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.

In 2012, I wrote a four-minute children's film, My Garden Pals. The story concerned a female caterpillar (Katie), a child's hammer (Mark), and a child’s saw (Saly) that were left out in the garden to fend for themselves. I was able to get three of my students to record the character voiceovers, and I videotaped their performance in the hopes that a computer science major would be able to lip sync the animated characters and bring the story to life.

Unfortunately, while every student I approached liked the idea, none had the time to commit to animating the 2D (or preferably 3D) comedy. Not being able to find anyone to work on the project, I removed the assets from my hard drive, stored them on one of my backup drives, and stuck it in the closet. There it sat for 14 years.

Back in the Game

Fast forward to December 2025. I just completed an animation project where the boxes and bottles in a medicine cabinet come to life and try to save a tin of Rexall milk of magnesia tablets that had been left on the sink. I had intended to use stop motion animation, but I found it easier to complete the project using AI.

With that project successfully completed, I thought AI would be a great way to bring that old children's film over the finish line. Of course, the first challenge was to find where I put the footage. Eventually, I located the hard drive in a box and copied the video and audio of my former students speaking the lines. Although the audio was recorded in mono (left channel only), and I was able to use Abobe Premiere Pro to make a stereo version.

I had some familiarity with Grok (an AI assistant from xAI), having used it for The Great Rexall Rescue, and decided to use it to bring My Garden Pals to life. I typed in the description of the first character, Katie the Caterpillar. The information in the script said, “Katie was chewing on some grass in the small backyard. She's clearly a female caterpillar because she has a large bow on her one hair. Her eyes are too small for her face, and her mouth is overly large. Tiny, useless arms hang down at her side.”

With this information, I let Grok do its work and generate a still frame. After about 60 seconds, I had more than 50 different examples of what Grok thought my caterpillar should look like. I selected the one that I thought was best.

Watch What You Type

The next step was to type in Katie’s audio and have the animated character speak the words. This I got directly from the script. I would begin with typing, “Create a video having the caterpillar saying…” I made sure I selected the aspect ratio (16:9) and “Fun” or “Normal” for the style of video. After another 60 seconds, I had the caterpillar speaking the exact script.

Each video scenario/shot generated was limited to eight seconds in the free version. Free is no longer an option, as Grok now charges $30 per month, but videos can now be up to 12 seconds in 720p (or 30 seconds in 480p).

The AI-generated video and audio would add a little background music, the dialogue (spoken in a female voice), and end with a music stinger or some expression on the character's face. Several times I had to hit the “Redo” button because it would add bizarre things that I didn't really need.

Once I found what I wanted, I would select “Up Res” to make the footage 1,504x832 at 24p. I’m not sure how it arrived at those specific numbers, but I could use “Scale” under Effect Controls in Premiere to make it larger. At that point, I would download the file. I now had a completed file with video and audio.

Using the previous video just created, I would type in the next line of dialog that Katie the Caterpillar would say. All of Katie's lines in the script were done in one sitting. I found it easier to do all of Katie's shots first, followed by the shots of the other characters.

As I was just typing in the audio and what I wanted the character to do, I also wanted to add reaction shots. When Katie was talking, I may need a reaction shot from Mark the Hammer or Saly the Saw. Again, I would simply type in what I envisioned the other character doing with eye gestures, mouth movements, and expressions and Grok would complete it.

I did all of Mark the Hammer’s shots next. Although he was a slightly mean character, I had envisioned a Wallace and Gromit clay animation look. Putting all this in Grok, it appeared as you see it in the photo, complete with tooth marks on the hammer. The last character, Saly the Saw, was all done at once, too.

This all sounds relatively painless. However, it wasn't quite that easy. Although the version of Grok that I used was free and had no watermark, there were some things I had to work around. For example, I needed several e-mail addresses to login to the software. After several hours of work, I got locked out of the software because I overused my free allotment of time. In my defense, it never told me what my free allotment was.

I had tried other AI software, and you needed carrots or coins that would rapidly disappear as soon as you started working. Then, the software would request you get a license. Also, if I tried to do too much in one sitting, Grok would tell me that the hours of 2-8 p.m. were best suited for my needs, as 8:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. were “peak" hours. I rarely got much work done before 2 p.m. with my teaching schedule, but after 2 p.m. the software was less sluggish. (Again, this has changed with the pay model.)

Audio Obstacles

In animation, you produce the audio first and then worry about the video. This project was done a little differently in that I would type the audio I wanted with the video, remove Grok’s audio, and then insert my own prerecorded audio.

I imported the shots with Grok-generated video and audio intact into Adobe Premiere Pro. Once moved to the timeline, I would take the audio from 2012 and lay it underneath the audio generated by Grok. By soloing my student’s audio, I would match the lip sync with the 2026 visuals.

Usually, it was close because the audio was short. Sometimes, I would either speed up or slow down the visuals to make the lip sync match. The pacing of the AI-generated audio was rarely what I envisioned as a director. But if I put the word “beat” or “pause” in, the AI character would speak the word “beat” or “pause.” Hey, what do you want for free?

One time, when I was adding the dialogue for Saly the Saw, there was a large black cable attached to the back of the saw that moved up and down with her. I didn't want that, so I typed, "Please remove the black cable from the video.” When Grok completed the video, the dialogue was what I had typed in, plus Saly spoke, “Please remove the black cable from the video.”

Even typos would appear as real words. Other times, dialogue would appear as white text on the saw. I clicked the “Redo” button several times before the black cable disappeared and the audio mentioning the black cable was gone, too. Apparently, talking saw characters are difficult for Grok.

Sync or Sunk?

Getting my original audio to exactly match the AI’s audio was my next issue. The only remedy for that was the Razor Blade cutting tool in Premiere. I would get four or five words exactly how I wanted with lip sync, cut the scene, slow it to 83%, and keep it at that speed until the sync would drift. For an eight-second bit of lip sync, there may have been five different cuts and five different speeds.

It took me several weeks to complete the project during the golden hours during which I was allowed to access Grok. Despite the hassles, this whole AI technology is really mind blowing. Considering how Grok could do this for free and I have no artistic skill, this was amazing!

Watching the final project dozens and dozens of times, little issues were corrected, inconsistencies in the characters were fixed, and music and sound effects were added at the appropriate places. Now that I have this film under my belt, I found another short project that I started in 2016 about three young women who are tired of being two dimensional characters and go see a wizard to be converted to 3D characters. Looking forward to seeing how Grok brings that project to life.

Talk to enough people in the AV industry, and you will find broad agreement on one thing: the word AI has been stretched so far it has lost most of its meaning. Automation gets called AI. Rule-based alerting gets called AI. A chatbot bolted onto a monitoring dashboard gets called AI. The enthusiasm is understandable since the technology is genuinely moving fast, but the labeling has gotten ahead of reality, and the industry knows it.

But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We should question inflated claims, but we should also be willing to recognize where AI can genuinely add value. Especially when it comes to operational intelligence, because the accountability gap between AV, IT, and the network is exactly where AI delivers.

Platforms Everywhere, But the Complete Picture is Missing

InfoComm 2026 made clear that the industry has moved on from boxes. A decade ago, the conversation was about whether AV over IP would work. Today, the question is how platforms work together. Every major vendor now has a management layer: room control platforms, audio networking platforms, collaboration platforms, AV management platforms. The market has answered the device fragmentation problem of the last decade by building around software and platforms rather than hardware and point products. That is the right direction.

A New Problem Has Been Created

Each platform sees its own slice of the environment. The collaboration platform knows whether the call is live. The control system knows whether the display is on. The audio platform knows whether the DSP is responding. The network switch knows whether the port is up. But none of them, individually, can tell you why the room is not working. Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and founder of The Collab Collective, put it plainly after walking the InfoComm floor: the single-pane-of-glass pitch, he observed, usually just aggregates noise into one place. That is the "phantomization" problem in a sentence.

The Accountability Gap

When something fails in a converged AV environment, the investigation must cross platform boundaries that no single tool was designed to span. IT owns the network. AV owns the experience. The collaboration platform vendor owns their stack. When something fails, the executive audience does not care which layer caused the issue. They only know the stream glitched, the room did not work, or the CEO could not be heard.

That gap, the space between platforms where operational problems live, is the specific challenge that AI in AV needs to address to be worth the name. Not AI that adds a feature to an existing platform. AI that sits above the platforms and reasons across all of them. Durr's observation from the show floor cuts to it directly: "Monitoring was never the job. Resolution is."

What the Network Sees

The network is the connective tissue between every platform in the room. It is also the layer that most operational AI in AV does not cover. Magic in the room, boring on the network. That is still the goal. But boring depends on active intelligence, not passive infrastructure.

The root cause of an AV failure is often not in the device layer at all. It is upstream: a VLAN misconfiguration, a port that dropped, a Quality of Service (QoS) policy that changed. Even though every platform reports green, the room does not work. Without network-layer visibility, the investigation stays manual, and the blame game thrives.

That is one of the reasons NETGEAR partners with companies like Utelogy, Providius, XYTE, and NetSpeek. We believe network-layer visibility belongs inside the AI's operational context, not alongside it. These kinds of platforms are going to use an AI-native AV operations product to treat the network as a first-class data source.

The industry solved device fragmentation by moving to platforms. That was the right answer to the right problem. The next problem is both holistic and operational: how do you manage an environment that no single platform can fully see? That is the question AI in AV should be answering. When it does, it earns its name.

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.

Situational awareness across defense, public safety, and emergency response operations is built on one critical resource: timely access to accurate visual information. Whether it is an unmanned aircraft surveying a contested environment, a helicopter supporting search-and-rescue operations, or a drone monitoring the spread of a wildfire, video has become one of the most valuable sources of operational intelligence.

But raw video alone is not enough. The value of video lies in how quickly it can be delivered, processed, interpreted, and acted upon. Behind every mission-critical video feed is a complex ecosystem of technologies responsible for encoding, transporting, transcoding, and displaying video across networks that may be bandwidth-constrained, unreliable, or contested. This increases the need for edge-based technologies, which operate directly in the field, closest to where events are unfolding, where timely situational awareness is most critical and connectivity to centralized processing or analysis cannot always be guaranteed.

As missions become more complex and the number of video sources continues to grow, the industry is increasingly turning to AI to help transform video from a passive stream of imagery into actionable insight. When applied correctly, AI enhances existing video workflows; enabling more accurate interpretation, reducing cognitive load on operators, and helping teams focus on the information that matters most.

A Growing Role

Video has become central to modern defense and civilian operations, which increasingly rely on edge‑based personnel to process and act on real‑time video insights even when connectivity to central systems is limited.

In military and defense operations, full-motion video from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), manned aircraft, and ground-based systems provides commanders with real-time insight into evolving situations. These feeds allow teams to monitor troop movements, identify potential threats, and coordinate responses across multiple operational units. At the edge, forward‑deployed teams, UAV operators, and tactical analysts rely on immediate, locally processed video to make rapid decisions under dynamic and high‑risk conditions.

Public safety agencies rely on similar capabilities. Police departments integrate video from helicopters, drones, fixed surveillance systems, and body‑worn cameras to support investigations and real‑time incident management in the field. Fire departments increasingly deploy aerial drones during wildfire response to assess fire behavior, track fire lines, and identify potential risks to firefighters on the ground. Search-and-rescue teams also use aerial video to expand coverage across vast terrain, monitoring these feeds for visual clues that might otherwise go unnoticed from the ground.

What these scenarios share is a reliance on real-time video transport and edge-based processing. Video must move quickly and securely from the field to command and tactical operations centers (TOCs), often across multiple networks and systems. The workflows behind these operations must accommodate different video formats, varying bandwidth availability, and multiple viewing destinations simultaneously.

Video encoders compress and prepare feeds for transmission. Transcoders adapt those streams to different network conditions or viewing platforms. Players and visualization systems allow operators to view, analyze, and share information in real time.

These components work together to ensure that decision makers receive the video they need when they need it. However, as the number of video sources grows, so does the complexity of processing and interpreting them—and in environments where connectivity may be intermittent or constrained, edge processing can make the difference between receiving actionable information in seconds versus minutes.

Video Overload

Operators working in mission-critical environments are often tasked with monitoring multiple video feeds simultaneously. In some operations centers, teams may oversee dozens of live streams at once. During field operations, where fewer video feeds are typically available, the reduced number of video feeds create increased pressure on quick, yet accurate, decision making.

This is where AI is starting to play a bigger role. AI can analyze visual data in real time as well as identify objects or activities, so teams can make faster decisions or use the information later to spot patterns and support investigations. AI-powered video analysis introduces several capabilities that significantly improve how mission-critical video is used.

Object Detection and Recognition: One of the most widely used video-based AI capabilities is object detection using computer vision algorithms. AI models can automatically identify and classify objects within a video stream, such as vehicles, individuals, vessels, or aircraft. Instead of reviewing entire recordings, analysts can quickly locate moments where specific events occurred.

AI‑enabled video analysis enhances mission-critical operations across defense, public safety, and search-and-rescue by rapidly identifying key elements within live or recorded imagery. For example, in military reconnaissance, automated detection can flag even hard-to-see vehicle movement within a surveillance zone, eliminating the need to manually scan hours of footage. During wildfire response, the same capabilities help identify hotspots, vehicles, or structures, giving incident commanders faster insight into emerging risks. For search-and-rescue teams, AI can highlight potential human figures in aerial imagery, dramatically reducing search time in sea rescues, difficult terrain, or other low‑visibility environments.

Metadata Enrichment: AI also enhances video workflows through a process called structured observation management (SOM), which generates additional metadata such as image chips of detected objects, timestamps, geographic coordinates, or movement vectors. When combined with traditional video metadata, it creates a richer data environment that allows operators to search, filter, and analyze video more effectively.

Pattern Recognition and Behavioral Analysis (GEOINT AI): Geospatial intelligence artificial intelligence (GEOINT AI) is the National Geospatial Agency's term for utilizing SOM to enable analysis of patterns and behaviors within geospatial data, including video. For example, a vehicle repeatedly circling a location or an object moving against expected traffic patterns may indicate a situation that requires closer investigation. These capabilities are particularly valuable in large-scale monitoring operations where the environment is constantly changing.

Balancing AI with Security

Another important shift in mission-critical video workflows is the movement of AI processing closer to the edge. In many deployments, this intelligence runs directly on field-deployed encoding systems mounted on vehicles, aircraft, or portable command units.

Rugged edge devices, such as the Haivision Kraken X1 Rugged video processing appliance, illustrate how modern video encoders are increasingly designed not only to encode and transport video reliably, but also to support processing capabilities that help reduce bandwidth requirements and accelerate situational insight. This approach reduces network load while enabling faster insights for operators.

By performing object detection before transmission, systems can prioritize sending only the most relevant information. In many cases, full-motion video no longer needs to traverse constrained networks. Instead, detections, including cropped images of detected objects and metadata, are transmitted to inform which streams should be prioritized for further review.

Despite the clear benefits of AI in video workflows, security remains a primary concern in many mission-critical environments. Defense organizations and public safety agencies often operate under strict requirements governing how information is processed, transmitted, and stored.

The good news is that modern AI implementations do not require data to leave secure environments. AI models can be deployed locally within trusted infrastructure, whether in mobile edge devices, tactical systems, or secured data centers, ensuring sensitive video content remains within controlled networks.

Additionally, AI processing can occur without the need to permanently store video. Systems can analyze incoming footage in real time to generate operational metadata, then discard the raw frames once processing is complete. This approach allows organizations to extract AI-driven insights while reducing data duplication and maintaining strict control over sensitive information.

Encryption, authentication, and secure video transport protocols remain essential components of these workflows. AI should enhance operational capabilities without introducing new vulnerabilities.

Operational Intelligence

The role of video in mission-critical operations will only continue to grow. As drones, sensors, and connected systems become more widely deployed, the volume of available visual data will expand dramatically.

AI will play a key role in helping organizations manage this scale. Rather than simply delivering video from point A to point B, modern video workflows are evolving into intelligent systems capable of analyzing, prioritizing, and contextualizing visual information.

The goal is not to replace human expertise, but to ensure that operators receive the right information at the right moment. In high-stakes environments where decisions must be made quickly, that difference can be critical. By combining real-time video transport with AI-driven analysis, mission-critical organizations are moving closer to a future where situational awareness is not limited by the volume of available data but enhanced by 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.

Learning environments have endured a seismic shift over the past five years, as classroom and instructional models were transformed first through necessity and subsequently through new behaviors and preferences born through change. AV technology has played a substantial role along the way, from bringing physical and remote learners together through UC platforms to enhancing collaboration through streamlined connectivity and control technologies.

AI-based technologies have increasingly played a role in this changing classroom technology landscape, with beamforming microphones and camera tracking technology among the first to make a difference in our evolving education environments. Today, they have become powerful tools to help expand access to spoken word content across languages and models in real time with on-demand subsequent access just as easy (and expected) for the learners to access.

We’ve all become accustomed to live tools on our phones that can caption the words of the person in front of us, including real-time translations, and even re-speaking those words in a language we best understand. These capabilities (and much more) are possible today to help learning become more accessible, efficient, and comprehensible.

Besides all the “magic” AI can bring to maximize learning and understanding, there are also regulations that have been increasing at federal, state, and local levels regarding accessibility. For example, “WCAG 2.1 Level AA” codifies the Department of Justice’s final rule on ADA Title II with respect to online content for public entities, including K-12 districts and public universities. So, in many situations, captioning is required, not just helpful.

Diversity Abounds

The community that makes up an education student body has evolved over the decades. Today, you’ll find students of all ages and from diverse backgrounds as international as any United Nations event. With that comes all manner of hearing abilities and languages—but that doesn’t mean any of those languages are what’s being spoken in the room.

Add to that the art of multitasking by many of today's students, where they slice their time in the classroom (if they’re in a room with others at all) across multiple activities and devices while lectures and classmate conversations unfold. Like me, some prefer to read transcripts rather than watch a video or listen to an audio recording; they may be a faster reader or their setting may just be more conducive to reading a transcript rather than experiencing a lecture in real time.

These are the dynamics that have propelled AI captioning or translation from advantageous to must-have. When evaluating these valuable solutions, buyers should consider aspects such as flexible pricing, ease of setup, accuracy, latency, allowance for custom word libraries, word filtering and substitution, automated indication of speaker change, automated punctuation insertion, a documented API for automation, file-based access to transcripts and sidecar files (used for adding captions to videos), and a live data feed to get captions and translation out to other platforms and systems. That’s quite a list, but they all matter when it comes to performance.

The better AI captioning systems add a grammar filter to know the right spelling (for example, “they’re,” “their,” or “there”), with latencies of three to four seconds for native captions. An additional second or two is acceptable for translations. The field of translation is evolving rapidly and getting better at managing word-order differences between languages.

Voice fingerprinting is also coming along fast. At first, in file-based material, a system could identify someone's voice in isolation so that the AI could ID the voice. It had time to process the file and provide their name along with their captioned words. Now, it’s possible to do this in real time with live captions as people speak, thanks to high-speed GPU processing.

One of the easiest ways to make spoken word content easier for folks in the classroom to absorb and retain is with a caption video display. Tech by companies such as ENCO makes this simple, with a local NUC-type PC running totally on-prem, using no internet, taking a local in-room mic feed, and displaying text captions on a video monitor of any size in real time.

Further, those captions can be sent to mobile sites or apps or other devices and recorded as text transcripts. After all, it's just data. Then, those transcripts can be married with video or audio recordings of the sessions later, making them highly searchable for students who want to go back and review targeted material again. All this can happen while allowing the instructors to upload custom word libraries, so the AI systems have a leg up on knowing about complex or uniquely spelled words and technical jargon.

This same technology is available today to support students who may not speak the native tongue. In some cases, you might need an Internet connection for live translations, but more companies are providing entire on-prem live translation capabilities as well. Users can even display both the in-room language captions and various other live transitions on the same screens or on other screens or devices in the room. (And don’t forget those multi-lingual transcripts.)

Keep in mind that many students also learn remotely. Today's technology can deliver these same live captions to where they learn, while still originating from the room where the little NUC computer resides. However, those captions and translations require relay through a public web server following standard datasec/cybersecurity policies. They can also be passed onto streaming encoders to feed streaming CDNs, a method traditionally closer to the proven CEA-608/708 closed captions that broadcasters use.

The Third Rail

Captions and transcripts are very much the “third rail” of content. When coupled with audio and video (live or recorded), they can be the gateway to identifying essential nuggets of information within hours of long recordings. Searchable transcripts can quickly return results—and with the right content management system, users can instantly link to the point in a recording where something specific was mentioned.

While smaller institutions might need an in-room, off-network portable caption cart for occasional captioning and translation needs, what if there are dozens of rooms that require captions? Not a problem—remember, it's all just data.

A central cluster of campus servers can feed classrooms around a connected campus, employing useful signal routing capabilities such as audio over IP to get in-room audio to the central servers. The same infrastructure can bring the caption text data back to the room to show on a video monitor via a tiny Raspberry Pi or similar small computer, with its web browser looking back to the proper server.

You can also bank transcripts from all the sessions, allowing students to access them later (based on user authentication controls, since not everyone has access to every class). An overall “conductor” application can oversee when sessions are routed to a caption engine where the captions and transcripts can be accessed.

The ability to caption speakers isn’t limited to the lecturer up front, of course, as ceiling-mount or other additional microphones can capture student questions and comments that inevitably take place. Some caption systems can even label the speakers, for example, as "lecturer" and "student."

When learning is paramount, the best educational environments make available the course material and dialogues in as many ways as the learner can absorb. AI tools are there to help make this highly affordable, flexible, and deployable across a variety of situations, buildings, technical environments, and other requirements.

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.

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.

AI capabilities in the AV industry are obviously accelerating rapidly—and with them comes a series of challenges. These include considerations around ethics and transparency about how AI is used, as well as training to ensure that teams across multiple parts of every business are using AI in a responsible way.

While the industry continues to navigate those challenges, it’s important to have some kind of formal accountability framework to keep everyone on the same page. Unfortunately, those frameworks have lagged behind the speed of development of AI tools.

That’s why we were really pleased to see the introduction of a new standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ISO 42001 is the world’s first AI management system standard, and it provides valuable guidance for the fast moving world of AI deployment.

What is ISO 42001?

According to the ISO, the standard is designed to “set out a structured way to manage risks and opportunities associated with AI, balancing innovation with governance.” It specifies the requirements for an organization to establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS) within organizations.

ISO 42001 supports businesses as they consider what they need when rolling out AI. It covers whatever AI tools are being used, as well as how best to manage AI projects, including the assessment and mitigation of risks.

The ISO outlines its target users for 42001 as organizations "providing or utilizing AI-based products or services" and its objective as making sure those organizations have the guidance they need to use AI responsibly and effectively, even while the technology continues to evolve.

Consider all this, we felt it was important for Pleneo to follow the standards set out by ISO 42001, and were pleased to be the first device manufacturer in AV and unified communications to achieve the certification laid out by the standard. But why is it important that not just us but the wider industry adheres to standardization like this? And how does it actually keep companies, particularly tech companies, accountable?

Responsibility and Compliance

One of the biggest considerations for AI adoption is making sure that you’re using tools in line with regulations and in the most responsible way. There are a lot of ethical concerns over the data that’s used to train neural networks and models. If data is from an unverifiable source, there might be issues around ownership or biases being embedded into a final product or service. This unverifiable data is what stops people from trusting many AI products, as does the environmental impact of large AI applications.

The governance around how you use and manage data in your systems also ties into the correct use of AI. The ethical and responsible considerations aside, any organization using AI must be compliant with regulations and legal requirements. As the technology continues to be rolled out, there’s only going to be more regulations on the way.

The ISO 42001 framework, and its adoption of the PDCA—or Plan-Do-Check-Act—methodology ensure that companies are continually reviewing their use of AI data across their business to make sure they’re in line and compliant. For Pleneo in particular, the certification validates the approach we’ve taken to embedding AI technologies within our platforms. We’re not leaning on larger datasets available to public-facing AI tools but are instead processing intelligence locally.

It’s this data processing that the ISO 42001 standard addresses. We know that our use of AI reduces cloud dependency and preserves privacy. And with this standard, we’re able to demonstrate to our users a responsibility with our AI adoption, and that they can trust our AI tools in the same way as any other products in our lineup. Trust is going to be key for the entire industry as AI adoption continues.

Guidance and Opportunity

Businesses across all industries are appointing AI evangelists within their ranks. The AV industry is no different. Regardless of whether they’re new hires or people taking on the mantle within existing roles, many are working with AI for the first time. ISO 42001 provides those people, and organizations more widely, with practical guidance on how to deploy AI in many different ways, and how to mitigate AI-specific risks effectively when they arise.

Handling these sorts of issues more easily opens the door to innovation. Less time spent handling risks means more time taking advantage of the opportunities that AI presents across things like product and service development. That’s what is possible with the right framework in place thanks to the standards outlined by ISO 42001.

For the Pro AV sector, and for modern workspaces in particular, AI is influencing how meetings are prioritized, interpreted, and experienced. Oversight of the technology needs to extend beyond data protection to the integrity and predictability of automated decision making itself.

Formal governance standards like those from ISO will set mature platforms apart from experimental implementations. This is what ensures that intelligent meeting environments are viewed not as emerging technology, but as reliable, accountable enterprise systems.

Beyond singing along to Neil Sedaka in the car, my friend has never been musically inclined. And yet, now he's a published songwriter.

He sent me a link and there it was, a Christmas song. It wasn't him singing, but it was a fully composed song. He wrote the lyrics and a prompt, and an online AI service built his musical vision.

I gotta try this, I thought. Finally, a chance to repair my relationship with AI. Between bad headshots and warped action figures, my AI experiments over the past couple of years, while fun, would probably not land in the win column.

I've always wanted to record music, but I was impeded by my musical limitations. Writing lyrics isn't the problem, and I could carry a tune in a bucket in my younger days. But my drumming is elementary at best, my keyboard work is weak on a good day, and I'm guessing at least two guitar manufacturers would gladly pay me to admit publicly that I don't use their gear. So, to make my rock star dreams a reality, I'd need a band, some sort of recording studio, and a substantial budget to pay for all of that.

Scratch that plan. Enter AI.

First, I needed a song. I've had a song title floating around my subconscious for a while, so I sat down and wrote "Rockin' Chair" in about 20 minutes. If you study the lyrics, you can pick up the subtext of getting older and the loss of youth. But mostly it's an invitation to get busy on the front porch. (Hey, this is rock 'n' roll, not a sewing circle.)

Then, on a lazy Saturday, I went to the Suno website on my personal laptop. It took a few minutes to register, a few minutes more to write a prompt, and maybe two minutes to type in the lyrics. So, let's say I invested about 30 minutes in the process.

Suno spit out several versions of my song in less than a minute. And they were good.

Oh, the cadence was off, and none of them sounded exactly like how I "heard" the song in my head. However, every version had a good beat, background vocals, solid instrument work, and all the spit and polish you'd expect from a hit single.

I literally closed my browser and walked away. Didn't even look at it for more than a week. Honestly, I needed to process what had just happened. In seconds, AI had made my song a reality. I hadn't even plugged in my amp.

At this stage of my life, I have no illusions of becoming a musical sensation. If everything goes right, maybe I'll make tens of cents in royalties from "Rockin' Chair" over the next decade, which will not even cover the cost to use the service for a month. Oh, you can get a taste for free, but if you want to tweak your song and avoid copyright issues, you'll need to spend some money.

But that's not the point, is it? The point is a guy who can only play a few chords on a guitar could publish a toe-tapping tune in less time than it took to write the lyrics.

That said, this is AI, which means it has to learn how to do all this, no doubt using data (read: songs) produced by copyrighted artists. Remember, AI is not about soul, it's about statistical patterns. Essentially, my song is a kernel of creativity wrapped in a cocoon of predictive chunks and synthesized production.

So, is Suno a shortcut? You bet. Does that make it less of a song? I'm not sure. After all, we've been listening to songs built around music samples for decades. One could argue that AI is the next step in that sort of musical evolution. And I have it on good authority that Nashville music pros are using Suno to quickly produce demos (and save a lot of money in the process).

I'm not ready to equate machine learning to inspiration. But I'll say this: I think "Rockin' Chair" is a good song—and without AI, it would have never existed beyond my notepad. Rock on.

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.

In live production, switching happens in the moment. In sports, for example, no one knows what’s coming next—and if the operator misses the shot, it’s gone. Even in news, where rundowns provide structure, switching still has to react dynamically to what’s happening on air.

The pressure hasn’t gone away. But the systems behind it have evolved.

In my previous column, I said that FPGA changed the trajectory of production tools by letting engineers evolve a switcher instead of rebuilding it. Functions that once required fixed hardware can now be designed in software and loaded onto programmable silicon. If something needs fixing, it can be reprogrammed. If requirements change, it can often be reworked, provided the FPGA has been sized correctly.

A production switcher can be built to meet today's requirements. When a customer asks whether the system could also do something it wasn’t originally designed to do, the question becomes whether that capability can be added within the existing architecture.

Cloud With Constraints

Across the industry, business models are under pressure. More content is being delivered over the internet and OTT platforms. Long-established broadcasters are rethinking how they operate. Sports organizations stream directly to audiences, corporate teams run significant production infrastructure, and independent producers put content online every day. The production landscape has grown, and with it, the infrastructure decisions.

Five years or so ago, the industry buzzed about moving everything to the cloud. With income and turnover reducing, many organizations needed to find ways to cut both operating costs and CapEx budgets—and the cloud seemed like the answer. Providers like AWS and Azure offer massive amounts of compute power, so the whole industry began working on virtualizing what we've typically done in hardware and FPGAs.

Some parts of media production made that shift easily. Media playout, for example, has always suited the cloud, Netflix being the obvious example.

But live production is different. The challenge isn't insurmountable, but it's technically complex. Getting multiple feeds into the cloud, producing there, and getting the output back requires compromises, including a lot more compression. Still, if it can save money, people want to make it work.

More recently, early enthusiasm about the cloud has given way to a shift in thinking. Without major advances in technology, putting everything in the cloud remains, for live production at least, something closer to a utopian dream than a practical reality, except at relatively small scales.

Bursting into the Cloud

In live production, systems have always been built for the biggest day—the worst-case size and production need. That means a lot of capacity sits idle most of the time. Every studio in the world is overbuilt on purpose, sized for the maximum need, even though that maximum might only happen a few times a year.

Bursting offers a different approach. Rather than investing in permanent infrastructure to handle rare peaks, the cloud can supplement an existing system when demand briefly exceeds the base setup.

Elections are a good example. A broadcaster may suddenly need additional camera feeds for a few hours or a few days, more than the on-prem system can support. In those cases, extra capability can be added temporarily by bursting into the cloud.

Used this way, the cloud doesn’t replace on-prem systems; it complements them. For many use cases, putting everything in the cloud can end up costing more than running systems on-prem. As a supplement, however, there can be enough affordable horsepower to make it worthwhile.

That’s why the conversation has shifted. It’s no longer about on-prem or cloud, but how to combine the two in a way that fits organizations, workflows, and business models. The hybrid approach will be the real game changer. And as it matures, so will the tools and services that support it.

For most, the future looks hybrid.

First, I must say, from my perspective, InfoComm 2026 was outstanding. The official numbers reported by AVIXA show that attendance was down seven percent from the IC show in Las Vegas in 2024, but you wouldn’t know it from the crowded booths. And when I talked to manufacturers, the overwhelming consensus was that while booth traffic might have been slightly off, there were more focused attendees and fewer tire-kickers. I was pleased to see that the percentage of end-users attending was higher than in previous years.

This was the first InfoComm held in the recently renovated Las Vegas Convention Center. Thank you, thank you, thank you to LVCC for the beautiful new space and air-conditioned hallways, and to AVIXA for creating a great experience. The main lobby was inviting, energizing, and engaging. Not having to walk twenty minutes between halls meant I could see more booths, and I actually had more energy. Rather than being totally wiped on Friday, I had a spring in my step (but that could have been my stormtrooper suit).

AI is No Longer a Buzzword (or two)

I don’t need to tell you that AI is advancing at warp speed. But let’s take it down a notch and relate it to our industry and the positive impact it can have in many areas.

If embraced with intent and the proper context provided, the use of AI assistants, facilitators, or agents in meeting, collaboration, and education spaces can increase productivity.

And, for the moment, let’s forget about hybrid versus all-in at the office, because AI-enabled collaboration spaces apply to all scenarios.

First things first. I think we can all agree that high-quality audio is foundational to the success of AI-enabled collaboration spaces. AI is about receiving clean data to deliver actionable data. Good enough audio is NOT good enough. Josh Blalock, director, Alliances & Engagement at Shure, said, "In the era of AI and particularly as we shift deeper into the agentic side of things, having crystal clear audio being passed from the spoken word into the platform that is processing that transcript and who said what and all that on the back end is 100% in focus and important right now." For anyone thinking that 95% is a pretty good average for accuracy, Blalock countered, "That's 5% that you're missing, and that 5% can change the entire context of what was just said. It could be leaving out who owns a task. If we're not clearly identifying every single person that said something, then the data is not as useful."

If you’re ready to embrace it, AI can be enormously helpful with programming, deployment, troubleshooting, upgrading, and monitoring of systems and devices. And that doesn’t mean eliminating jobs. It’s about making your job more efficient.

Kendra Philips, senior vice president of Sales at Legrand | AV, said, “Our new Unified Cloud Platform brings AI-driven remote monitoring and management to the AV stack, giving integrators visibility, predictive insight, and recurring managed service revenue opportunities that didn’t exist before.”

I stopped by the DVIGear booth to learn more about DisplayNet Connect for AI Agents for AV over IP signal distribution platforms. “We are taking the parts of an AV over IP project that have traditionally required deep API expertise—writing integrations, building control UIs, and debugging issues in the field—and making them accessible through the same AI tools our customers already use every day,” said Steven Barlow, president of DVIGear.

ENCO demonstrated enSpeak as part of a complete multilingual communication workflow that combines live captioning, real-time text translation, and AI-powered voice synthesis into a seamless end-to-end solution.

At InfoComm, the AI-enabled and AI enabler solutions were endless.

Remember, it’s about the data.

Eyes and Ears, Everywhere

The immense number of “videobars” shown at InfoComm this year was, let’s say, noticeable. Actually, it seemed like they multiplied like rabbits. That said, with AI being deployed fast and furious in collaboration and education spaces, the more the merrier. And they’re not all created equal.

Huddly’s C1 Crew is Microsoft Teams certified and comes as a complete kit: one C1 videobar, two Crew Add-On Cameras, cabling, mounting hardware, an Ethernet switch, and runs Edge AI onboard, working as one system. Barco announced the solution with its new wireless room system bundle developed in partnership with Huddly and Certified for Microsoft Teams. The solution combines ClickShare Hub Pro with the Huddly C1 video bar, bringing effortless wireless conferencing and presentation to small to medium-sized rooms.

And, as mentioned, I firmly believe audio is the most important element in a collaboration. At InfoComm, many audio companies upped the ante with new solutions and revisions to already great products.

David Missall, insights manager, consultant, and technical application engineer manager at Sennheiser, said, “Our philosophy is simple: Build flexible, scalable tools grounded in real customer needs and empower users to connect and collaborate through exceptional sound.” This vision included the TeamConnect Ceiling M Plus (TCC M Plus), a new ceiling microphone that combines premium audio performance with a new generation of features designed to reduce deployment effort, simplify system configuration, and scale easily. A new capability included with TCC M Plus is PartnerLink, Sennheiser’s integration feature designed to simplify how microphones are configured within leading AV platforms.

All for One, and All-In-Ones for Everybody

The term “all-in-one” is used freely to describe a combination of technologies engineered into one form factor for ease-of-use for integrators, AV/IT managers and end-users. From display manufacturers to collaboration device and solution companies, there was no shortage of unified solutions.

Display manufacturers often put the “All-in-One” moniker in the product name.

Sony showed its new entry into the category, the Crystal LED UNIFY All-in-One display. "Expanding our portfolio to include a 135-inch All-in-One model helps us meet customer demand, makes our solutions easier to spec and deploy, and serves as the perfect complement and extension to enhance our existing lineup while adding compatibility and consistency across our integrated pro AV family of solutions," said Rich Ventura, vice president, Professional Display Solutions, Sony Electronics.

“From all-in-one dvLED systems to foldable LED displays, we’re rethinking how large-scale displays are installed and maintained, reducing time, effort, and uncertainty for AV and IT managers alike,” said Shane Roma, technical product manager of dvLED and Commercial Displays at ViewSonic.

The Q-SYS RoomSuite Collaboration Bar is a Windows-based device, certified for Microsoft Teams. The solution features four high-resolution 50 MP cameras and a 16-element microphone array and is bundled with an 11-inch touchscreen controller. While it offers standard collaboration features, its true value lies in its integration with the wider Q-SYS Platform via Q-SYS Reflect. "It’s so much more than bar," said Sanjay Kulkarni, VP of Product for QSC. "It’s a context-generating endpoint that feeds into the cognitive cloud layer of our platform, capable of generating insights and actions across the enterprise."

The Ecosystem

Discussing an “ecosystem” has been a growing trend, but I noticed a more expanded role. Why not have your ecosystem talk to my ecosystem and be part of a larger, transparent ecosystem, and so on?

“Xyte is focusing on unified cloud management, automation, and AI-assisted operations,” said Omer Brookstein, chief executive officer and co-founder of Xyte. At InfoComm, the company demonstrated how AV/IT teams can centralize device data, automate routine actions, schedule operational workflows, and use the Xyte CLI to create a consistent, auditable language for people, scripts, and AI agents. “Our philosophy is that AI in AV should not be a demo trick; it should help teams reduce downtime, control cost, improve room readiness, and make every action traceable. The next phase of AV/IT management is not just smarter dashboards; it is governed execution across the full device fleet—from the cloud to the room.”

MDEP

Barco, Crestron, Jabra, Optoma, and QSC were among the many manufacturers that announced products and solutions that included or were built on the MDEP Android-based platform.

The Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) is the Android-based platform from Microsoft that enables device manufacturers and software developers to deliver innovative solutions, backed by Microsoft's reputation for security, trust, and management. Built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the platform is designed to be extended and customized for both hardware and software solutions.

Mark Yang, group CEO at Optoma Corporation, said, "We are thrilled to become part of the MDEP community, which is an important endorsement for Optoma. As part of MDEP, Optoma will focus on developing and evolving a portfolio of enterprise-grade visual solutions designed for shared workspaces, collaboration environments, and digital signage applications—prioritizing interoperability, security, manageability, and scalability."

More Trends

My counterpart in crime, Mark J. Pescatore, SCN’s content director, covered more trends from InfoComm 2026 that you should check out.

While Las Vegas turned up temperatures for InfoComm 2026, the show made its own heat. There was serious energy on the show floor, with plenty of exhibitors, presentations, and experiences to keep attendees engaged. The completed renovations to the Las Vegas Convention Center helped traffic flow between the Work (Central Hall) and Play (North Hall) areas, with free session spaces and other attractions positioned between the two.

[What's the Buzz? How InfoComm Has Changed in Five Years]

First, let's talk about those show numbers. I said it on the show floor and I'll stand by my assessment: Attendance was fine. Not record-breaking, not a disaster. Fine. Normal. Within acceptable parameters.

The official numbers back me up. According to AVIXA, there were 28,132 verified attendees (35,707 total registrants). International attendance accounted for 20% of attendees, with representation from 94 countries. There were also 807 exhibitors.

How does that compare to last year's effort in Orlando, FL? InfoComm 2025 attracted 817 exhibitors, which was down from 833 in 2024. So, yes, there's a small downward trend, but 807 still gave attendees plenty to experience.

Orlando attendance was 30,998, and InfoComm 2024 in Las Vegas was 30,271, which reported 23% international attendance. That little nugget of data is important. Based on these numbers, a quick bit of math shows me the show lost about 1,300 international attendees from the last time we all gathered in Las Vegas, which represents roughly 60% of the attendee loss.

What kept them away? Was it outrageous travel costs? International unrest? The growing popularity of ISE in Barcelona? Methinks it's all of the above.

Speaking of numbers, Michael Sullivan-Trainor, AVIXA’s senior industry analyst, reported during the show that growth in the Pro AV industry has slowed from 5.4% to 3.9%, but it's still ahead of GDP in most countries. Even more encouraging: Pro AV buyers are increasing budget growth expectation this year. Here are a couple of other things I noticed on the show floor.

Don't sleep on virtual production.

If you haven't heard, there's a buzzword gaining momentum in Pro AV: broadcast AV. (You can get some insights from our recent ebook, AV for Broadcast.) During a presentation for media covering the show, Sullivan-Trainor said the growing broadcast AV market is changing the way the industry is looking at delivering AV. In fact, broadcast production rooms that deliver high production values are being adopted across other verticals, including corporate, government, healthcare, education, and more.

According to Trainor, the core principles of broadcast AV include workflows that offer repeatable execution, not just ad hoc operations, with enterprise-first designs that are focused on business teams and are aligned with IT requirements. And virtual production is a "very important" part of the growing broadcast AV market segment. He mentioned one company that embraced virtual production and was producing content 30% faster as well as 40% more content. That kind of ROI is hard to ignore.

Sony gets it. The company has developed a comprehensive virtual production ecosystem, and partnered with Vū Tampa Bay to demonstrate a setup designed for corporate users during the show. The solution featured Sony's CAPRI modular dvLED display, which can be upgraded to a VERONA display with a lower pixel pitch and deeper blacks. Both are purpose-built Sony Crystal LEDs for virtual production. The demo also had a BRC-AM7 PTZ camera with AI integration for tracking and facial recognition.

Jaime Raffone, senior sales manager, virtual production, Sony, said the demand for virtual production at the corporate level is "growing exponentially," because it offers a "very easy point of entry." Many financial and Fortune 500 companies have already adopted virtual production workflows and are now building out their facilities for more complex productions. "Content is still king," Raffone offered, adding that virtual production provides an "easier, more immersive way to build their brand."

A virtual production set was also part of the Smart Workplace, which was powered by FORTÉ and showcased modern office technologies. It was one of three new immersive experiences at the show; there was also the Pitch, powered by Diversified, which provided a look at the modern fan experience, while the Retail Experience demonstrated how Pro AV technologies are influencing consumer engagement in physical retail environments.

Stop trying to bury the projector business.

Yes, the projector business is not en fuego. Robert Ambrose, CEO and co-founder of Caretta Research, took a quick look at the numbers for me. The market is not showing a positive trend; in fact, it's on the decline at a roughly 5% drop annually. But it ain't dead yet.

According to Petro Shimonishi, director of new business development and business transformation for Panasonic Projector & Display Americas, the market oscillates between flat and declining, depending on the year. Except this year—because sales are up. She's seeing customers "boomerang" from dvLED solutions due to the cost and complexities of maintenance issues.

Panasonic is also investing in a new projector technology. VIVID PRIME is a RGB laser light source technology that's designed to eliminate the "rainbow effect" without introducing new imaging issues. The new PT-HTQ20 4K projector is the company's first to feature VIVID PRIME, and is designed to appeal to museums, themed entertainment, and immersive experiences. Shimonishi said the company is also seeing new interest from golf simulation systems that rely on projectors. Obviously, you can't launch a golf ball at a dvLED display—or at least not more than once.

Joel St-Denis, director of project management at Christie, admitted concerts and live events have been "taken over" by LED. However, he said, "There's still growth in certain areas." Fixed installations are a bright spot, particularly with projectors in the 8,000-12,000 lumen market space. St-Denis said these models, including Christie's new Korus Series, are bright enough to punch through ambient light while providing competitive price points.

And then there's projection mapping. Scalable Display Technologies had a patriotic demonstration of projection mapping on a scaled version of Mount Rushmore at its booth. From monuments to historic structures, projection mapping brings existing spaces to life. "I think it's reinvigorating production," said James Pietsch, director of global accounts, Scalable Display Technologies.

ViewSonic launched its LSD Series of laser projectors in May and had three models on display at InfoComm. Jeff Muto, business line director, ViewSonic, said the lumens-per-dollar ratio has improved with the company's third-generation laser technology, so ViewSonic can deliver a more viable product for schools and small businesses. (And yes, they have a dedicated Golf Mode, too. I sense another trend.)

Muto also admitted the professional projector market is "slowing," but with relatively few projector manufacturers in the industry, there's no reason to abandon the technology. And slowing doesn't mean stopped; globally, this is still a multi-billion dollar industry. So, plenty of sales, new technological developments, new products, and new potential markets and applications. Sure doesn't sound like a dead market segment to me.

For years, single-use batteries have been treated as a background issue in Pro AV. They’re small, relatively inexpensive, and easy to replace, so most teams just get on with the job. But ask an audio engineer, stage manager, or facilities technician how many AA or AAA batteries their organization actually uses in a year, and many struggle to answer with confidence.

That’s understandable. Battery consumption builds quietly in the background—a few wireless microphones on stage, some beltpacks, or a handful of in-ear receivers for every rehearsal, show, or corporate presentation. But across live production, broadcast, theater, house of worship, and corporate venues, those numbers add up quickly.

I’ve spent years working in the touring industry. I’ve seen firsthand just how reliant our industry is on disposable batteries. They remain a practical and universal power source for pro audio equipment. That won’t change overnight. But the scale of battery waste today—and the financial and environmental costs attached to it—mean it’s time to think more seriously about how batteries are managed, tracked, and replaced.

A Numbers Game

At my own production company, Sonic City, we operate 74 channels of wireless equipment. In a typical year, that translates to more than 20,000 single-use batteries. That’s a fairly common story for medium-sized touring and production operations.

The wider industry picture is more striking. Norwegian cultural institution Kulturrom estimated several years ago that Norway’s entertainment sector alone uses more than 1 million disposable batteries annually across concert venues, touring productions, theatres, and cultural events.

Norway is a small market.

Scale that globally and the numbers become hard to ignore. In the United States alone, it’s widely estimated that around 3 billion batteries are discarded every year, many of them standard alkaline AA and AAA batteries used in everyday electronics and Pro AV equipment.

It’s not down to an AV integrator or venue manager to solve the global battery crisis. What they can influence is how much they spend on batteries and what their environmental impact looks like.

The first step is tracking battery usage properly. Many teams don’t have enough visibility into how many batteries are being purchased, stored, used, and discarded across productions or facilities. Once those numbers are added up alongside purchasing costs, disposal requirements, and day-to-day operational pressure, battery management becomes a serious business issue.

Integrators, venues, and production teams need to ask the tough questions. Start counting batteries. Estimate annual consumption. Understand the cost attached to that usage. Even a rough baseline can quickly highlight opportunities to reduce waste, simplify workflows, and lower long-term expenditure.

Current Status

The pro audio market offers several approaches to rechargeables. Major manufacturers such as Shure and Sennheiser have developed highly capable proprietary charging ecosystems designed for their own wireless systems. They’re fantastic for reliability and visibility, but can introduce additional cost and lock users in a single vendor environment.

Then you have standard consumer rechargeables. While they’re adequate for low-drain household devices, traditional 1.2V NiMH batteries struggle to meet the reliability needs of demanding professional environments. In live production, there’s no room for uncertainty. A wireless mic dropping out during a service, keynote presentation, or live performance isn’t acceptable.

Those issues are being addressed. Advances in rechargeable battery technology, particularly lithium-ion systems designed for professional use, are helping tackle longstanding concerns around runtime predictability, charging speed, and voltage.

Operational realities are also pushing things forward. Touring crews, venue technicians, and corporate AV teams are expected to do more with fewer people and tighter turnaround times. Reducing last-minute battery runs, simplifying charging workflows, and increasing runtime makes work easier.

Recycling matters, regardless of the battery. A recent EPA report to Congress cited recycling rates for alkaline batteries at just 4%. That means the overwhelming majority end up in landfill, not recovery.

In Europe, the EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542 introduced stricter sustainability, collection, and recycling requirements across the battery lifecycle, including a target to collect 73% of waste portable batteries by the end of 2030. It's a more fragmented story in the United States, but states like California, New York, and New Hampshire have introduced stricter rules around recycling and disposal, increasing pressure on businesses and end users to adopt more sustainable battery practices.

Charging Smarter

Broadcast, music, house of worship, and corporate AV are all environments where battery reliability and operational efficiency matter. Several broadcasters, audio rental companies, and churches in Europe are taking a rechargeable-first approach. Similar thinking is emerging in orchestral environments, where consistency and reliability are essential for rehearsals, recordings, and live performances.

Touring engineers are also looking at the issue from a logistics standpoint. For audio crews working internationally, reducing battery swaps, simplifying charging, and traveling with less gear makes a demanding schedule a little more bearable.

The AV industry has transformed how it approaches remote production, AV/IT workflows, cloud—and yes, AI. Battery management is a practical issue that we’ve been too slow to address. Relying entirely on proprietary systems or single-use power sources in an industry increasingly focused on interoperability and ROI no longer feels sustainable.

The encouraging part is that this is a solvable problem. Better tracking, smarter charging workflows, improved recycling practices, and greater awareness can all make a measurable difference to the bottom line and working culture.

For an industry built on reliability, preparation, and technical precision, battery management can no longer remain an afterthought. The teams that approach it more strategically will reduce waste, lower operational costs, and make day-to-day production workflows easier in the process.

Across modern workplaces, lecture halls, and collaboration environments, AV and IT systems are becoming more closely intertwined. What was a once a simple plug-and-play relationship has transformed into a vast web of interconnected devices, all competing for resources on the network.

This new landscape has led both AV and IT professionals to greater collaboration, but it's not without its challenges. One of the most significant issues is the absence of clear, continuous visibility into how networked technology behaves, especially across multi-site deployments.

As networked audio systems scale across hybrid workforces and multi-building estates, traditional methods of on-site monitoring and room-by-room oversight are unable to keep pace with operational demands. When teams lack a centralized view of device health, configuration status, and performance conditions, they are effectively working blind, leaving them to react to issues only after they disrupt communication.

Emerging Solutions

To address this shift in expectations, the industry has accelerated toward cloud-based device management. Visibility has become the foundation of reliability, enabling teams to anticipate problems instead of responding to them. This visibility helps AV/IT teams to understand their audio infrastructure as a unified living system rather than a series of isolated endpoints. In environments where uptime is essential, the ability to observe device behavior, detect inconsistencies, maintain firmware alignment, and track overall performance from any location has become a defining requirement for successful operations.

A new generation of centralized management platforms is emerging to solve this challenge. These platforms, currently in development across the industry, are designed to unify device oversight into a single, intuitive interface accessible from any location. They enable secure, role-based management across teams and campuses, allowing organizations to organize rooms and devices in ways that reflect how their environments function.

By operating entirely through a web browser, they streamline deployment and remove installation barriers, offering fast, flexible management for integrators, IT staff, and AV teams alike. While these systems represent meaningful progress, their deeper significance comes from how they evolve after launch. Cloud-based platforms do not remain static; they become living ecosystems shaped by the organizations that use them.

Real-time diagnostics, usage patterns, and operational insights create a feedback loop that informs future development. Instead of guessing what features customers may need, developers gain continuous visibility into emerging behaviors and challenges, enabling smarter, more targeted enhancements. Over several years, such platforms often become far more capable than anyone could have forecast at the outset.

Let's Add AI

As cloud-based visibility becomes the norm, the next phase of evolution will be defined by intelligence layered on top of that visibility. Centralized platforms already aggregate telemetry, configuration data, and performance indicators across distributed environments. As these data sets mature, they create the foundation for intelligent systems that can interpret conditions, recognize patterns, and recommend—or initiate—action. Rather than simply presenting status information, future management layers will increasingly function as active participants in system operations, reducing the burden on AV and IT teams and shortening the distance between insight and resolution.

Advances in AI agents and large language model–driven orchestration point toward a future where device management becomes intent-based rather than task-based. Instead of manually interrogating individual endpoints, teams will define outcomes—maintaining audio consistency across rooms, validating system readiness before meetings, or isolating anomalies before users notice them—and intelligent agents will handle the underlying complexity. Enabled by standardized APIs and secure context-sharing protocols, these agents will be able to understand device states, correlate events across vendors and systems, and execute corrective workflows autonomously while remaining governed by enterprise security and authorization policies.

This shift will further blur the traditional boundaries between AV, IT, and building systems. As intelligent management layers gain the ability to reason across audio, networking, control, and collaboration platforms, networked audio will no longer operate as an isolated discipline.

Instead, it will become part of a broader, software-defined environment in which performance, reliability, and user experience are continuously optimized by systems designed to learn and adapt over time. In this context, long-term value will be driven less by static feature sets and more by openness, interoperability, and the ability to participate in intelligent ecosystems that evolve alongside the organizations they support.

As hybrid work continues to expand and distributed learning becomes more entrenched, this shift will influence the entire lifecycle of networked audio deployments. Visibility will become as essential as sound quality, and the ability to oversee devices remotely will be viewed not as an advanced feature but as a baseline expectation. Organizations will invest in systems that can adapt over time, accommodate new spaces and workflows, and provide the kind of real-time intelligence that allows teams to stay ahead of issues rather than chasing them.

The future of networked audio will be defined by platforms that give organizations the ability to understand their environments holistically. When systems can be observed in real time, refined continuously, and secured centrally, collaboration becomes more dependable for everyone who relies on it. In an era where communication is mission-critical, the most transformative advancement is not any single device—it's the ability to finally see the entire landscape and act with confidence.

On Wednesday, June 17, at 9 a.m. PT, the doors to the show floor of InfoComm 2026 will open, and I can hardly wait!

This year, I will be channeling a stormtrooper as I sprint from meeting to meeting, traversing the North and Central Halls packed with more than 800 exhibitors. I’m excited to see the new products and solutions I have been privy to during NDA interviews and the many more embargoed press releases our editors have received.

And of course, seeing people in person is absolutely the best. We've got such a great community.

The AVT Guide

Because the AV Technology Guide to InfoComm contains a great deal of embargoed information, we're putting this together at the 11^th hour. I've just finished proofreading the final pages, which represent the biggest Guide that I have worked on since starting with AVT in 2014.

More than 100 exhibitors are represented through interviews with CEOs and product managers about company roadmaps and the strategies that led to the products and solutions we'll all see on the show floor. The Guide will be released on June 17 at 9 a.m. PT.

You’ll see some common themes that have been a thread for several years. Ease of use, flexibility, and scalability have been the cornerstones of our industry. New and evolving standards hold the promise of interoperability, and then there’s AI.

Is AI ushering in a new convergence for our industry? It is certainly a disruptor, the likes that I don’t think we’ve seen before, and we’re at the precipice. Last InfoComm, most manufacturers were talking about how they were planning to implement AI, and some had solutions. This year, there’s hardly a manufacturer that hasn’t embraced AI in some way, whether through a partnership, creating AI-enabled products, or delivering solutions that work seamlessly with AI platforms.

After the conversations we had with executives to compile the guide, the products that were submitted for it, plus reading the hundreds of Best of Show at InfoComm entries (another record-breaking year), I am excited for the year ahead.

Best of Show

As always, we hire end-users, integrators, and consultants to anonymously judge new products on the show floor. In many cases, two judges will weigh in on a new product. At the last minute, we needed to hire more judges, because we got so many more entries than in previous years. All the judging is done on the first day of the show, and the editorial team stays up all night tabulating and evaluating the comments to announce the winners on Thursday morning.

3 Quick Tips

Airport Badge Pick-Up: Skip lines at the convention center and pick up your badge at the airport at these locations: Terminal 1 Baggage Claim (Across from the Starbucks), or at Terminal 3 Baggage Claim (Near Door 51)

First Time Attendee Guide: AVIXA has put together this handy guide for first time attendees. It’s invaluable!

A New Yorker Approved Deli: While the show floor occupies the North and Central Halls, the sessions and association meetings are being held in the West Hall. If you’ve got a hankering for New York-style deli, Future’s Adam Goldstein highly recommended Siegel’s Bagelmania. Located adjacent to the West Hall on Convention Center Drive, the massive 10,000-square-foot Jewish deli is legendary in Vegas. Hours: Sun-Sat 6:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Kudos to the Las Vegas Convention Center

In January 2026, LVCC opened its newly renovated North and Central Halls. Music to my ears: A climate-controlled indoor concourse now connects the North and South Halls, letting attendees move across the massive 200-acre campus entirely indoors. Dry heat or not, I don’t like the heat, and my new stormtrooper suit isn’t air-conditioned.

AVT Question: Please share insights into your company’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

Thought Leader: Gauthier Renard, Group Product Manager, Meeting Experience at Barco ClickShare

Microsoft Teams Rooms added much-needed structure, security, and consistency to hybrid meetings. But structure alone does not reflect how meetings actually unfold, with people switching rooms at the last minute, external guests arriving with their own laptops, or a customer sending a meeting link for a different platform. When that happens, even well-equipped rooms can let people down.

For users, the friction is immediate: They walk into a Teams Rooms space, but the meeting is scheduled on another platform; they move rooms unexpectedly and cannot access the new room’s audio and video; or, maybe a guest is ready to present but cannot access the company tenant. The meeting does not fail because of poor planning; it fails because real life doesn’t always play out as planned.

The core challenge is not Microsoft Teams Rooms; it is the gap between a standardized room experience and the variety of meetings people actually join. A space that works perfectly for a scheduled Teams meeting can become harder to use when the meeting link is for another platform, the host is an external guest, or someone needs to run the call from their own laptop. Users fall back on cables, workarounds, or urgent support calls, turning small disruptions into recurring delays.

Adding wireless BYOD within a Teams Rooms environment changes that dynamic, allowing structure and flexibility to coexist. The room remains Teams Rooms ready and aligned with IT requirements, while users can join the call from their laptop when the meeting is hosted on another platform like Zoom, Webex, and Google Meet. External guests can also run meetings confidently while maintaining a consistent in-room experience.

As hybrid work matures, flexibility becomes the real benchmark for meeting room success. Solutions such as ClickShare Hub, with wireless BYOD for Microsoft Teams Rooms, help absorb real-world unpredictability without adding complexity. When users trust that a room will support them no matter how the meeting evolves, meetings become truly reliable spaces for collaboration.

Take a moment to consider all the disruptions we are facing in the broader context of the global economy—changing trade policies through tariffs, supply chain challenges linked to conflict in the Middle East, rising energy costs due to the same, climate change, aging workforces, and of course AI.

The last is perhaps the one that the Pro AV industry is contemplating the most. A quick review of the news coming out of NAB provides a firehose of announcements of the next wave of use cases for AI. In fact, there is a good amount to talk about there, as the exact applications within AV solution sets crystalize. We’ll get to that, but first let’s back up a moment. What exactly is the context?

Optimism or Pessimism?

Coming out of a muted 2025, which saw lower growth rates for GDP and Pro AV specifically, has everyone wondering how 2026 might fare. Starting with GDP, IMF estimates show some challenges, particularly once the Iranian conflict is factored in. Growth rates for the Middle East were cut fairly substantially, creating a ripple effect around the rest of the world.

Estimates now show GDP in 2026 growing 3.1%, down from 3.4% last year. This means a weaker context for Pro AV, as arguably there is less capital to be invested overall, even if technology may win a disproportionate share, as it often does.

The counterpoints to a pessimistic outlook aren’t hard to find. A quick search reveals continued growth in corporate profits, historically low jobless claims, low unemployment rates, and robust consumer spending. Each of those provides a good fundamental for Pro AV investment generally speaking.

Economists continue to talk about an experience economy, in which consumers’ discretionary spending shifts to "micro-luxuries." Witness travel, entertainment, and dining related outlays here. The challenging news is that data shows a slower rate of growth in normalized consumer spending since the peak of the pandemic recovery.

The U.S. World Bank estimates for global household consumption numbers are growing at a slower rate over the past several years and into 2026 once the data is normalized to 2015, rising only 2.7% in 2025. As an early indicator of downstream investment in technology, this could portend softness ahead.

Fortunately, since corporate profits are up, even if consumer spending weakens over the near term, there is room for investment, assuming executives do not also become cautious in light of rising costs. One indicator suggesting the contrary is the Purchase Manager’s Index, a gauge of corporate buying intent. As with any similar diffusion index, scores above 50 indicate growth; the Q1 result shows 52.5, a slight increase from last year.

With consumer spending growth down and corporate plans improving, economists suggest we are entering a late-stage economy wherein growth comes from corporate investments to improve operations and gain efficiencies, instead of one driven by consumers. This is perhaps a good sign for Pro AV, though with many projects being driven more by experiences, this is only partially positive.

Evaluating the Outlooks

With context in mind, let’s turn to the actual outlooks. According to AVIXA, 2025 was a low watermark for growth and 2026 will rebound a bit. Caretta Research shows similar, though with a bit more conservativeness. Both put overall Pro AV spending growth closer to 4%. Based on past differences between GDP and Pro AV, these figures may appear a bit low, but not out of keeping with a general climate of concern. A tepid year of growth, with perhaps an upside more toward 5% is reasonable.

Multi-source data from Q1 helps shed light on the trajectory so far. AVIXA’s AV Business Index, a diffusion index based on surveys submitted by AV professionals, shows a slight uptick in March to near 60. Those paying close attention will immediately notice that March is typically the highwater mark for a given year and should be taken with a grain of salt. Though one month doesn’t make the year, the tone that signal sets is a bit of a cautionary tale. Respondents did indicate rising costs as a chief concern, which echo in other data indicating that the impact of tariffs may be finally showing up in the data.

Turning to the Jetbuilt project management platform for AV dealers and installers offers another signal of a strong start to 2026. The total value of projects created on Jetbuilt increased 38% over the same period last year. While some of this is due to just the increasing usage of the platform, that is well above the baseline growth of 15% in project value for 2025. Thus, it is a clear sign of more projects in the pipeline at a higher value.

Here’s the bigger issue—while the average project values are increasing, the percentage of project costs from hardware is on the rise. While it hovered around 40% over the past few years, it shot up more than 50% in late 2025. This puts pressure on integrators from a margin perspective, as more of the revenue is consumed by hardware rather than markups or service. Once again, we have a potential signal of tariff impacts.

Two examples of the hardware cost increases felt by integrators can be found in data from PMA Research, a market research company focused on the display market. While a bit bouncy, the average prices in the Pro AV channel for both flat-panel displays and projectors have shown 10-20% spikes over the past several months. In the case of FPD and dvLED, this occurred in December with slight improvement since.

Projector prices have risen more steadily both for integrators and at the distributor level with increases more in the 25% range. Given that display prices had been dropping over the past several years due to a surge in inventories, this further supports the theory that inventory has diminished to the point where tariff impacts can be felt.

So where does this leave us as we come together at InfoComm to get a renewed pulse on the evolutions in AI? Here’s what we know: The volume and value of projects in the AV pipeline are showing good growth over last year. But project work may be less profitable for the channel as rising hardware costs eat up the budget. This will further require integrators to be creative in how they gain efficiencies to maintain margin.

Fortunately, AI may be poised to help provide process improvements. AI-powered design recommendation tools coming from project management platforms are emerging to help integrators create and deploy reference designs in a more efficient way.

AVT Question: Please share insights into your company’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

Thought Leader: Duncan Miller, Director of Global Marketing at Adder Technology

At InfoComm, we're showcasing more than products and solutions; we're demonstrating how Adder is helping organizations simplify and unify control across complex AV and IT environments.

Adder is driven by a clear philosophy: deliver complete connectivity, exceptional user experiences, and the flexibility customers need to scale and evolve their operations with confidence. As AV and IT infrastructures continue to converge, organizations are looking for solutions that are secure, intuitive, and easily integrated into broader workflows.

A key focus for us has been expanding the openness of our platforms. Through enhanced API capabilities across our portfolio, we're enabling administrators, developers, and technology partners to integrate Adder solutions more deeply into control systems, management platforms, and automated workflows. As organizations look to connect AV, IT, and operational technologies more seamlessly, our APIs provide the flexibility to build tailored workflows that improve efficiency, visibility, and control.

This commitment to interoperability continues with the launch of the ARDx™ Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows third parties to embed high-performance, out-of-band KVM-over-IP capabilities directly into their own applications. Together, our APIs and SDK provide customers and partners with greater freedom to integrate Adder’s technology into the ecosystems that best meet their needs.

We’re also introducing AIM 6, the latest generation of our ADDERLink INFINITY system management software. Developed in response to customer feedback, AIM 6 introduces a redesigned user interface, enhanced accessibility, greater system visibility, and strengthened security features, helping administrators and operators manage increasingly sophisticated IP KVM deployments more efficiently.

Visit Adder at InfoComm 2026 on booth #C5449 to see AIM 6, ARDx, and our range of IP KVM solutions.

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.

AVT Question: Please share insights into your company’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

Thought Leader: Mark Bonifacio, Director, Business Management, Professional Display Solutions, Sony Electronics

At InfoComm 2026, Sony Electronics is positioning its expansive professional AV portfolio around a clear idea: empowering creativity while enhancing spaces. Our booth features displays, dvLED, projection, PTZ cameras, management tools, and partner integrations in real-world environments spanning corporate, education, command and control, retail, broadcast, digital signage, and virtual production, as well as interactive experiences and demos. As the industry transitions from standalone AV hardware toward integrated experiences, Sony is highlighting an ecosystem of solutions and alignments that facilitate communication, connectivity, learning, and engagement while making installations more intelligent, efficient, and adaptable.

Visitors will see new BRAVIA Professional BZ-P Series displays, comprised of 16 models that combine AI-powered XR processing, Deep Black Non-Glare technology, and improved energy efficiency. We’re also expanding our Crystal LED family to prioritize installation speed and accessibility. The S Series targets mid-market environments, and UNIFY provides an All-in-One entry to the portfolio, while CAPRI combines high brightness and anti-reflection, bringing virtual production capabilities to a wider audience.

Sony is also advancing automation and content capture through additions and strategic updates to its PTZ camera portfolio. The compact SRG-AS10 and SRG-XS10 deliver 4K 60p, low-light performance, flexible installation, and broad protocol support. The SRG-AS10 adds AI Auto Framing, including multi-person and basketball tracking, while firmware updates to the SRG-A40/A12 extend AI sports, stabilization, overlay, and facial recognition capabilities.

Complementary and open solutions are also a central focus for Sony. Zero Touch Provisioning, cloud-based device tools, device management, open control support, and mobile access reduce integration friction and simplify operations. At InfoComm, Sony is not simply launching products; it is presenting a connected AV philosophy built around interoperability, sustainability, automation, and practical problem-solving for spaces that work harder, look better, and evolve faster.

AVT Question: Please share insights into your company’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

Thought Leader: Kendra Philips, senior vice president af sales at Legrand | AV

At Legrand | AV, our philosophy is straightforward: customers don’t buy products, they buy outcomes. That belief shapes every conversation we have with integrators, end users, and consultants, and it’s the throughline of our InfoComm 2026 presence under the theme “Where Solutions Live.”

This year, we’re showcasing how our brands work together to solve vertical-specific challenges. In corporate, higher education, government, and commercial retail, the questions aren’t about a single mount, a single switcher, or a single rack. They’re about how the entire AV system performs over its lifecycle. Our roadmap reflects that reality.

Three solutions illustrate where we’re heading. Our new Unified Cloud Platform brings AI-driven remote monitoring and management to the AV stack, giving integrators visibility, predictive insight, and recurring managed service revenue opportunities that didn’t exist before. The new Vaddio SpeakerVIEW redefines automated conferencing, intelligently tracking active speakers without the operator overhead that has historically limited adoption. And Chief continues to push display mounting forward with engineering built for today’s installations, from in-wall and portrait Tempo applications to TiLED trim solutions for dvLED applications.

What ties these together isn’t a feature list. It’s a commitment to building product families that meet integrators where they work and customers where they live. Our roadmap will continue to prioritize interoperability, serviceability, and the kind of design integrity that makes specifying a Legrand | AV solution the right choice years after installation.

AVT Question: Please share insights into your company’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

Thought Leader: Scott Bowditch shares insights into Ross Video’s roadmap for products and solutions to be showcased at InfoComm.

InfoComm is a valuable opportunity to connect with the integrators, consultants, and enterprise leaders shaping the future of corporate AV. Ross helps these teams build reliable, scalable production environments that make high-quality communication easier to deliver.

Sports and entertainment venues need to deliver bigger, more immersive experiences for fans. Ross unified workflows give production teams best-in-class control and flexibility to manage complex live environments and create moments that bring audiences closer to the action. The AVIXA Studio Powered by Ross shows where corporate AV is heading. We’re excited to work with AVIXA to demonstrate practical, broadcast-quality workflows for modern corporate communications.

The distinction between broadcast and professional AV is blurring as the two worlds converge and overlap, creating a new era in content creation that benefits both markets.

Historically, broadcast-quality production required dedicated studios, specialized engineering teams, SDI-based infrastructure, and significant capital investment. Today, many of those barriers are coming down. But the end goal remains the same—to produce high-quality content that looks good, helps deliver important messages, and fosters engagement while being cost-effective and easy to use.

Corporate and education customers are increasingly expected to create, deliver, and distribute high-quality video content at speed, whether for executive communications, training, education, live productions, hybrid events, product launches, or customer and student engagement. As a result, these end users are turning to technologies that combine the reliability and image quality of broadcast with the flexibility and accessibility of AV. This creates new markets, customers, and opportunities for those in both broadcast and Pro AV.

Interest is growing in solutions including budget-friendly studio cameras with expandable future pathways and PTZ options that incorporate the cinematic look, zoom, and AI-based technologies.

The Drivers

Several trends are accelerating this convergence. AV-over-IP is moving video and audio transmission away from dedicated media and cabling toward standard IT networks. This gives organizations more flexible production environments and broader ways to deliver content across rooms, campuses, and remote locations.

At the same time, remote and cloud-based production tools are reducing the need for physical control rooms, fixed studios, and specialized editing suites. Teams can now switch, manage, and edit content from virtually anywhere, lowering both operational complexity and cost.

[Sony Electronics to Launch Two Compact, Lightweight 4K PTZ Cameras at InfoComm 26]

AI-powered capabilities are also playing a critical role. Intelligent features such as AI auto framing, tracking, and enhanced autofocus, seen in Sony’s latest PTZ cameras, are helping non-technical or less-experienced users produce more professional results with less manual input. These capabilities are especially important in corporate, education, and faith environments, where internal teams or volunteers may not have traditional broadcast expertise but still need to deliver polished, consistent content using intuitive technologies.

Video Becomes Central

This evolution is visible in the growing use of PTZ cameras across auditoriums, mixed-use spaces, lecture halls, studios, and meeting environments. Equipment is becoming smarter, easier to deploy, and better suited to multipurpose use cases. Instead of building production around highly specialized facilities, organizations can create scalable video ecosystems that support everything from simple internal messaging to sophisticated live productions.

As video becomes central to how organizations communicate, thought leadership, internal messaging, and education are becoming more dependent on production capabilities. Using the latest technologies, end users can now create high-quality content quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively with fewer barriers and resources, making them better positioned to inform, influence, and engage their audiences now and into the future.

SurveyMonkey recently conducted a study on remote and hybrid work, collecting responses from more than 3,500 U.S. workers. Based on the statistics the company shared, I think we can agree that when it comes to hybrid work, the workforce agrees to disagree.

Between 2017-2018, before COVID-19 introduced us all to face masks and elbow bumps, less than one-quarter of almost 35 million full-time workers had never exercised their option to work from home. In fact, almost half of us had never worked from home at all, according to Statista. As we all remember, things changed quickly.

Now, a little more than six years after the initial shutdowns, the pendulum has swung back the other way, with almost 40% of workers reporting that their “ideal work arrangement” has shifted. In 2025, based on a survey of 849 companies, Resume Templates reported that about 80% of companies were increasing their return-to-office enforcement measures, while about 27% of companies were returning to a five-day, in-office work week.

Why do companies want employees back in the office? The primary reasons, based on the Resume Templates data, were improved collaboration, productivity, and communication. But here’s where it gets a little messy: According to SurveyMonkey’s research, while 23% of workers want more remote work opportunities, 14% want more in-person opportunities. Turns out there’s no one-size-fits-all for this whole hybrid thing.

What draws folks back to the office? Collaboration and improved focus (32%) were highest on the list, with visibility (31%) and higher productivity (29%) not far behind. However, there’s also a healthy dose of personal worry to go with those company-first sentiments.

More than 45% of respondents were concerned about missing the opportunity to build relationships with co-workers. One-quarter of respondents were worried about missing out on unplanned learning with members of the senior team, and one-quarter thought hybrid would lead to declining trust between employees and management.

Remote work has its share of selling points, too. More than half (52%) of respondents noted the lack of a commute, while 44% reported higher productivity levels outside of the office. The majority of remote (72%) and hybrid (68%) workers say remote work provides a better work-life balance. That said, hybrid isn’t always an ideal situation, as about one-third were worried about home and work boundaries.

To summarize, remote workers want to avoid commuting and can be more productive at home, but they've also got career FOMO and can be more productive in the office. Wait, what? Welcome to the joy of statistical analysis, where you can use the same numbers to plead either side of the case.

Gallup recently estimated 26% of U.S. workers in remote-capable jobs are exclusively remote, while 52% are hybrid. Again, there's no official number, and "remote-capable" is open to interpretation, but Neat research from last year indicated more than 32.6 million Americans work remotely. That's about 19% of the civilian labor force, based on March numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now that we've cited stats and research from various sources, what does it all mean? We can talk corporate culture or managerial motivations as much as you'd like—but whether they're happy or worried, you've got more than 32 million Americans who work outside of the office at least part of the time, and more than 6 million of those never work there.

The return-to-office trend may continue, and I'll concede that some workers may head back to the office full time. However, hybrid and remote work opportunities are not going to suddenly disappear, and neither is the workforce's reliance on videoconferencing for conducting internal and external business. Statistically speaking, there are more than 32 million reasons for Pro AV to keep effective and reliable meeting room and collaborative technologies as the top priority at InfoComm this year.

There’s nothing better than a successful deployment of new AV when everything is running smoothly. New auto-framing audio and video conferencing hardware and software connect in-person and remote participants, and a control system automatically initiates a meeting and starts the presentation on display. Participants collaborate, sharing content and video that is seamlessly switched to different displays. It’s AV/IT nirvana.

Until it’s not. We asked AV/IT industry thought leaders about how their company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment, but also on Day 2 and beyond. Below are some excerpts.

For the full interviews, check out the sidebar on the right.

Omer Brookstein, CEO and co-founder at Xyte, said, “The real goal isn’t simply to connect devices. It’s to make AV easier to manage, easier to support, and easier to improve over time. Open cloud connectivity helps organizations monitor mixed fleets more consistently, move data between systems, automate routine tasks, and adopt new tools without rebuilding everything around a single vendor’s stack.”

“We focus heavily on open standards and network-based solutions, said Emma Eagle, manager of Marketing at Hall Research. “When AV technology works the same way other IT systems do, it becomes easier to deploy, manage, and scale across an entire organization—from small meeting rooms to large conference spaces.

“Established customer deployments may require upgrades to maintain long-term interoperability, as the protocols themselves are often evolving,“ Amy Zhou, director of Sales at Magewell, added. “For example, the popular NDI connectivity technology has changed over the years; it’s now on version 6.3 overall, and media formats within it have gone from NDI High Bandwidth to NDI HX, NDI HX2, and NDI HX3. This makes the upgradability of our products crucial for continued interoperability and compatibility.”

Joel Mulpeter, senior director of Product Marketing at Crestron, said, “Our products always need to work with the network—not against it. When we get deployed in a facility, the network exists, and we’re part of that ecosystem, so we ensure that we’re good citizens on that network.”

“By combining manufacturer-agnostic interoperability, robust management, and scalable design, Audinate’s solutions help ensure connectivity that works without friction, every day, at any scale,” said Jim Kidwell, principal product marketing manager at Audinate.“

“At ViewSonic, we approach product development with the full ecosystem in mind,” said Shane Roma, technical product manager of dvLED and Commercial Displays at ViewSonic. “A unified API structure reduces programming complexity, accelerates deployment, and minimizes support calls across diverse installations.”

Effi Goldstein, President of the HDBaseT Alliance, added, “Our commitment to an open, vendor-agnostic standard empowers businesses with exceptional flexibility. Organizations can mix and match products across multiple brands without risking compatibility issues, supporting business continuity, easier maintenance, and long-term investment protection.

“Sennheiser’s commitment to interoperability—across Dante, open APIs, alliance partnerships, and secure cloud management—helps organizations build AV ecosystems that are connected, scalable, and ready for whatever comes next,” said Jakub Kolacz, manager of Product Management Software at Sennheiser.”

Adam Sowers, senior manager of Business Development at Sony Electronics, added, “As a founding member of Open AV Cloud, we help to drive best practices around open ecosystems and interoperability for IP-based integrations, control, and monitoring that work across environments.”

“By prioritizing interoperability at every level, Shure empowers IT teams to deliver collaboration environments that are consistent, intuitive, and scalable wherever work happens,” added Justin Ramirez, senior director of Software Sales at Shure.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Joseph Gagliardi, Product Manager at WyreStorm

Interoperability is one of those things you don’t think about when it’s working—and you definitely think about when it isn’t. Most end users don’t care what’s behind the wall or in the rack; they care that the room behaves the same way every time. They want to be able to plug in, present, hear audio, see video, and get on with the meeting.

What I’ve learned is that connectivity isn’t a one-time setup. Rooms live in the real world where laptops change, operating systems update, and UC platforms roll out new versions. Invariably, someone will swap a display model, or the network team will tighten a policy. The question isn’t whether change will happen; it’s whether the room can handle it without turning every Monday morning into a helpdesk rush.

At WyreStorm, we design for that reality. We build around the standards and workflows people actually use day to day, common interfaces, familiar control methods, and AV distribution approaches that are proven in the field. The aim is simple: fewer special rules, fewer surprises, and a setup that keeps working even when the environment around it evolves.

The other half is what happens after the install. Interoperability stays healthy when people have clear guidance and can get real answers quickly. Good documentation, practical deployment notes, and responsive human support shorten the distance between, “Something changed,” and, “We’re back up.” When that’s in place, nobody thinks about the tech, and the room just does its job.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Mark Boyadijan, Customer Solutions Director at Neutrik Group Americas

The Neutrik Group continues to advance connectivity solutions designed to meet the evolving demands of the AVL industry. Specifying and designing with its trusted brands, NEUTRIK, REAN, and CONTRIK, eliminates the risks associated with non-compliant or uncertified products for a range of AV projects. This ensures safety, durability, and long-term reliability. Where interoperability is critical, standardizing with Neutrik Group connectivity brands provides backward compatibility within product families, with precision tolerances engineered to deliver optimal mating performance cycle after cycle.

As technology trends drive the need for higher data throughput and increased power delivery, Neutrik Group remains committed to developing interconnect solutions that meet or exceed emerging standards. Customers value the confidence that comes from deploying products built to perform in mission-critical environments, including large-scale integrated AV systems. That peace of mind means never having to second-guess the decision to rely on proven connectivity solutions.

With more than 50 years of innovation and industry-defining product designs, Neutrik Group has built its reputation on collaboration and responsiveness. By listening closely to engineers, designers, consultants, integrators, and end users, the company develops solutions that address real-world challenges and withstand demanding conditions. This customer-first philosophy keeps the organization at the forefront of both current and future connectivity requirements.

The Neutrik Group’s leadership in the interconnect industry is not the result of chance, but of continuous partnership and shared innovation, empowering professionals to deliver exceptional experiences across AV, integrated installations, broadcast, and live events worldwide.

Trade shows are among the most powerful opportunities the AV industry has to connect, learn, network, and advance business relationships. Whether it’s InfoComm, ISE, NAB, CEDIA, or a local conference, these gatherings condense months’ worth of conversations, connections, relationship building, and business development into just a few days, making it critical to make the most of these opportunities.

While exhibitors and event hosts invest months in planning, promoting, and preparing for a successful trade show or conference, attendees must also adopt a strategy for success to make the most of their time and energy—or the event will pass by in a flash, leaving them with overwhelming exhaustion and regret.

Attending a trade show effectively is not about how much you do; it’s about how well what you do aligns with your goals. Preparation, intentionality, execution, discipline, and follow through can be the difference between being busy and producing results or simply feeling busy.

Start With Purpose

Before you even register for the event, outline your objectives for attending, identify your "must have" meetings, connections, or conversations. Define what success looks like or what would constitute a good return on investment. Next, document those clear goals and objectives so you can measure outcomes and identify tangible results afterward. Trade shows reward those who prepare.

Without defined objectives, it becomes too easy to get caught up in the excitement of the event and the frenzy of the crowds, have conversations that are more social than business-focused, attend random sessions, and return home having done a lot yet getting little done. With purpose, every conversation and meeting becomes part of a strategy rather than a coincidence.

Whenever possible, schedule appointments with exhibitors, partners, colleagues, and clients in the weeks leading up to the event. Take advantage of opportunities to meet on the show floor, outside the show, or at a social event. Invite them to meet for a meal or coordinate a time to meet at a hotel lounge. Stay on schedule so outcomes and results become routine rather than random. Planning ahead ensures you’re prioritizing meetings with the people and companies that matter most.

It's also critical to be strategic in meeting planning and to map routes across the show floor to make the most of your time, minimize backtracking, and conserve energy. When scheduling times, it's critical to build buffers between meetings and account for "commute" time between booths. Conversations may run long, appointments can be delayed, crowds will slow movement, impromptu conversations happen, and, most importantly, opportunities arise. Leaving breathing room provides scheduling flexibility, keeps stress levels manageable, and creates opportunities for short, valuable breaks.

Being booked from morning to night may sound productive, but it's not sustainable. Understand and stick to limits. It's OK to have downtime, especially when it boosts overall effectiveness. A few minutes to decompress between meetings or time to rest between the day's meetings and evening activities can dramatically improve focus, engagement, and stamina.

Beyond meetings, plan logistics thoughtfully. Make reservations early and stay at a hotel that balances convenience and value while aligning with predefined objectives. For example, if networking is important, stay at a high-traffic hotel. If social activities are a priority, seek out the hot spots. If recharging outside the show is key, stay at a quieter hotel with ample dining options. Hotels near the convention center also reduce steps and commuting time, offering convenience for breaks when needed.

Prioritize What Matters Most

Trade shows offer more opportunities than anyone can realistically handle. Beyond meetings with exhibitors and clients, there are networking opportunities, educational sessions, invitation-only events, social gatherings, and random conversations, all competing for limited time.

The key to intentional prioritization is to remember the goals and objectives first established during the planning process. This means aligning time allocation with business objectives by scheduling the "must have" activities first. Then, plan the next tier of meetings and activities in order of importance. After that, fill in the gaps with nice-to-have appointments to round out the schedule. Be sure to avoid overbooking or scheduling unnecessary events, especially when they could threaten priorities.

Prioritization isn’t only about business goals. It also pertains to personal effectiveness. Many attendees focus solely on time management, but effective trade show participation also requires managing energy and mental bandwidth. Large crowds, loud environments, and information overload can quickly diminish your ability to engage meaningfully.

Through the #HealthyAV movement, first brought to light in 2024, Brittany DiCesare and I shared a personal experience that organically led to a commitment to being our best at trade shows and conferences, and it gained traction in our industry. It applies to anyone and entails recognizing that professional performance at industry events can be directly tied to physical and mental well-being.

Making good choices to treat yourself well, including eating and drinking in moderation, getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, exercising, and recharging when needed, can be a winning formula for being at your best when it counts the most.

Have Fun on Your Terms

Trade shows are among the few times our industry gathers in person, and maintaining connections and relationships matters. Take advantage of opportunities to have fun and socialize. The trick is balancing that value with your broader goals and priorities.

Evenings at trade shows often bring a flood of invitations: receptions, dinners, meetups, parties, and private gatherings. These events can be valuable opportunities to strengthen relationships in a relaxed setting, but they can also consume a lot of time and drain energy.

Instead of trying to be everywhere, evaluate each invitation with priorities in mind. Which events align with objectives? Which relationships would benefit most from face-to-face time? Where is the greatest likelihood of meaningful conversations?

Selective participation leads to greater engagement rather than rushing from event to event just to show up, make an appearance, and gain little value at high cost in fatigue. The #HealthyAV mindset reinforces this approach. When we treat wellness as part of our professional strategy, we show up better for our teams, partners, clients, and ourselves.

Ultimately, the value of a trade show is not measured by how many steps you log, how many booths you visit, or how many people you meet. It’s measured by the actions taken, knowledge gained, opportunities created, and outcomes achieved. By approaching events with intention, preparation, and self-awareness, success becomes a more predictable outcome rather than a matter of chance.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Joey Palkowitch, Director of Commercial Audio Sales at AtlasIED

Interoperability and connectivity are essential to modern AV systems, especially as organizations increasingly rely on networked infrastructure to manage audio across multiple spaces. One of the most effective ways manufacturers support this shift is by embracing widely adopted AVoIP protocols like Dante.

Dante simplifies system architecture by enabling high-quality audio to travel over standard Ethernet networks rather than traditional analog cabling. For integrators, this dramatically reduces installation complexity while increasing flexibility.

AtlasIED’s Atmosphere platform reflects this philosophy. With Dante-enabled DSPs, Atmosphere allows integrators to unify networked audio with powerful, user-friendly control and processing. Designers can seamlessly connect Dante microphones, endpoints, and other third-party devices into the system while still benefiting from Atmosphere’s intuitive configuration and management tools. This ensures that systems remain flexible, scalable, and easy to manage long after installation is complete.

AtlasIED is also Dante-enabled on the loudspeaker level. The Atlas+Fyne Dante-enabled PoE++ loudspeakers combine network audio transport, power delivery, and advanced acoustic performance over a single cable. By pairing Dante networking with IsoFlare point-source transducer technology and onboard DSP, these loudspeakers deliver consistent coverage, high intelligibility, and real-time system monitoring through Dante Controller and network management tools.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Robert Luckey, Consultant Liaison at Ampetronic | Listen Technologies

Everything Ampetronic | Listen Technologies builds, serves our core commitment: connecting every listener to the sound they need to hear clearly, so they can fully engage within their organization and its facilities. Interoperability is how we deliver that connectivity within their network architecture, security policies, and budget at any scale.

Our Wi-Fi-based assistive listening systems (ALS) use a central audio gateway and a venue’s existing wireless network to distribute audio and interactivity well beyond baseline compliance. The economics scale with ALS user load rather than room count. In one building or 100—it’s the same architecture. Our platform authenticates and operates within existing network policies, and, in the most complex architectures, out-of-band service discovery enables transparent roaming across network segments. IT manages assistive listening in the same way they manage everything else.

Ampetronic | Listen Technologies’ newest product line, Auri, implements the forward-looking Auracast broadcast audio standard, enjoying rapid adoption across consumer BYOD devices from hearing aids to earbuds. WAP-like transmitters are the only transmission-side hardware: standard PoE, with no rack space. Broadcasts are one to infinite, low latency, and high quality, with impressive range and peaceful coexistence with Wi-Fi. Auri provides centralized software management while air-gapping end users from the network entirely.

Both platforms support dedicated receivers for compliance alongside BYOD, promoting usage by eliminating stigma. Security configurations adapt to a venue’s policy. Neither requires internet access.

One thing I beg of every designer and specifier: Ensure your AV infrastructure includes an ALS-compatible audio output path, even when assistive listening isn’t in the initial scope. Hold your meeting room audio hardware vendors accountable for providing it. Routable near-end and far-end mixed analog audio is simplest; Dante and AES67 are equally suitable. Build that signal path proactively. Ampetronic | Listen’s technology is ready when your organization is.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

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

Interoperability and connectivity are crucial to how AV professionals design modern systems, as audio and video must move reliably across diverse devices, environments, and architectures.

As AV over IP has matured, Audinate’s products address the growing complexity of connecting large numbers of devices across shared networks. Rather than relying on inconsistently applied open standards or manufacturer-specific standards, Audinate provides a fully supported transport platform that allows products from over 700 manufacturers to communicate consistently. This gives integrators the flexibility to choose the best products for each application while avoiding the limitations of single-vendor systems that can lead to compatibility issues.

Interoperability today also depends on how well AV systems coexist with IT infrastructure. Audinate’s solutions offer visibility into Dante device status, traffic, and performance. Through centralized management, control, and a unified API, IT teams can monitor Dante AV endpoints alongside other networked systems, gaining a clearer, more cohesive view across sites. This simplifies management, improves troubleshooting, and supports closer alignment between AV and IT teams.

Scalability is another critical aspect of interoperability. Products built on Dante deliver consistent performance with backward compatibility, whether deployed in small, single-room systems or across an entire campus or enterprise. They route audio and video flexibly across the network while maintaining synchronization, reliability, and control.

By combining manufacturer-agnostic interoperability, robust management, and scalable design, Audinate’s solutions help ensure connectivity that works without friction, every day, at any scale.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: John Henkel, Product Marketing Director at NETGEAR AV

The AV industry's interoperability problem is misdiagnosed. It's framed as a protocol problem, so the industry responds with more protocols. And yet, deployments still fail in the field.

The actual problem is behavioral. AV systems are predictable by design, with static endpoints, known traffic patterns, and intolerance for timing variation. IT networks are dynamic by nature: Devices connect and disconnect, bandwidth fluctuates, and change is constant. When those two operating philosophies share infrastructure, protocol compliance doesn't prevent conflict.

This matters because it changes what "solving interoperability" actually requires. It’s primarily a people-and-knowledge problem—not a product problem. The deployments that work are staffed by people who understand both disciplines—people who understand why a multicast misconfiguration that an IT team would catch in minutes can go undiagnosed for weeks in an AV context, and vice versa.

That's the investment we made. The NETGEAR Engage Controller, for instance, isn't built on the assumption that every integrator arrives with the same knowledge, because they don't. Someone who wants a validated, protocol-specific starting point gets pre-configured profiles; someone who wants to go deeper gets a fully functioning, enterprise-grade network switch. It’s the same infrastructure with two different on-ramps, and neither one is a workaround.

The partnership work operates on the same principle. When we validate interoperability with a manufacturer, we're not just slapping a badge on it or reading each other’s spec sheets; it means our engineers test against real production conditions. The NETGEAR Training Academy extends that outward, with free training on third-party solutions’ protocols and platforms.

The interoperability gap closes when the people designing, deploying, and managing these systems understand both sides of the equation. And that's a different kind of investment than creating a new product or standard.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Kevin Christopherson, Director of Product Marketing, Hardware Portfolio at Sharp Imaging & Information Company of America

Sharp is a leading worldwide provider of display solutions. These include a robust portfolio of dvLED, large-format, interactive, projection, epaper, and desktop solutions that integrate seamlessly into diverse technology ecosystems, ensuring reliable interoperability and connectivity for customers every day.

At Sharp, we emphasize standards-based compatibility. Our products support widely adopted interfaces such as HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C, and wireless protocols, allowing effortless connection to laptops, media players, conferencing systems, and legacy equipment. This reduces friction in mixed-device environments commonly found in offices, classrooms, and control rooms.

We also incorporate interfaces for network control and management. A majority of our solutions feature LAN connectivity and are compatible with leading control and networking standards. This enables centralized monitoring, remote diagnostics, and control across fleets of devices. IT teams can manage updates, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance remotely.

Furthermore, we enhance collaboration through either built-in or optional wireless casting technologies on select products, allowing users to connect instantly without cables.

Finally, we focus on scalability and reliability. Our solutions are designed to work consistently across single rooms or enterprise-wide deployments, maintaining stable connections and predictable performance.

Together, these capabilities ensure that Sharp’s display solutions fit naturally into existing infrastructures, simplify user experiences, and support uninterrupted communication and productivity.

AVT Question: Please share insights into how your company’s products and solutions help ensure interoperability and connectivity not only on the day of deployment but also on Day 2 and beyond.

Thought Leader: Mitch Rauch, U.S. Sales Director at Powersoft

As audiovisual deployments grow larger and more distributed, system connectivity has become an important consideration for integrators and operators. Today, distributed AV designs increasingly rely on IP networks rather than dedicated signal paths. As a result, integrators have to account for network fundamentals such as IP addressing, VLAN segmentation, and switch configuration. Amplifiers and processors are no longer passive endpoints within a signal chain; they are active, networked devices responsible for routing signals, synchronizing system behavior, and supporting centralized control.

Additionally, device connectivity has further expanded the role of AV infrastructure. Remote management platforms allow integrators and support teams to monitor system performance, diagnose issues, and deploy firmware updates without being physically present on-site. In many cases, system anomalies can be identified and resolved before they affect users, which reduces operational interruptions, limits unnecessary site visits, and supports service strategies built around continuous monitoring and maintenance.

At Powersoft, our product development reflects today's operational realities. Unica and Nota 142 are designed to function as intelligent components within distributed AV ecosystems. Their native cloud connectivity supports remote monitoring and management, while compatibility with standard IT network practices helps simplify deployment across large or multi-building installations.

Connectivity also extends beyond with our AnyMATE communication technology, which enables identification, monitoring, and data exchange directly through existing loudspeaker lines. Its first implementation, SpeakerMATE, allows amplifiers to recognize connected passive speakers and exchange operational data without requiring additional network cabling or external power.

Together, these capabilities help ensure that installed audio systems remain interoperable with today’s complex AV systems and aligned with the increasingly network-driven environments in which they operate.