Hi everyone! This is your favorite wrap-up of Day One of InfoComm. Yes, I am posting this a day late. Yes, this will be a trend.

First thing’s first: My day began with sponsor interviews. This was actually most of my day. While yes, people pay for these, I still think they are worth watching. I try really hard to make these not another chance for a sponsor to talk products, but to talk about what they are actually doing in the market. Where they’re differentiating. What they’re learning from their customers. I always learn something from these, so I hope you watch them and learn a little something too!

I really liked all of my interviews on Wednesday, but I have to hand it to Sahil Dhingra at XTEN-AV for allowing me the opportunity to just pick his brain on AI use in our industry and beyond. I have recently become a little stressed about this race to superintelligence and all of these giant data centers appearing everywhere, and the push for quantum computing, etc. etc. (insert dramatic spiral here) (I can talk about that more fully some other time). Sahil was so down to talk about this and gave a great analogy: AI is like fire. It’s a wonderful tool if you can contain it. It can easily become scary if you don’t. The full interview is below:

Gary and I also — of course — bring you an episode of rAVe [TV] in which we interview a few familiar faces about the show and then we bring you around with Gary on the show floor. If you’re at home and haven’t gotten to see what the floor looks like, give it a watch. It’s just the right amount of chaotic that you guys pretty much expect from us at this point.

Finally, we had a few press events! I’m very grateful to my co-worker, Lydia, for covering some of these for me so I could include them in here. I have not quite mastered the art of being multiple places at once.

She first went to AVIXA’s press lunch, which covered:

• Our industry is driven by user demand, and the bar has been raised for user experiences. AVIXA is seeing continued growth despite numerous shocks and challenges.
• An end-user study that followed 1,800 qualified end users with spending budgets. The results showed that more than half plan to increase their budget next quarter, 57% are expecting budget increases going into Q3 and operating costs have gone up, so budgets have to go up.
• ProAV buyers remain resilient and continue to grow despite economic challenges.
• A combination of factors has led to the increase in higher prices for AV materials, but the tariff situation is much calmer than it was 14 months ago.

She also covered a press event with Pliant Technologies — an announcement for the CrewCom Flex Frameless Matrix Intercom Platform. This basically converges wired, wireless and virtual voice communication with a AES67 / SMPTE ST 2110 backbone. It’s also extremely scalable. We have a full story on it here so you can check that out too.

Finally, I ended the day at Crestron, then Shure, then Visionary’s events. I had a very good time, but I did leave all events promptly at 9 p.m. because I was hangry.

And that’s my Day One!