AV Industry Shifts Towards Direct Execution and Service Ownership

At InfoComm 2026, the AV industry showed that meeting rooms are no longer just displays and codecs, they're becoming edge devices with AI capabilities. Cisco and NVIDIA co-developed RoomOS 26, which brings AI out of cloud services and into the room, where autonomous agents run on-device.

The acquisition of Vega Global by Forté added over 750 employees across 17 Asia-Pacific countries, signaling a shift towards direct execution and away from partner-based coverage. AV Magazine noted that this move is part of a larger trend in enterprise AV, with global companies increasingly buying AV as an operating model with service ownership.

HP's integration of Poly Lens into its Workforce Experience Platform aims to provide IT teams with improved visibility into room performance and device management. Crestron framed the show as evidence that what enterprises want is starting to look more like venue-class operations, with standardized configurations, remote observability, and predictable service outcomes.

Cisco's Webex AI roadmap includes 'agentic' features moving beyond the meeting room, tying collaboration telemetry to customer-facing operations. This raises governance questions about where workloads run, how they are updated, and what data is retained when the network is degraded.