For those who walked ISE’s flooring this yr you’d have seen the same old spectacle: wall-sized shows, immersive audio demos, and sufficient LED lighting to energy a small metropolis.
However sit down with the folks deploying this know-how—the integrators managing world rollouts, the enterprise IT groups supporting hybrid work, the training leaders making an attempt to standardise a whole lot of lecture rooms—and also you hear one thing completely different.
They’re not asking for extra innovation. They’re asking for much less complexity.
The questions at ISE 2026 have been variations on the identical challenges: How can we obtain consistency throughout a whole lot or hundreds of rooms? How can we add AI capabilities with out creating safety issues we are able to’t handle? And the way can we make selections right this moment that also make sense in 5 years?
UC As we speak was on the bottom in Barcelona to seek out out the solutions.
Platform Methods Change Product-by-Product Choices
QSC President Jatan Shah described AV transferring from product-by-product selections towards platform methods that cowl complete environments. His framework begins with functions—audio, video, management—however locations them inside areas like assembly rooms, which collectively type locations: workplaces, campuses, venues.
Shah described transferring “past particular use instances” towards utilizing knowledge and sensors to create “insights that truly make… outcomes which are significant for the workplaces that we’re specializing in.”
That considering appeared repeatedly throughout the present flooring. Prospects need fewer silos, fewer one-off room builds, and a unified administration layer that scales.
The language has shifted from “integrations” to full-stack positioning. For patrons, selecting a platform is now an operational determination, the place supportability, safety mannequin, and lifecycle administration matter as a lot as specs.
Interoperability Turns into Infrastructure
Google Meet’s interoperability with Microsoft Groups launched throughout ISE week. Google Meet Product Lead Quentin Esterhuizen confirmed:
“One [announcement] is our last interoperability with Groups. In order that’s been a very long time coming.”
The transfer acknowledges what enterprise IT groups already know: you possibly can’t implement platform uniformity throughout suppliers, companions, and inner groups. Blended estates are commonplace working actuality. Cross-platform becoming a member of must work with out friction, particularly in customer-facing conferences and multi-tenant buildings the place you possibly can’t management what platform the opposite get together makes use of.
For distributors, interoperability is transferring from a aggressive differentiator to a baseline requirement. Organisations operating a number of collaboration platforms—which is most massive enterprises—will more and more deal with seamless cross-platform becoming a member of as non-negotiable in procurement evaluations.
AI Shifts to Agentic Fashions, and Governance Will get Pressing
AI was in every single place at ISE 2026, however the dialog has matured. Not a lot an indication of generative options, extra scrutiny about what issues AI truly solves and the way organisations govern techniques that may act autonomously.
Keynote speaker Sol Rashidi highlighted the transfer from utilized AI by way of generative AI’s explosion to 2026’s rising give attention to agentic AI—techniques that take motion, not simply generate content material. She stated:
“Agentic AI is a special beast. Brokers can take motion.”
When AI techniques can execute duties and make selections autonomously, coverage paperwork aren’t sufficient. Organisations want automated governance and monitoring. Rashidi’s recommendation: “Now outsource your duties, not your crucial considering, crucial considering and your capacity to suppose independently, suppose deeply, suppose autonomously, and your capacity to discern, so extracting sign from noise are going to be the 2 largest attributes you possibly can keep.”
The safety implications got here up repeatedly. Promethean Chief Product Officer Lance Solomon was blunt when requested about main challenges in 2026:
“I believe the most important is safety, fairly frankly.”
For patrons, this implies treating AI options as a part of threat evaluation, with questions on knowledge dealing with, replace schedules, and the way governance operates when techniques act autonomously.
Simplicity and Consistency: The Massive Room Drawback
One of the crucial concrete themes at ISE 2026 was the place deployment challenges are transferring: to bigger, extra advanced rooms. Logitech’s Nathan Coutinho recognized the shift: “I believe simplicity, consistency, and this wasn’t a problem a pair years in the past. It’s extra of a problem now, as a result of there’s 1000s of convention rooms.”
Coutinho and colleague Neil Fluester argued that huddle and medium rooms are largely solved issues. The problem now’s bigger rooms: that includes increased stakes, extra advanced setups, and extra frequent expertise failures. “I believe the present this yr, there’s two components,” Fluester stated. “It’s iterative and innovation.”
The requirement isn’t higher cameras or extra microphones. It’s consistency: be part of experiences that work each time, rooms that don’t want native experience or instruction playing cards. Coutinho put it plainly:
“You don’t wish to be a human being strolling into an enormous convention room and, oh, look, there’s 15 cameras. This appears to be like like a science experiment, proper?”
For organisations deploying a whole lot or hundreds of rooms, the precedence is repeatability and manageability over showcase specs. Standardisation and operational tooling matter greater than novelty, particularly for world rollouts the place consistency determines whether or not the deployment succeeds or generates limitless help tickets.
Training: Manufacturing Workflows and Safety Pressures
Training know-how at ISE 2026 centred on two operational shifts. First, increased training content material cycles are compressing. AVIXA’s Pam Taggart described establishments capturing classes, producing transcripts and summaries, then redistributing content material in a number of codecs—shortly. Lecture rooms and lecture halls have gotten manufacturing environments the place workflow issues as a lot as {hardware}.
Second, accessibility is transferring from lodging workflows to designed-in approaches. Johns Hopkins College’s Erin Maher Moran emphasised making accessibility purposeful and fewer conspicuous, requiring collaboration throughout networking, services, infrastructure, and AV/IT groups. She careworn standardisation for scale however warned towards requirements too inflexible to evolve with instructing strategies. She defined:
“You may’t put various things in each single room, after which count on that we’re going to have the ability to help that simply. So it truly is about making an attempt to stay to a normal, however not so inflexible that it will probably’t evolve and alter with the wants of of the school and lessons.”
What Modified at ISE 2026
The shift at this yr’s present was delicate however vital. The patrons getting airtime—integrators, enterprise IT groups, and training leaders—are asking completely different questions. Not “what’s the most recent function?” however “how does this scale?”
Three developments look doubtless earlier than ISE 2027. Interoperability will change into a normal procurement requirement—distributors with out credible cross-platform tales will face tougher questions. Massive-room standardisation will speed up as distributors increase into advanced areas the place adoption selections get made. And AI governance will transfer from principle to implementation, with distributors constructing governance capabilities into platforms quite than treating it as separate.
ISE 2026 had its share of selling language, however past the bulletins, the conversations have been about operational capability, safety posture, and whether or not options will nonetheless make sense in 5 years. For distributors, which means proving repeatability, not simply innovation. For patrons, the questions that matter aren’t about specs. They’re about what occurs after the set up staff leaves.
Learn extra from ISE 2026:
