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A few years ago, the AV industry had a visibility problem.

Today, it has a context problem.

That’s a very different thing.

We’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what’s happening in a room. We can tell when a display goes offline, when a camera disconnects, when a firmware update fails, when a room hasn’t been used in three weeks, or when a help ticket gets opened. We have dashboards for all of that. Lots of dashboards!

And that’s the problem.

Because as AV systems get bigger, disconnected operations get more expensive. Not always in obvious ways, either. It shows up as wasted time, slower resolution, unnecessary service calls, frustrated users and rooms people stop trusting.

Knowing something happened isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it.

An alert tells you a device failed. Context tells you it failed after a software update, that similar devices are showing the same behavior, that support has seen this before and that there’s a good chance the issue can be resolved without rolling a truck. That’s valuable. That’s actionable.

Honestly, I think that’s where the industry is headed.

For years we’ve been focused on collecting more data. Every device, every room, every platform generates data now. Tons of it. But most of that information still lives in different places. Service tickets are over here. Device telemetry is over there. Usage data is somewhere else. Room workflows, support history, firmware records, user behavior — all of it exists, but too often it exists in pieces.

So what happens?

Teams spend their time hunting for answers instead of solving problems. They jump between dashboards. They compare notes manually. They troubleshoot the same issue in different rooms without realizing the problems are connected. And meanwhile, the user just knows the room didn’t work when they needed it to.

That’s not a visibility issue anymore.

That’s an understanding issue.

The cloud is starting to change that. Not because “cloud” is some exciting buzzword — we’ve had enough of those — but because it’s becoming the place where all those disconnected pieces can finally come together. Visibility, service history, room usage, device behavior, workflows. Suddenly you’re not looking at isolated events anymore. You’re looking at the full picture.

And that’s where all the AI conversations start getting interesting.

Because AI doesn’t magically create intelligence. It needs context. And in AV, that means clean, connected operational data across devices, rooms, service history and workflows. If all AI can see is one device, it’ll give you a one-device answer. If it can see the room, the service history, the network behavior and everything connected to it, now you’re talking about something useful.

That’s why I don’t think the next chapter in AV is more dashboards.

The next chapter is helping people understand what the data is actually telling them.

Not replacing people. Not “self-healing” everything. I’ve been in AV too long to believe buildings are suddenly going to start fixing themselves! Real environments still need people making decisions.

What technology should do is help those people make better decisions faster.

That’s the opportunity.

The companies that figure this out won’t win because they have the flashiest AI demo. They’ll win because they help customers solve problems faster, keep rooms running longer and spend less time hunting for answers. And that starts with operational context.

It starts with connecting the pieces that have been separated for too long: the room, the device, the service record, the usage pattern, the support workflow and the people responsible for keeping it all running. At the end of the day, nobody is buying dashboards. They’re buying outcomes.

And the next big leap in AV won’t come from collecting more information. It’ll come from finally understanding it.