, none of this requires replacing equipment that still has useful life. Cloud visibility functions as a connective layer above existing infrastructure, allowing organizations to modernize their operational approach without forcing a hardware refresh cycle. That makes the transition financially realistic for a much broader range of organizations and allows migration to happen at a pace that fits both budget and risk tolerance.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Sanjay Kulkarni, Vice President of Product at QSC

The convergence of AV and IT is now an operational reality for most organisations. Networked AV architectures offer clear benefits in scalability, manageability and data-driven decision-making, but adoption is rarely as simple as replacing existing systems.

The biggest barriers are often organisational, financial and operational considerations, rather than technical capabilities. Existing AV investments often remain functional and valuable, making upgrades difficult to justify. Security, governance and interoperability have become priorities. As AV systems connect to enterprise networks, they must meet the same standards as any other IT asset.

The most successful transitions are incremental rather than disruptive. Organizations want to modernise at their own pace, extending the life of existing infrastructure while moving toward interoperable, software-centric environments. This shift is driving interest in full-stack AV platforms that bring together devices, software and cloud-based management within a single ecosystem.”

Cloud technologies are accelerating this shift by providing centralised visibility, management and analytics across geographically dispersed spaces. Instead of managing rooms and devices as isolated systems, enterprises can gain a holistic view of performance, utilisation and user experience across their technology estate.

Beyond automating routine administrative tasks, AI technologies can help organizations harness real-time data to improve visibility, generate actionable insights, and support more informed decision-making across connected environments.

At Q-SYS, we’re seeing organisations prioritise flexible, software-centric architectures that help them extend existing investments while creating a path to cloud-enabled management, data-driven insight and evolving intelligent technologies. The same thinking sits behind the high-performance workplace discussion, as AV environments increasingly need to be adaptable, connected and easier to manage over time. Ultimately, the future of AV/IT will be shaped by secure, intelligent ecosystems that can evolve with changing workplace needs.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Joe Andrulis, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at Biamp

The big shift we are seeing as an AV manufacturer relates to how AV solutions are increasingly software-defined. In other words, the days of purpose-built, hardware-heavy systems that required on-site expertise to reconfigure are giving way to software-defined environments where organizations can adapt their AV infrastructure to meet changing needs without touching a rack.

This shift has fundamentally changed the technology requirements for practically all types of environments. Spaces that previously might have only required microphones, loudspeakers, and a projector must now often seamlessly support conferencing platforms, high-quality audio capture, video distribution, and remote collaboration. The result is a growing convergence of technologies that were once managed separately.

To get there, organizations must look at platforms that can bring together digital signal processing, conferencing, room control, amplification, and audio networking within a single ecosystem—often accessed through the cloud.

Control plays a big part in this paradigm shift. Historically, powerful AV control systems came with equally heavy programming requirements, putting them out of reach for organizations without dedicated technical staff. Rather, the shift toward intuitive, no-code platforms means internal teams can now deploy sophisticated automation that end users can manage day-to-day, without ongoing support.

AI is another factor driving this shift. AV systems with embedded AI can respond to the environment automatically, including changes in usage patterns that previously required lots of planning or forethought. These intelligent tools can now continuously adapt to environmental fluctuations, ensuring a smoother and more refined user experience across diverse scenarios.

At the end of the day, this software-defined AV infrastructure is enabling hardware to consolidate, last longer, and provide a greater experience for everyone along the AV value chain.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Petro Shimonishi, Director at Panasonic Projector & Display Americas

Many of today’s production teams across entertainment venues, higher ed, and corporate settings are making the transition to networked AV—but few can justify replacing hardware-based equipment that’s still functioning. Thankfully, a hybrid strategy has emerged, giving AV teams the flexibility to modernize outdated solutions while maintaining existing legacy equipment under one ecosystem.

This happens as the AV industry hits an inflection point: Customers are no longer buying isolated projectors and displays, but are instead investing in connected visual communication platforms. Remote management, interoperability, and real-time operational data have become expectations, and network connectivity now carries IT-grade security requirements, including zero-trust architecture, role-based access, and encrypted signal paths. AI and cloud services are moving past buzzword status too: Predictive maintenance, automatic camera framing, and content intelligence are already easing the load on stretched AV/IT teams, with cloud-to-cloud connectivity letting organizations add these capabilities gradually rather than all at once.

At Panasonic Projector & Display Americas, our goal is to empower innovation without disruption, ensuring AV and IT teams can integrate networked solutions without sacrificing critical time and resources. As modern AV and IT teams continue to work together, we aim to enable integrators to evolve in accordance with their organization’s needs and goals. This means building open APIs and standards-based integration that let AV/IT teams evolve at their own pace, deploying AI and cloud services only where they create measurable value while protecting the equipment already in place. The future of professional AV is not defined by replacing every device on the network; it centers on creating secure, intelligent ecosystems that allow organizations to modernize at their own pace.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Yannic Laleeuwe, Marketing Director, Meeting Experience at Barco ClickShare

For years, AV and IT leaders have focused on integration. The priority was to connect devices, platforms, and spaces into one coherent environment. In many organizations, that foundation is now largely in place. The next challenge is making meeting rooms intelligent enough to support AI-driven collaboration.

Hybrid work has reshaped expectations. People move between home, office, and travel, expecting meeting experiences to move with them. But many meeting spaces still rely on fixed setups and fragmented technology that slow people down rather than support them.

At the same time, collaboration platforms continue to evolve. AI is already embedded into daily workflows, helping teams capture decisions, generate insights, and stay aligned. In Microsoft Teams, for example, Copilot can use meeting speech-to-text and transcription data to surface discussion points, summarize conversations, and suggest follow-up actions. These experiences, however, are only as good as the meeting input behind them. Garbled audio, a camera that misses half the room, or a five-minute scramble to connect a laptop don’t just frustrate people in the meeting; they also degrade the transcript Copilot is working from.

This is where AV/IT is being redefined. It is no longer only about connecting hardware; it is about enabling collaboration that is simple enough that people use it without thinking, and consistent enough that AI can trust what it captures. Simplicity, interoperability, and security are expectations. As technology fades into the background, the focus shifts to uptime, room visibility, performance, and the quality of the meeting experience itself.

The meeting room is no longer just a place where work happens; it is where the quality of collaboration begins. When that experience is easy to start, reliable, and inclusive, it gives AI the right foundation to deliver real value across platforms like Microsoft Teams and Copilot. The organizations that move early will not just run better meetings; they will build smarter ways of working across the entire business.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Jonathan Mangall, Managing Director, EMEA at Utelogy

At Utelogy, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how organizations approach AV. The conversation has moved beyond deploying technology to managing it as part of the wider enterprise IT ecosystem. Networked AV, cloud technologies, and AI are transforming operations, but successful adoption depends on helping organizations evolve without disrupting the investments they've already made.

Legacy infrastructure remains a key challenge. Most organizations operate multi-vendor AV environments with years of useful life remaining, making rip-and-replace impractical and cost-prohibitive. That's why Utelogy champions an open, vendor-agnostic platform that unifies, monitors, and manages existing AV while protecting previous capital investments.

Security is equally critical. As AV devices become enterprise network endpoints, they must meet the same governance, authentication, and compliance standards as every other connected IT asset. Utelogy’s enterprise-grade security and integration with existing IT workflows are fundamental to ensuring AV can be managed with the same confidence as the rest of the technology estate.

Cloud is accelerating this transformation by providing centralized visibility, remote management, and the scalability needed to support global deployments. Whether organizations choose cloud, hybrid, or on-premises, flexibility is essential to meet operational and regulatory requirements.

AI is now taking enterprise AV management to the next level. We see AI as an enabler rather than a replacement for IT teams. By analyzing operational data, identifying anomalies, predicting potential issues, and automating routine tasks, AI allows organizations to move from reactive support to proactive, intelligent operations that improve user experiences while reducing operational overhead.

The future of AV/IT isn't defined by the hardware, but by how intelligently it's managed. By combining open integration, cloud-native management, and AI-driven automation, Utelogy helps customers maximize current investments while preparing for autonomous AV operations.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Josh Blalock, Global Director, Alliances & Engagement at Shure

The conversation around AI has matured. A year ago, everyone was talking about AI theoretically. Today, the real question is whether the infrastructure underneath it is actually ready to support the outcomes organizations expect, and if their AI roadmap matches their business roadmap.

As more companies rely on AI to summarize meetings, assign actions, automate workflows, and collaborate with agents, good enough isn’t good enough anymore. Every meeting is creating data that those systems depend on. If the audio isn’t captured accurately or your collaboration environment is fragmented across disconnected platforms, those small gaps become much bigger problems once AI agents start making decisions from that information.

Organizations shouldn’t think about meeting rooms as just places where conversations happen; they should be thought of as spaces where business data is generated, and decisions are taken. The same way organizations wouldn’t accept missing records in CRM or gaps in email history, the same should apply to incomplete or inaccurate meeting data.

The cloud plays a critical role by giving IT teams centralized visibility and management across their collaboration environments, while AI unlocks new ways to turn meeting content into action.

But neither delivers value without a strong foundation. The organizations that will benefit most are those that build an ecosystem that captures the highest-quality data from the very beginning. That’s what enables AI to deliver meaningful business outcomes.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Wylie Dunham, Senior Network Engineer and AVoIP Product Manager at Atlona

The continued growth of uncompressed AVoIP technologies such as SDVoE, along with many upcoming IPMX implementations, is placing greater emphasis on multi-gigabit network infrastructure. These technologies deliver high image quality, ultra-low latency, and predictable performance, making them ideal for demanding applications. However, many implementations also rely on 10GbE connectivity at the edge and higher-capacity network uplinks. For many organizations, the challenge is no longer the AV technology itself, but the cost and complexity of extending high-bandwidth network infrastructure to every endpoint.

At the same time, enterprise network investments are being driven by priorities well beyond AV. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 access points, cloud services, and increasing user density continue to shape infrastructure planning and budgeting. While MultiGig switching is becoming more common, it is typically deployed where those demands exist, with most access ports throughout the enterprise still operating at 1GbE. As a result, AV projects must increasingly align with existing IT strategies rather than expecting networks to be redesigned around video distribution. When these technologies are deployed, they are often isolated, not leveraging the AV everywhere feature of networked AV due to capacity requirements from the network edge through the core.

This raises an important question for the industry: Does every deployment require an uncompressed 10Gb stream? Answers depend entirely on the application. Mission-critical environments such as command and control, medical visualization, and live production may justify the investment in uncompressed transport. Meeting rooms, classrooms, digital signage, hospitality, and corporate communications often have different priorities, where scalability, infrastructure efficiency, and total cost of ownership can edge out the need for absolute minimum latency. As AVoIP continues to evolve, selecting the right transport technology should be driven by application requirements—not the assumption that every deployment demands the highest-available-bandwidth solution.

AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.

Thought Leader: Steven Barlow, President of DVIGear

Every vendor claims a full networked AV/IT suite. The real question is, how do you get there without ripping out equipment that still has years of life left, and without opening new security holes? The ideal approach is a transition that's additive rather than wholesale. DisplayNet uses standards-based, uncompressed distribution that can run over the IP network you already operate, coexisting with the matrix switchers and endpoints already in place—so you can migrate on your own schedule instead of someone else's, extending the infrastructure you own rather than replacing it.

On security, putting AV on IP isn't a new attack surface to fear; it's the opportunity to bring AV under the same enterprise governance—segmentation, authentication, monitoring—that already protects everything else. Uncompressed, deterministic signals stay on premises where real-time video belongs. That also defines the cloud's role: Latency keeps the pixels local, so the cloud handles the control plane of orchestration, monitoring, and configuration.

The most stubborn barrier has always been expertise. Operating AV-over-IP has meant mastering proprietary APIs and control syntax. DisplayNet Connect for AI Agents removes that bottleneck. As the first AV-over-IP system with native Model Context Protocol support, it's directly controllable by Claude, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, or any MCP-compatible agent. A technology manager states intent in plain language and the system configures itself, compressing what once took days of custom development into minutes.

The winning transition is incremental, secures itself with the IT stack you already trust, and uses AI to erase the learning curve that kept networked AV out of reach.

NOW AVAILABLE! AV Technology Manager’s Guide to Display Technologies

25 Thought Leaders share insights on topics such as how to grow and immerse audiences, collaborate across campuses via the cloud, use AI to drive targeted messaging and gather data, create an ecosystem to improve workflows, increase sustainability, and reduce total cost of ownership.

AV/IT Team: Meet the creative team behind the Museum of Art + Light, where more than 100 laser projectors bring creativity to life with nearly 37,000 square feet of eye-popping color and exquisite detail.

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26 Display Technologies That Matter: Video processors, fine-pixel-pitch LED video walls, COB LED display, integrated SoC displays, AV production suites, 4K video wall appliance, flip-chip, wire-bond-free COB LEDs, AV-over-IP distribution, dvLED universal wall mounts, laser projectors, 21:9 displays, outdoor LCDs, ADA-compliant applications, interactive displays, digital signage solutions, mobile all-in-one displays, e-paper, and much more!

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Almost 20 years ago, when I was deeply invested in the sustainability proposition and the emerging world of green building, I read a book with a title that is difficult to ignore for anyone in the AV integration space: Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets.

Written by Barry LePatner, the book examined why construction projects so often produced familiar poor outcomes: cost overruns, delays, disputes, compromised results, and frustrated owners. Sound familiar?

The book was published in 2007, long before the current AI moment, and certainly was not about hybrid work, intelligent buildings, adaptive collaboration environments, or the future of the modern workplace.

Yet what it triggered in me at the time has stayed with me since, and feels even more relevant today. The way we go about building something is as important as the thing we intend to build.

When a process is fragmented, information is incomplete, incentives are misaligned, and accountability is divided, disappointing outcomes should not always be treated as isolated failures. They may actually be the predictable product of the system used to create them.

That principle has particular relevance for the AV and collaboration industry because we have long occupied an unusual position between two worlds. Our value is increasingly shaped by the digital environment: software, platforms, data, user experience, and now intelligence. Yet our systems and delivery model remain highly embedded within the physical environment, dependent upon walls, ceilings, furniture, cabling, acoustics, lighting, power, and construction schedules.

Despite years of discussion about AV and IT convergence, the physical side of that equation has continued to dominate how our environments are delivered. AV is still largely funded, designed, procured, installed, commissioned, and handed over through workflows inherited from a project-centric construction model.

That model was/is not designed around the continuous adaptability, shared outcomes, and ongoing learning realities of today. It was designed to define what largely static physical structures would be built, divide that answer into scopes, allocate risk, control change, and eventually reach completion. Because AV was so closely integrated into that process, we inherited much of the same inertia, fragmentation, and accountability challenges.

Interconnected Environments

As collaboration outcomes become more dependent on the speed and agility of digital capability, what was once an awkward tension risks becoming a foundational constraint.

The workplace is becoming one interconnected environment, whether our organizational structures are ready for it or not. Physical space, workplace applications, collaboration platforms, occupancy data, identity, employee experience, organizational policy, and eventually AI-enabled contextual intelligence are all becoming increasingly interdependent.

That means more stakeholders in the build process, greater consequence to the decisions each makes, more complexity across the lifecycle, and much less certainty about what future users and workflows will require.

In other words, we are taking a delivery model that was already struggling with fragmentation, information asymmetry, and divided accountability, then asking it to absorb more participants, faster change, greater integration, and far less visibility into the future.

The book does not provide a contemporary blueprint for solving that challenge. But it offers a valuable diagnosis of the familiar model we still work within, and an invitation to recognize why simply forcing more technology and complexity into it will not produce a fundamentally different outcome.

That is why the traditional reliance on defining project-centric scope upfront deserves much greater scrutiny.

Rethinking Scope

Our procurement models typically begin by trying to define the answer. Requirements are established, translated into specifications, divided between disciplines, priced, contracted, and then managed against the original definition. Commercial accountability depends upon the assumption that the intended result can be understood with enough confidence at the beginning.

For physical construction, much of that discipline will always be necessary. Buildings require plans, budgets, sequencing, code compliance, and contractual clarity.

But the modern workplace presents a different challenge. Organizations are still being asked to define long-term requirements when their visibility into future need is shrinking. AI is changing interfaces, workflows, support models, collaboration patterns, and the role of the workplace itself. Capabilities that might seem experimental if not futuristic when a project begins may become commonplace before the initial deployment reaches completion.

The more intelligent and adaptive the workplace becomes, the less credible it is to believe that all meaningful value can be specified at the outset.

That does not mean scope disappears. It means scope cannot continue to be treated as a complete and static answer.

A tightly defined scope may provide immediate commercial certainty while simultaneously constraining future opportunity. It can reward delivery of what was understood yesterday while leaving no one responsible for what becomes possible tomorrow. The conventional process seeks to eliminate uncertainty, yet the future workplace must embrace the opportunity of uncertainty and a capacity to learn and adapt to whatever the future holds.

There are no quick or easy answers to this new reality. But I believe there are two practical directions end-user leaders can begin pursuing today: reconsider how the workplace itself is designed, and challenge whether the procurement and accountability models around it are capable of supporting that design.

A Layered Approach to Design

The first direction begins with recognizing that the workplace is not a single system operating to a single lifecycle. It is an interconnected environment spanning infrastructure, hardware, digital capability, and contextual intelligence. Each layer changes at a different speed and should be considered accordingly.

The infrastructure layer includes the structure, power, pathways, network cabling, acoustics, mounting provisions, furniture, environmental systems, and other relatively permanent characteristics of the space. It moves slowly, lasts a long time, and is disruptive and expensive to change. Its role should be to provide a resilient foundation without unnecessarily predetermining what must sit above it.

The hardware layer includes cameras, microphones, displays, loudspeakers, sensors, control devices, local compute, networking equipment, and other physical technology endpoints. Hardware may be digitally upgradeable, but it remains constrained by its processing power, memory, optics, connectivity, inputs, outputs, sensors, and physical architecture.

The digital layer is the software and data environment that activates and connects that hardware. It includes operating software, collaboration platforms, applications, control logic, identity, APIs, integrations, analytics, cloud services, and management platforms. This is where capability becomes far more agile, but only to the extent that the infrastructure and hardware beneath it allow.

Finally, the emerging contextual intelligence layer interprets who is gathering, why they are gathering, what they are trying to achieve, what has happened previously, which constraints or preferences matter, and how the environment might respond. It connects real-time signals, organizational knowledge, history, individual needs, and human purpose to create a more relevant and adaptive experience.

The practical principle is that each slower-moving layer should create permission for the faster-moving layer above it to evolve, rather than predetermining its limits.

That offers end-user leaders a different way to think about scope today. Does the largely static infrastructure simply support the current equipment list, or does it preserve future flexibility? Does the hardware only meet today’s specification, or can it support new software capabilities as they emerge? Is the digital architecture open and integrated enough to enable future intelligence? Are we imagining contextual experiences while making foundational decisions that may prevent them?

These are not abstract future questions. They belong in current design and governance conversations.

Moving Toward Shared Accountability

But layered design alone is not enough. A workplace may be architected for evolution and still be pulled back toward a static answer by the procurement model through which it is delivered.

That is the second practical direction for change.

A process built around tightly defined upfront scope, fragmented contracts, lowest initial cost, and responsibility that largely ends at handover will naturally reinforce the very outcomes we are trying to move beyond. It encourages each participant to optimize their own deliverable, even when the employee ultimately experiences the result as one integrated workplace.

Specification accountability remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. The future workplace requires greater shared accountability for how the combined environment performs, adapts, and creates value across its lifecycle.

That does not mean every partner can guarantee every workplace outcome. Collaboration quality, employee behaviour, organizational culture, and business performance will never sit entirely within the control of an architect, consultant, integrator, or technology provider.

But partners can be held accountable for their contribution to those outcomes. They can help establish the original assumptions, identify how their decisions enable or constrain the intended experience, remain involved in measuring performance, and participate in refining the environment as needs and capabilities change.

That is very different from completing a project, signing off the scope, and transferring responsibility to an operational team. It treats the workplace not as a static collection of assets, but as an organizational capability that should improve over time.

Many AV and workplace technology leaders may reasonably feel they have limited authority over these wider processes. Construction may sit with real estate. Procurement may be centralized. Workplace policy may belong to HR. AI governance may reside elsewhere in the enterprise.

But leadership has rarely been defined by remaining comfortably within an established lane. It often begins with recognizing that the existing lanes no longer serve an outcome for which you carry some responsibility.

Catalyzing Integrated Processes

This is not about AV leaders claiming ownership of the entire workplace. It is about becoming catalysts for a more integrated process: connecting physical decisions to future digital consequences, bringing the right stakeholders together before major constraints are locked in, and asking how success will be judged across the lifecycle rather than only at commissioning.

It means pursuing two connected propositions.

Design the workplace for evolution.

Procure the partnerships and accountability that allow it to evolve.

Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets was a catalyst for this reflection because it challenged the idea that flawed outcomes are always caused by the failure of individual participants. Sometimes capable people working within a flawed structure will continue to produce flawed outcomes.

For the collaboration industry, that is not only a lesson from the past. It is a warning about the future.

We cannot seek to procure tomorrow’s intelligent workplace through yesterday’s construction workflow.

We may not yet know the specific technologies, capabilities, or experiences that will define that future. But we do not need to wait for those answers before beginning the work. The practical path available today is to rethink the foundations we design and the models through which we procure, operate, and remain accountable for them, so that future change becomes something the workplace is prepared to embrace rather than something it is structured to resist.

NOW AVAILABLE! AV Technology Manager’s Guide to The State of AV/IT

30+ AV/IT Thought Leaders On The State of AV/IT: They address pain points, such as existing infrastructure and major AV equipment that hasn't reached the end of its lifecycle, the importance of security, and the role of the cloud and AI.

154 Award-Winning Products—Best of Show at InfoComm: Check out what the judges had to say about the products they evaluated while at the show.

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AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Zec Voislavm, Director of Product Development at WyreStorm Technologies

Let’s be honest: For a long time, the cloud just sounded like more work for AV teams. It meant more security hoops to jump through and more things for the IT department to say "no" to. But the industry is shifting for a very blunt reason: The old way of managing hardware is killing our margins and our schedules.

For integrators, the cloud is a pivot from reactive firefighting to actual profit. We’ve all been there—sending a tech across town at rush hour just to power-cycle a box or toggle a setting. It’s a waste of talent and gas. With a cloud-based dashboard, you’re seeing the "check engine" light before the client even walks into the room. You can push firmware at 2 a.m. from your couch instead of 2 p.m. in a boardroom. It turns a frantic service call into a quiet, remote fix, keeping your best techs focused on new builds rather than truck rolls for minor glitches.

For operators, it’s about the Monday morning panic. When you’re managing 50 rooms across three floors or three time zones, visibility is everything. Cloud tools mean you aren't walking the halls testing mics manually. Instead, you know the status of every codec and display before the first meeting starts.

Of course, this isn't a shortcut. If you don't bake in security and network policy from day one, then you’re just building a bigger headache. But when done right, the cloud doesn't replace the expertise of a solid AV pro; it just stops them from wasting time on the boring stuff so they can focus on what actually matters: making sure the tech just works.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Amber Ward, Senior Marketing Director at Carousel Digital Signage

Cloud-based digital signage has transformed how organizations design and scale their signage networks. By connecting media players to cloud-hosted servers, organizations avoid complex inbound configurations, resulting in a much cleaner security and network landscape than in the on-premise era. The flexibility of cloud architecture allows seamless scaling across buildings, geographies, and device types—all without the need to rebuild the system each time. Content is no longer tied to dedicated displays: The same messaging can now reach web browsers, tablets, and mobile devices, which is crucial when audiences are spread across retail floors, campuses, or remote workforces.

For IT teams evaluating platforms, SOC 2 compliance should be on the short list of non-negotiables. It signals that a vendor has independently audited controls for data security and availability, and its absence is a serious network concern for any system that touches enterprise infrastructure.

One of the biggest pain points among IT professionals is that ownership of a cloud-based digital signage system can get murky. The team responsible for securing the system is not the same as the team managing its content. Before deployment, end users should establish clear roles and workflows for content creation, approval, and placement. This ensures accountability and prevents confusion about responsibilities.

Mixed-device environments are the norm. Media players, smart displays, mobile devices, and embedded hardware coexist on the same network. Finding digital signage software that works across that variety is essential, and one that integrates with your device management systems—not works outside them.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Tom Lureman, Director of Engineering and Product Management at AtlasIED

End users across a wide range of industries are increasingly adopting cloud solutions, motivated by the benefits of improved business continuity and preventive maintenance. This shift enables companies to provide ongoing, immediate support rather than unique, one-time fixes that integration partners can charge a premium for. Instead of waiting for unpredictable issues to arise and dispatching technicians, cloud solutions enable end users to proactively manage systems remotely. This approach helps prevent downtime and ensures that systems are operating efficiently.

Remote software and firmware updates play a vital role in proactive AV management. They ensure that systems remain secure, compatible, and up to date, reducing the need for on-site maintenance and enabling faster deployment of new features and fixes.

From deployment to maintenance, the cloud delivers unparalleled value compared to traditional systems. As end users look to upgrade their AV systems, solutions like Atmosphere Cloud will become the norm. This platform facilitates monitoring, updating, and modifying hardware settings, greatly enhancing operational efficiency. AtlasIED is dedicated to leading this transformation by providing tools that are not only powerful but also user-friendly and supportive of the evolving AV landscape.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Nancy Knowlton, Chief Executive Officer at Nureva

The debate over whether on-prem systems or the cloud are better has been running for years. The advantages of the cloud—scalability, flexibility, and the ability to deploy and manage systems remotely—are well understood. For many organizations, these advantages enable faster innovation and lower the burden on internal IT teams.

And yet, hesitation around cloud-based solutions remains.

Concerns about security, cost predictability, data sovereignty, and simple loss of control often hold organizations back. These are not irrational fears, especially for those with regulatory requirements or long-lived infrastructure investments. But avoiding the cloud altogether can also come with risks: missed efficiencies, slower response to change, access to fewer leading-edge apps, and growing technical debt.

Rather than treating the decision as all-or-nothing, a more productive mindset is to explore how cloud solutions could work in practice.

One approach is to start with a small pilot project. Pick something low risk and noncritical, and use it to understand how deployment, management, security, and costs actually play out. A pilot project can turn assumptions into evidence.

It’s also worth involving people early. Survey staff who will use or support the system to understand their reactions and concerns. Talk with peers in other organizations about how the cloud is working for them. Ask what went well, what surprised them, and what they would do differently. Benefit from their experiences.

Vendors can play a role, too. Ask suppliers of cloud-based applications for trials and detailed explanations of how their solutions address security, reliability, and long-term cost concerns.

The key is to get started—to do something. Getting started, even in a small way, creates insight that no amount of debate can replace.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Chris Merrill, Director of Product Management and Engineering at Panasonic

When we talk about cloud in Pro AV, we're rarely talking about the same thing. For some, cloud means a software interface accessible from anywhere on the network; for others, it's a remote data center operated by an application vendor, independent processing on a hyperscaler like AWS or Azure, or a hybrid combining several of these. The term has become so elastic that it's almost meaningless without context—and that ambiguity creates real risk for AV managers making infrastructure decisions.

In practice, what we're seeing across the industry is that most professional AV operations keep the heavy lifting on-premises. The reasons for this are practical: data security, content ownership, and the unforgiving latency requirements of live production, where buffering simply isn't an option. Cloud becomes a tactical resource—something you burst into for surge capacity or to access a specific capability that a hyperscaler handles better than local infrastructure. This isn't a failure to adopt; it's a mature recognition that Pro AV workloads have structural constraints that differ from general enterprise IT.

That reality is exactly what shapes our approach at Panasonic. Our KAIROS live production platform is built around the assumption that environments are hybrid by nature and not by compromise—supporting operators who need to integrate content and media sources across multiple formats and infrastructures without being locked into a single deployment model. Our recent partnership with NEP Group, integrating NEP Platform's software orchestration with KAIROS, is a concrete example: enabling live event providers to deploy workflows that move fluidly between traditional and IP-based infrastructure based on what the production actually demands.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Roberto Musso, Technical Director at NDI

As organizations continue adapting to hybrid operations and geographically distributed teams, cloud infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important part of modern AV workflows. However, the discussion is often more nuanced than simply moving everything into the cloud.

In many cases, the real value of cloud adoption is flexibility. Organizations can deploy resources more dynamically, support remote collaboration, simplify content distribution, and scale operations without being constrained by fixed physical infrastructure.

At the same time, not every workflow benefits equally from a cloud-first approach. In professional AV environments, operational requirements such as latency, reliability, synchronization, bandwidth availability, and overall system predictability remain extremely important. For this reason, many organizations are adopting hybrid models where cloud and on-premises infrastructures coexist depending on the specific application.

One of the biggest shifts happening across the industry is the move toward software-defined and IP-based infrastructures. Rather than building isolated hardware silos, organizations increasingly want workflows that can adapt over time, integrate different technologies, and operate across multiple locations without forcing a complete redesign of the infrastructure.

This is where technologies such as NDI are helping accelerate the transition. By using standard IP networking and software-driven workflows, organizations can build infrastructures that are significantly more flexible than traditional hardware-centric approaches, while still enabling operation across local, remote, and cloud-connected environments.

This is also changing the relationship between AV and IT teams. Media workflows are no longer isolated systems; they are becoming part of broader enterprise networks and operational strategies. As a result, interoperability, visibility, security, and network management are becoming central considerations for AV deployments.

Another important trend is the growing demand for open and flexible ecosystems. Organizations are increasingly reluctant to lock themselves into a single vendor, workflow model, or deployment architecture. Interoperability is no longer viewed as an optional feature, but as a fundamental requirement for long-term operational flexibility.

Ultimately, the future of AV will likely be defined less by fully centralized cloud models and more by intelligent hybrid infrastructures that combine local performance with the flexibility of distributed and cloud-connected environments.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Shannon Byrne, Vice President of Marketing at NETGEAR Enterpris

The professional AV industry is experiencing its most significant transformation in decades. The shift from hardware-centric, proprietary systems to cloud-managed, software-defined infrastructure is fundamentally changing how AV systems are designed, deployed, and operated—and the pace of that change is accelerating.

For AV and IT teams, the benefits are real and substantial. Remote management eliminates the need for most routine on-site visits. Centralized visibility across distributed installations turns proactive maintenance into standard practice. Auto-discovery and intelligent configuration compress commissioning timelines from days to hours. And the shift from capital expenditure to an operational expense model gives organizations greater financial flexibility, allowing them to scale capacity as needed rather than front-load infrastructure investments.

Perhaps most importantly, cloud-managed AV is finally closing the gap between AV and IT. IT teams gain the management consistency they expect from modern infrastructure, and AV professionals retain the specialized performance their applications demand.

But the opportunity comes with real risks. Cloud readiness is not automatic. Organizations must honestly assess whether their devices, networks, and internet bandwidth are prepared for cloud-dependent workflows, particularly with high-resolution video. Cloud storage costs can also surprise teams accustomed to the economics of local infrastructure. Security architecture requires deliberate design—not an afterthought.

The organizations navigating this transition most successfully treat it as both a technical and a business decision. They ask hard questions about readiness, total cost, and value rather than simply following industry momentum.

The future of AV is cloud-managed and software-defined: Getting there strategically is what separates the organizations that benefit most from those that struggle.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Aaron Rollins, Vice President of Product Management and Customer Experience at BrightSign

As AI creates possibilities for more customizable digital signage content, from personalized recommendations to real-time data overlays, the pressure grows for AV technology managers to oversee more endpoints and keep content running smoothly. Cloud platforms make these advanced deployments more manageable.

Running multiple screens from one cloud-based solution is the current baseline, but AI pushes it even further. Predictive alerts let AV managers detect playback issues before customers see a blank screen. Similarly, anomaly detection can identify when one digital signage player from a fleet of thousands drifts out of spec. Meanwhile, remote diagnostics can help resolve issues quickly without sending a repair technician onsite. This helps AV managers scale digital signage deployments at a lower operating cost and less manual work.

There are three major factors to consider that can help avoid operational concerns: open APIs, data ownership, and system security.

First, cloud platforms with published, documented APIs are critical. With visibility into how the system talks to itself, AV managers can audit it, integrate it, and transition off of it when needed. While branded as a security feature, closed APIs pose a lock-in risk.

Second, with digital signage players generating telemetry, content performance data, and audience engagement metrics, it’s critical to consider who owns the data and whether it can be exported.

And finally, SSO, certificate management, and role-based access ensure seamless, secure control for a well-managed fleet, minimizing liabilities. And cloud connectivity powered by a secure, reliable operating system ensures consistent performance and maximum uptime.

While AI has the potential to make digital signage deployments more engaging, they also grow increasingly complex. That’s where it’s critical to adopt a cloud platform with the control and visibility these activations will require.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Jim Kidwell, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Audinate

From boardrooms to live concert arenas, AV-over-IP has brought incredible flexibility to AV systems in almost every application. Now that cloud-based solutions have come to the AV world, the decision about when and how to use them should be part of the discussion. Multiple companies, including Audinate with Dante Director and Dante Director Professional, now offer management and monitoring applications that provide superior insights into AV networks, in effect elevating AV systems into the professional IT space. These management solutions are worth considering, as they offer new capabilities for remote device management that can positively affect your daily customer service and support.

Where the cloud is still evolving is the full adoption of production-based workflows hosted entirely in the cloud. Mature solutions for professional broadcast, such as Grass Valley’s AMPP, can provide a fully realized cloud-based broadcast production environment with hardware connectivity, including Dante audio.

Moving production environments into the cloud is a bit of an internal accounting shift for many organizations. It may no longer include as much capital expenditure up front, but will have higher operational expenses as you utilize cloud production systems. This is a shift that can have real financial benefits, as you only pay for the systems when you are actively using them. So, with some up-front budgetary planning, organizations can effectively shift their accounting and make systems more cost-effective and flexible when needed.

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.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Jonathan Gryckiewicz, Business Development Director, Cloud Solutions at Ross Video

Cloud-based AV is reshaping how organizations produce, manage, and distribute video content. One of the biggest trends driving adoption is the convergence of traditional Pro AV with broadcast-quality production. Companies now expect executive town halls, virtual events, and internal communications to deliver the same polished experience audiences see in professional broadcasts. Cloud-enabled workflows help organizations achieve this by supporting remote production, centralized control, and scalable collaboration across teams and locations.

Another major trend is the shift from hardware-focused systems to workflow-focused environments. Modern AV strategies are less about purchasing standalone equipment and more about building flexible ecosystems that integrate production, automation, streaming, and content management. Cloud infrastructure allows organizations to scale resources as needed, reduce reliance on large, on-premises systems, and deploy updates or new capabilities more efficiently.

The benefits are significant. Cloud-based AV environments improve operational flexibility, enable remote collaboration, and help organizations respond faster to changing production demands. IP-based and software-defined workflows also support scalability, allowing companies to expand capabilities without rebuilding entire infrastructures. For many organizations, this can lower long-term operational costs while improving agility and system resilience.

However, there are important cautions. Cloud AV depends heavily on reliable network infrastructure, bandwidth, and cybersecurity. Without proper planning, organizations can face latency, interoperability, or reliability issues that impact live productions and user experience. Vendor lock-in is another growing concern, making open standards and interoperable platforms increasingly important when evaluating long-term AV strategies.

Ultimately, successful cloud AV adoption requires more than simply moving technology online. Organizations that focus on workflow design, scalability, and long-term operational strategy will be best positioned to maximize the benefits of cloud-based production and collaboration.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Kelly Harlin, Director of Solutions Marketing and Commercialization at Sharp Imaging & Information Company of America

The cloud is fundamentally changing the AV landscape, shifting it from hardware-heavy setups to more flexible, software-driven platforms. As organizations adopt hybrid ways of working, AV has become essential to making collaboration feel seamless—whether people are in the office or working remotely. Cloud-based AV makes it easier to connect through video conferencing, shared content, and real-time collaboration tools, helping teams stay engaged and productive from anywhere.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud-based AV is how easily it scales. Organizations can roll out and manage AV across multiple locations without the need for large, upfront hardware investments. They can also adjust capacity as their needs change. With centralized, remote management, IT teams can monitor systems, push updates, and troubleshoot issues from anywhere, reducing downtime and lowering operational overhead.

We are also seeing that innovation drives faster adoption. Technologies like AV-over-IP and cloud-managed platforms are bringing AV and IT closer together, allowing systems to run on standard networks and integrate more easily with business applications. AI is adding another layer of intelligence, powering smarter cameras, better audio, and meeting spaces that can configure themselves. At the same time, open APIs are making it easier to build more connected, data-driven ecosystems.

As digital transformation continues to accelerate, cloud-based AV is evolving beyond a supporting tool into something much more strategic, helping organizations innovate, improve engagement, and better support how people work today.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Daniel Renne, Director of Emerging Technologies and Projects at Hall Technologies

Cloud-connected AV is rapidly shifting from a hardware-centric model to a data-centric ecosystem. Historically, the AV industry has lacked meaningful operational intelligence because most devices functioned as isolated endpoints with limited telemetry, analytics, or centralized visibility. As organizations continue adopting hybrid work, distributed campuses, and enterprise-wide collaboration standards, that model is no longer sustainable.

The next evolution of AV in the cloud is not simply remote management; it is intelligent data aggregation. Manufacturers and technology providers should be designing AV and IoT-enabled devices that securely capture operational, environmental, and usage data and route that information into centralized cloud platforms and data warehouses. Once data context exists at scale, organizations can apply AI and advanced analytics to uncover trends that were previously invisible.

The benefits are significant. End users gain deeper insight into room utilization, user behavior, technology adoption, and recurring integration issues. IT teams can proactively identify failures before they impact meetings—while also optimizing lifecycle planning, reducing downtime, and making more informed infrastructure investments. Cloud intelligence also creates opportunities for predictive maintenance, energy efficiency, and more personalized user experiences across enterprise environments.

However, organizations should approach cloud-connected AV strategically. Data governance, cybersecurity, and privacy must remain foundational considerations. Increased connectivity also introduces additional operational costs related to cloud infrastructure, storage, and ongoing device management. The industry must ensure that the value of data intelligence outweighs the complexity and cost associated with collecting and securing it.

Ultimately, AV in the cloud should not just connect devices; it should create actionable intelligence.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Jakub Kolacz, Manager of Product Management Software at Sennheiser

The shift to AV in the cloud reflects both a technological and operational evolution—one where systems are no longer treated as isolated room-based setups but as part of a broader, networked ecosystem. The defining trend is the move to centralized, cloud-based management platforms that provide continuous visibility into device health, configuration, and performance across multiple locations.

A key benefit of cloud platforms is the ability to remotely configure, monitor, and diagnose systems, allowing AV and IT teams to manage deployments proactively. For audio specifically, this means maintaining consistent performance by tracking device health, RF conditions, and firmware alignment from a unified interface. This is especially valuable in hybrid work scenarios, where the expectation is that every meeting delivers a reliable, high-quality experience regardless of location.

At the same time, centralized data unlocks deeper insights into usage patterns, fault trends, and environmental factors, informing better system design and ongoing optimization. Over time, this data foundation supports more advanced capabilities, including AI-driven monitoring and automated corrective actions, shifting teams toward oversight and governance rather than manual intervention.

That said, this transition comes with some important considerations. As AV systems become true network endpoints, they inherit IT-level requirements for security and compliance. Network stability is critical, and without it, the benefits of cloud management diminish. There is also a need for closer alignment between AV and IT teams, as shared ownership of systems can create complexities if responsibilities and workflows are not clearly defined.

Ultimately, cloud-based AV marks a shift from managing individual devices to managing system intelligence—but success depends on balancing innovation with infrastructure.

For more than a decade, AV Technology and Systems Contractor News have joined forces to deliver a full day of hot-topic panels, peer networking, and intimate conversations with vendors at the AV/IT Summit.

If you are a CTO, CIO, AV/IT director, consultant, or integrator, the AV/IT Summit on Aug. 5, 2026, in Times Square, is the must-attend event of the summer.

Space is truly limited, so apply now.

Check out the video below and learn why SCN’s Mark Pescatore and AVT’s Cindy Davis think you need to register to attend.

Designed to Engage, Inform, and Inspire

Our keynote, "The AI Moment for the Collaborative Workplace," delivered by Byron Tarry, founder and chief transformation officer of NΞXXT, is sure to inspire you and challenge your assumptions of AI in the workplace. Tarry will explore how analytics, automation, and intelligent agents can anchor the digital layer of a space, offering the ability to generate insight, optimize performance, and increasingly collaborate with the people who use it.

Pain Points 2026: Bring yours and get answers!

Designing the Modern Higher Ed Classroom: Moderated by HETMA's Joe Way

Broadcast-Level AV for Enterprise and Higher Ed: What you need to know to get started and level up.

The Consultant’s Roundtable: Learn how they can help your organization plan, design, deploy, and manage AV and IT infrastructure solutions—and, of course, simplify the process.

The State of Collaboration: We discuss the new collaboration space and the drivers for high-quality solutions.

The Great AI Debate: We discuss how AI is truly impacting Pro AV.

Better Every Year

“Each year I have been involved with the AV/IT Summit, it gets better and better,” said Cindy Davis, content director for AV Technology. “Last year, we introduced the Pain Points session, and it was so much fun. Attendees bring their top AV/IT pain points, and our panel of experts and other attendees attempt to solve them.”

On a more serious note, our panels cover some of the most important topics in the AV/IT industry today. There’s plenty of networking time to talk further with our speakers, your peers, and the AV/IT Summit vendors to share ideas.

You might think that stating that space is limited is a marketing ploy, but it’s not; we can only accept a limited number of people. Attendees must qualify to attend, so register today!

We look forward to seeing you at the AV/IT Summit!

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Lital Grossman, Executive Director for OpenAV Cloud

The cloud has transformed nearly every corner of enterprise technology. CRM, HR, finance, communications—all managed remotely, integrated seamlessly, and accessible from anywhere. It is now AV’s turn. But unlike those industries, AV is arriving at this moment carrying decades of proprietary infrastructure and siloed thinking.

The opportunity is significant. Cloud-connected AV means IT and facilities teams can monitor device health across hundreds of rooms from a single dashboard, respond to issues before they disrupt a meeting, automate workflows based on room status, and integrate AV systems with the scheduling, collaboration, and security platforms already running the enterprise. For end users, this translates to fewer disruptions, more reliable spaces, and technology that behaves like the rest of the IT stack—predictable, manageable, and scalable.

But the shift comes with real cautions. Not all cloud AV is created equal. Many vendors have moved infrastructure to the cloud while keeping their APIs closed, their data inaccessible, and their ecosystems locked. Organizations risk trading one form of dependency for another—swapping on-premise silos for cloud-based ones.

Security is another consideration that cannot be overstated. AV devices are increasingly IP-connected endpoints, and they need to be treated as such—with proper authentication, encrypted communication, role-based access, and documented protocols that IT and security teams can actually evaluate.

The path forward is openness. Cloud AV that exposes consistent, secure, read-write APIs gives organizations real choice—the ability to integrate best-of-breed solutions, build unified management layers, and avoid lock-in entirely.

The cloud moment for AV is here; the question is whether the industry will seize it openly, or simply rebuild the same walls in a new place.

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?

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Steven Hoenig, Senior Director, Portfolio Expansion Program Management at Legrand | AV

The shift to cloud-managed AV isn’t just a technology upgrade; it’s a fundamental rethinking of how AV/IT teams operate. For institutions and organizations managing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of spaces, the traditional break-fix model has a ceiling. Cloud platforms remove that ceiling.

The clearest benefit is visibility. Cloud-managed infrastructure lets you see early warning signs—unusual power draw, devices going offline, and patterns that precede failure—before anyone picks up the phone. That shift from reactive to proactive fundamentally changes what a small AV/IT team can manage effectively.

Scalability follows naturally. A team of three shouldn’t be limited to what three people can physically touch. Remote power management, automated monitoring, and developer-accessible APIs scale reach far beyond headcount. Automation handles the routine; staff focus on work that requires human judgment.

Energy management is underappreciated. Scheduled power-down routines for high-draw equipment during off-hours yield meaningful consumption reductions—relevant for any organization with sustainability commitments or operating cost pressures.

The cautions are worth noting. Network reliability becomes foundational; monitoring is only as good as your connectivity. Data security and access control require deliberate architecture, especially in sensitive environments. And cloud management without an operational framework generates a lot of data with no clear use for it.

The organizations getting the most out of AV in the cloud aren’t just using new tools; they’re redefining what their teams are capable of.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: John Kruse, Senior Field Solutions Architect at ViewSonic

Cloud is no longer an emerging concept in Pro AV; it’s becoming the operational backbone for how systems are deployed, managed, and scaled.

For many organizations, the primary benefit is visibility. Cloud-based platforms provide centralized monitoring across rooms, buildings, and global campuses, allowing IT teams to proactively identify issues, push updates, and maintain consistent performance without being physically present. This shift is especially valuable as AV footprints expand and support resources remain constrained.

Scalability is another key advantage. New rooms and devices can be onboarded quickly, configurations can be standardized, and updates can be deployed broadly with minimal disruption. This reduces deployment friction and shortens the time between design and usability.

Cloud also enables better data-driven decisions. Usage analytics, system health metrics, and performance trends give organizations insight into how spaces are actually being used—informing future investments and helping justify budgets with real data. Platforms like ViewSonic’s myViewBoard Manager, for example, reflect this shift by enabling centralized, cloud-based device management and remote control across distributed display environments.

However, moving AV into the cloud is not without considerations. Security and compliance must be addressed up front. AV devices are now part of the broader IT ecosystem, requiring alignment with network policies, authentication standards, and data governance practices. Organizations in regulated industries may face additional scrutiny around where data is stored and how it is transmitted.

There is also a dependency on network reliability. Cloud-managed systems assume consistent connectivity, and outages—whether local or upstream—can impact control, monitoring, or functionality.

Ultimately, cloud in AV is less about convenience and more about operational maturity. Organizations that approach it strategically—balancing scalability with security—will be better positioned to manage growing AV ecosystems with confidence.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Petro Shimonishi, Director of New Business Development at Panasonic Projector & Display Americas

The AV industry is undergoing a meaningful transformation, shifting from isolated, hardware-centric systems to open, cloud-connected ecosystems. This evolution is less about moving AV to the cloud and more about extending its capabilities through connectivity, interoperability, and intelligent management.

A defining trend is the move toward open, platform-agnostic systems. As organizations deploy increasingly complex technology stacks, seamless communication across devices is now essential. Historically, proprietary protocols made multi-vendor deployments difficult to manage, which is why industry collaboration is critical. Efforts like the OpenAV Cloud Association are helping drive standardization across device telemetry, cloud-to-cloud communication, security models, and open APIs.

At Panasonic Projector & Display Americas, we’ve embraced this shift as a founding member of the OpenAV Cloud Association and by introducing web-based APIs across our projector and display portfolio. These APIs enable third-party integration and allow external applications to monitor and control devices over IP networks. Through our partnership with XYTE, users gain real-time visibility and remote management.

The benefits of cloud-connected ecosystems are clear: improved system visibility, faster troubleshooting, reduced downtime, and more scalable deployments.

However, there are important considerations. Security and data protection remain top priorities, as connected devices introduce new potential attack surfaces. This is why cloud solutions must incorporate secure communication protocols and rigorous standards such as SOC2 compliance—supported by Panasonic’s ongoing firmware updates and XYTE’s secure cloud infrastructure. Reliability is another concern. That’s why it’s important that Panasonic solutions continue to operate locally, even if the network goes down. Meanwhile, avoiding proprietary lock-in provides long-term flexibility, while clear data policies and total cost visibility support smarter long-term decisions.

Ultimately, cloud-enabled AV should help organizations work smarter and respond faster while staying secure and flexible.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Toine Leerentveld, Director of Product Management, Cloud and Control Services at Crestron

Most conversations about AV in the cloud still focus on what moves where. The more useful question is, what changes about the relationship between vendor, integrator, and customer once the control layer becomes software?

Start with deployment: Cloud-managed AV should reduce the number of people who need to be in the room, literally and figuratively. Crestron built the XiO Cloud platform around that idea, letting one technician provision and monitor a global room footprint from a single dashboard, and turning most truck rolls into remote sessions. The measure of success is not the dashboard itself, but how much faster a new site comes online compared to five years ago.

The control layer is where the bigger shift happens. Crestron Virtual Control (VC-4) can run in a customer's private cloud or existing virtualized environment, scaling from a single room license to enterprise deployments at the customer's pace rather than the vendor's. Growth and upgrades stop being hardware events. That changes the procurement cycle, the refresh cycle, and, eventually, the org chart on the customer side.

Security gets glossed over in this conversation more than it should. Microphones, cameras, and room sensors tied to cloud services create a different threat model than legacy AV. Crestron treats security as a development discipline, with encrypted communications, role-based access, and a real vulnerability response program. The vendors who do the same will pull away from the ones who treat it as a press release.

The last shift is feedback velocity. Software updates ship in weeks, whereas hardware revisions took years, which means a customer request can become a feature inside the same budget cycle. The vendors who actually use that speed will define the next decade of this category.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Adam Sowers, Senior Manager, Business Development at Sony Electronics

Like most areas of modern business and everyday life, AV has shifted to the cloud. As organizations move away from on-prem hardware, AV-as-a-Service (AVaaS) has become a practical, forward-looking model—one that delivers value today while remaining flexible for what’s next.

The benefits are clear. Cloud-based AV improves efficiency, accessibility, and consistency while centralizing visibility and control. Teams gain real-time insight into device health and usage, issues can be identified before they become outages, and the need for on-site maintenance is reduced. Additionally, collaboration becomes more reliable and repeatable across locations.

At the platform level, different solutions serve different roles. Sony’s Device Management Platform (DMP) is purpose-built to manage Sony’s displays, offering device-specific monitoring, control, analytics, and software management that are tightly aligned with Sony hardware. In parallel, Xyte provides an open, hardware-agnostic cloud platform designed to manage devices from multiple manufacturers through a single pane of glass. That openness is especially valuable for organizations and integrators supporting mixed AV environments.

Together, these cloud platforms integrate with content providers to enable seamless digital signage, while cloud collaboration tools support consistent meeting experiences that promote meeting equity. Subscription-based models further simplify budgeting and improve cost predictability.

As with any cloud strategy, success starts with a reliable network, well-defined security and compliance requirements, and alignment with vendors that prioritize interoperability over lock-in.

This is why Sony, Xyte, and other AV manufacturers and technology providers support OpenAV Cloud—an industry initiative focused on driving collaboration, standards, and interoperability for the long-term benefit of integrators and end users.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Joe Andrulis, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at Biamp

The audiovisual industry has reached a pivotal moment. Comprehensive, cloud-based software solutions now deliver what organizations have long sought: a unified platform for managing AV environments throughout their complete lifecycle from anywhere in the world. From initial design concepts through deployment, real-time monitoring, continuous optimization, and daily use, modern cloud-based management platforms provide AV and IT teams with integrated tools at every critical stage. This end-to-end approach reinforces organizations' commitment to connecting people through extraordinary audiovisual experiences across their global operations.

These maturing, cloud-based desktop applications, such as Biamp Workplace, are transforming how AV installers work on-site and remotely, relieving common pressures during installation and commissioning. Built-in intelligent tools enable automated device discovery, streamlined firmware management, and intuitive device configuration. Perhaps most revolutionary is that AI agents are now assisting technicians in configuring devices properly, dramatically reducing setup time and eliminating guesswork during large-scale deployments.

What makes these AV management solutions truly versatile is operational flexibility. Whether teams work fully on premises, remotely, or in hybrid scenarios, the same powerful capabilities remain accessible. Platforms that can support offline or hybrid workflows can also help maintain continuity and momentum regardless of network conditions, supporting productive, consistent workflows. This adaptability means faster commissioning cycles and greater confidence in deployment outcomes, especially for environments that must continue to operate regardless of network conditions.

Ultimately, the holy grail of AV management is within reach: providing organizations with unprecedented control over their entire AV infrastructure at every stage. Whether operating in the cloud, on-premise, or through hybrid architectures, today's comprehensive platforms enable seamless oversight from initial design and deployment through ongoing optimization and support to product end of life—delivering the visibility, efficiency, and reliability that modern audiovisual environments demand.

AVT Question: Please share insights and trends on AV/IT in the cloud, including the benefits and cautions.

Thought Leader: Mohammad Al-Taraireh, Director of Product Management at Shure

As enterprises standardize collaboration spaces across campuses, regions, and hybrid work environments, AV is no longer a one-time room build; it’s becoming a managed service. The shift to cloud-connected AV reflects a broader reality: IT teams are being asked to deliver consistent experiences at scale while keeping systems secure, supportable, and measurable over time.

The biggest benefit of cloud-based AV is not only remote access, but, most importantly, operational control. When devices are connected through a cloud management layer, organizations gain centralized visibility into what’s deployed, what’s healthy, and what needs attention. That makes it possible to apply a fleet mindset: consistent configurations across room types, faster rollout of standardized templates, and proactive monitoring that identifies issues before they disrupt meetings. In practical terms, cloud management reduces truck rolls; shortens time-to-resolution; and helps maintain a predictable user experience, whether a space is a huddle room or a large, divisible conference room.

Interoperability remains essential, especially as Microsoft Teams and Zoom become the standard interface for daily work. Cloud-connected AV can support repeatable designs that align audio performance to certified room environments, helping reduce inconsistency and rework across varied spaces.

However, cloud connectivity raises important precautions. Organizations should evaluate security and governance first, including role-based administration; authentication alignment with IT identity practices; and clear policies for device onboarding, updates, and access control. Network readiness also matters. Segmenting AV endpoints, confirming bandwidth and quality-of-service, and planning for lifecycle management are key to ensuring reliability.

Ultimately, cloud-based AV enables scale without sacrificing control and turns room technology into an enterprise system that can be monitored, governed, and continuously improved.

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.

First, I would like to define the workplace. It is wherever you work. That could be in a corporate environment, a home office, a classroom, an auditorium, a sports venue, a museum, a government office, a transportation facility, a control room, a healthcare environment, hospitality, on the road, or in the field—you name it.

Hopefully, your environment is controlled with the optimal acoustics for speech intelligibility (near and far) and has the ideal lighting so the images on displays are clear. Yes, I know that’s a bold statement, but this is our industry, and if we want our collaboration spaces to enable positive outcomes and enhance productivity, it’s something to continuously work towards.

There’s no doubt that collaboration in the workplace has dramatically changed in the past few years. But this is no longer a conversation about the percentage of employees who are hybrid or remote, or how many days they work in the “office.” Remote participants could be vendors or invited speakers. Collaboration also means sharing content so everyone in the room can clearly view it on the displays, hear all participants, and share ideas.

Collaboration and The AI Factor

Artificial intelligence is a massive topic. It’s akin to talking about the impact of the World Wide Web in the late '80s and '90s, only bigger and more unknown.

At AV Technology, we’re going to home in on the potential and ever-evolving impact AI can have on collaboration in the workplace. My goal is to share ideas, inspire, educate, and sometimes challenge conventional thinking.

We’re launching the AV Technology Thought Leader Series on Collaboration and AI with Byron Tarry. He is the founder and chief transformation officer of NΞXXT, which helps individuals and organizations build collaboration-centric transformation that is measurable, responsible, and built to last. Tarry has more than 30 years in the AV and collaboration technologies realm, including nearly a decade as CEO of global AV integrator GPA. He brings a rare combination of strategic perspective and hands-on understanding of what makes innovation and change stick at scale. He will regularly contribute thought leadership articles for us. And, having spent some time with him, I am sure he will get you thinking outside the box.

Tarry is a frequent speaker on AI and collaboration and will be presenting The SPRINT at InfoComm, a hands-on innovation experience designed to help the AV and collaboration industry learn how to turn AI opportunities into practical outcomes. We connected at Integrated Systems Europe, where he presented on the topic of AI. I invited him to deliver our keynote at the AV/IT Summit in New York City on Aug. 5, The AI Moment for the Collaborative Workplace.

We’re thrilled to welcome Tarry into our circle of trusted contributors.

NOW AVAILABLE! AV Technology Manager’s Guide to AV in The Cloud

24 AV/IT Thought Leaders' insights and trends on AV in the cloud. What are the benefits? Are there any cautions?

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