Should you walked ISE’s flooring this yr you’d have seen the standard spectacle: wall-sized shows, immersive audio demos, and sufficient LED lighting to energy a small metropolis.
However sit down with the individuals deploying this expertise—the integrators managing international rollouts, the enterprise IT groups supporting hybrid work, the schooling leaders attempting to standardise lots of of lecture rooms—and also you hear one thing totally 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 lots of or 1000’s of rooms? How can we add AI capabilities with out creating safety issues we will’t handle? And the way can we make choices at this time that also make sense in 5 years?
UC Right this moment 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 choices towards platform methods that cowl total environments. His framework begins with purposes—audio, video, management—however locations them inside areas like assembly rooms, which collectively kind locations: workplaces, campuses, venues.
Shah described transferring “past particular use instances” towards utilizing knowledge and sensors to create “insights that truly make… outcomes which can be significant for the workplaces that we’re specializing in.”
That pondering 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 ultimate interoperability with Groups. In order that’s been a very long time coming.”
The transfer acknowledges what enterprise IT groups already know: you’ll be able to’t implement platform uniformity throughout suppliers, companions, and inner groups. Combined estates are customary 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’ll be able to’t management what platform the opposite occasion makes use of.
For distributors, interoperability is transferring from a aggressive differentiator to a baseline requirement. Organisations working 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 all over the place at ISE 2026, however the dialog has matured. Not a lot an illustration of generative options, extra scrutiny about what issues AI truly solves and the way organisations govern methods 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 deal with agentic AI—methods that take motion, not simply generate content material. She stated:
“Agentic AI is a unique beast. Brokers can take motion.”
When AI methods can execute duties and make choices autonomously, coverage paperwork aren’t sufficient. Organisations want automated governance and monitoring. Rashidi’s recommendation: “Now outsource your duties, not your vital pondering, vital pondering and your potential to assume independently, assume deeply, assume autonomously, and your potential to discern, so extracting sign from noise are going to be the 2 greatest attributes you’ll be able to preserve.”
The safety implications got here up repeatedly. Promethean Chief Product Officer Lance Solomon was blunt when requested about main challenges in 2026:
“I feel 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 methods act autonomously.
Simplicity and Consistency: The Massive Room Downside
Probably the most concrete themes at ISE 2026 was the place deployment challenges are transferring: to bigger, extra complicated rooms. Logitech’s Nathan Coutinho recognized the shift: “I feel simplicity, consistency, and this wasn’t a difficulty a pair years in the past. It’s extra of a difficulty 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 could be bigger rooms: that includes increased stakes, extra complicated setups, and extra frequent expertise failures. “I feel 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 a 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 lots of or 1000’s of rooms, the precedence is repeatability and manageability over showcase specs. Standardisation and operational tooling matter greater than novelty, particularly for international rollouts the place consistency determines whether or not the deployment succeeds or generates infinite help tickets.
Schooling: Manufacturing Workflows and Safety Pressures
Schooling expertise at ISE 2026 centred on two operational shifts. First, increased schooling 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—rapidly. 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, amenities, infrastructure, and AV/IT groups. She burdened standardisation for scale however warned in opposition to requirements too inflexible to evolve with educating strategies. She defined:
“You possibly can’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 attempting to stay to a normal, however not so inflexible that it could possibly’t evolve and alter with the wants of of the college and lessons.”
What Modified at ISE 2026
The shift at this yr’s present was refined however important. The patrons getting airtime—integrators, enterprise IT groups, and schooling leaders—are asking totally different questions. Not “what’s the newest characteristic?” however “how does this scale?”
Three developments look probably 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 develop into complicated areas the place adoption choices get made. And AI governance will transfer from principle to implementation, with distributors constructing governance capabilities into platforms somewhat than treating it as separate.
ISE 2026 had its share of promoting 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, meaning proving repeatability, not simply innovation. For patrons, the questions that matter aren’t about specs. They’re about what occurs after the set up workforce leaves.
Learn extra from ISE 2026:
