rewrite this title From Rooms to Experiences: The Biggest Takeaways from InfoComm 2026 – UC Today

InfoComm 2026 was full of AI. That was expected.

The more interesting question was whether any of it will make rooms, workplaces and shared spaces meaningfully better.

Across the show floor in Las Vegas, vendors launched the usual mix of cameras, microphones, displays, headsets, room systems and management platforms. But the stronger theme was not product volume. It was the industry’s attempt to move beyond the room as a fixed AV installation and treat it as part of a wider experience.

The meeting room has become one of the most contested spaces in the modern workplace. It is where hybrid work either functions or falls apart. It is where IT, facilities, AV teams and employees all feel the consequences of bad design. And it is where vendors are now trying to prove that intelligence, automation and interoperability can reduce friction rather than add another layer of complexity.

And InfoComm 2026 suggested, AV’s next phase will not be judged by how many devices are in a room, but by whether those devices help people work, meet, learn and communicate with less effort.

More UC Today Coverage from InfoComm 2026

The best room is the one users don’t have to think about

One of the clearer messages from InfoComm was that the industry is trying to make meeting room technology less visible.

That doesn’t mean less technology. If anything, rooms are becoming more sophisticated. But the ambition is to hide more of that complexity from the user.

HP Poly’s InfoComm portfolio was a good example of that direction. The company used the show to introduce and discuss updates across room compute, software, device management and AI-assisted room design, including Studio Room Compute, VideoOS 5.1 with DirectorAI, Poly Lens integration into HP’s Workforce Experience Platform, and Room Visualiser AI.

Speaking to UC Today, Greg Baribault, VP of Product and Portfolio Management at HP Poly, summed up the direction well:

“We want the conference controller, the microphones, the displays and cameras to just disappear. The room makes smart decisions so people can focus on what they’re there to do — have a meeting, have a discussion, have impact.”

That is a more useful way to think about the “smart room” than simply counting features.

For years, meeting rooms have been sold on capability: better audio, better video, better control, better sharing. But users rarely care about capability in isolation. They care whether the room starts quickly, whether remote participants can follow the conversation, whether the audio works, whether the camera frames people properly, and whether they need to call IT before the meeting can begin.

The strongest room technology at InfoComm was not the most visible. It was the technology trying to make itself uneventful.

AI needs to prove itself in the room

AI was impossible to avoid at InfoComm 2026, but the term itself is becoming less useful.

Almost every vendor can now point to some form of AI in a device, platform or workflow. The more important distinction is between AI that improves the room experience and AI that simply gives a product a more current label.

Jenn Heinold, Senior Vice President of Expositions for the Americas at AVIXA, made that point directly in our InfoComm preview.

“The best AI is an enhancement to AV, and not the other way around. The best AI is what’s making AV more proficient, efficient, and personalized.”

That is the right test for the market.

AI in AV should not be judged by how prominently it appears in a booth message. It should be judged by whether it improves framing, audio pickup, room readiness, diagnostics, accessibility, translation, support or space utilisation.

Heinold also pointed to the practical focus of the show’s AI agenda:

“It’s not about AI in theory. It’s really about coming together, doing workshops and working groups on how to put AI into action.”

That distinction matters because workplace buyers have already heard the big AI story. They do not need another abstract promise about intelligent workplaces. They need to know which problems AI can remove from the working day.

Can it help the room understand who is speaking?
Can it make remote participants feel less like spectators?
Can it alert IT before a meeting fails?
Can it reduce the time spent configuring spaces?
Can it make workplace data more useful without becoming intrusive?

Those are the questions that will decide whether AI in AV becomes operationally valuable or just another upgrade cycle.

The meeting summary is no longer the centre of the AI story

For UC and collaboration, the first obvious wave of AI was meeting notes, summaries and action items. Useful, but limited.

InfoComm 2026 showed that the conversation is already moving on.

The more interesting direction is AI that participates in workflows while work is happening. Microsoft, Cisco and Zoom are all pushing in that direction, with varying language around agentic AI, workflow orchestration and intelligent workplaces.

As we explored in Infocomm 2026: AI Moves Beyond Note-Taking in UC, the next phase is not simply about producing a better record of a meeting. It is about connecting the meeting to documents, tasks, room systems, business applications and follow-up processes.

Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn framed the shift around agentic co-workers:

“AI is creating a new era of intelligent workplaces for organisations of all kinds. The next evolution of AI is here: agentic co-workers designed to help people multiply their impact.”

That remains a big claim. The practical version is simpler: AI has to move from observing work to helping work progress.

For meeting rooms, that could mean surfacing the right content at the right time, adjusting the room based on what is happening, supporting multilingual participation, or turning a discussion into action without waiting for someone to manually tidy up the meeting afterwards.

The risk is that “agentic” becomes another overused category term before the use cases are clear. The opportunity is that rooms become less passive and more responsive to the work taking place inside them.

Interoperability is now part of the experience

One of the more grounded themes at InfoComm was interoperability.

It is easy to treat interoperability as a technical issue, but for users it is an experience issue. A room that works beautifully for one platform and awkwardly for another is not a great room. It is a conditional one.

That is a problem for enterprises because most do not live in a single-platform world. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Webex and other tools all appear across customers, partners, departments and regions. The room has to cope with that reality.

Logitech’s conversation with UC Today at InfoComm focused heavily on this point. The company framed AI-enabled rooms not just around smarter devices, but around rooms that work across the platforms enterprises actually use.

That is where the phrase “experience” becomes concrete. It means fewer failed joins, less user confusion, easier platform switching, more consistent device behaviour and simpler management for IT teams.

The Cisco and Zoom partnership was one of the clearest examples of this becoming a strategic issue rather than a checkbox.

With Cisco Devices for Zoom Rooms, Zoom-standardised organisations can use Cisco hardware while accessing a full Zoom Rooms experience. The partnership also brings Cisco device intelligence, edge AI, ThousandEyes diagnostics and workplace management capabilities into the discussion.

Espen Løberg, VP and GM for the Collaboration Devices business at Cisco, positioned the opportunity as broader than the meeting room:

“It also goes beyond what they can do now in their meeting rooms. It’s about what they can now do across their workplace, the other outcomes they can unlock with Cisco devices, built on top of the Cisco network, the Cisco Assurance capabilities, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Cloud Control.”

Jeff Smith, Head of Product, Workplace at Zoom, said the move was driven by customer demand:

“What we saw was a lot of customer demand for a solution where we could have a full Zoom Meetings experience on Cisco devices. They wanted us to take the next step and really deliver that full Zoom Rooms experience on the highest quality hardware that we could provide.”

The significance is not just that two major vendors are working together. It is that customers are forcing the issue.

They want choice without compromise. They want certified experiences without being boxed in. And they want room technology that reflects how their organisations actually operate.

AV and IT are no longer separate conversations

InfoComm also reinforced something that has been said for years but now feels unavoidable: AV and IT are the same workplace conversation.

That does not mean the disciplines are identical. They are not. AV still requires specialist knowledge of space, acoustics, visual experience, room behaviour and human interaction. But the operational model around AV now looks much more like IT.

Rooms need to be monitored. Devices need to be managed. Firmware needs to be updated. Networks need to be understood. Data needs to be interpreted. Security needs to be considered. Problems need to be identified before users report them.

That shift came through strongly in our conversation with Justin Watts, Global End User Services Lead and Brand Ambassador at AMD.

For Watts, the convergence of AV and IT is not a tension to be managed, but the foundation the modern workplace is being built on.

This is where the move from rooms to experiences becomes more than a headline. You cannot deliver consistent experiences across a workplace if every room is treated as a standalone project. The experience depends on management, visibility and standards.

It also depends on AV and IT teams understanding each other’s priorities. IT brings scale, governance, security and operational discipline. AV brings the understanding of what actually happens in physical spaces.

The best workplace experiences will need both.

Meeting equity remains the real test

The most human test for all of this is meeting equity.

The industry has talked about meeting equity since hybrid work became mainstream. InfoComm 2026 showed that the technology is improving, but also that the problem has not been fully solved.

Smart cameras can frame speakers more effectively. Beamforming microphones can isolate voices. AI noise suppression can remove distractions. Transcription and translation can support accessibility. Analytics can help organisations understand whether spaces are being used as intended.

But meeting equity is not solved by any single device.

A room can have strong technology and still create a poor experience if people at the far end are ignored, if remote participants cannot read the room, if the layout works against participation, or if meeting culture still privileges the people physically present.

That is why one of the most useful lines from the show came from Justin Watts:

“You have to focus on the furthest person in the room. Everyone has to have that meeting equity to participate.”

That should be the test for the smart meeting room.

Not whether it has the latest camera, or whether it has the most advanced microphone array.

The test is whether the person least naturally included in the meeting can still participate properly.

If the answer is yes, the room is doing its job. If the answer is no, the technology has not gone far enough.

The experience agenda goes beyond meeting rooms

The workplace was a major part of InfoComm 2026, but the same shift was visible elsewhere across the show.

Retail, education, live events, broadcast, sports, digital signage and immersive environments all reflected a similar direction. AV is being used less as a standalone display or audio layer and more as part of designed experiences.

That was visible in the show’s Future of Work and Future of Experience framing. It also appeared in discussions around AI-driven retail, data-led signage, live event production, fan engagement, spatial displays and accessible environments.

Heinold captured the buyer mindset neatly:

“I don’t come to InfoComm for just one product. I come to build a space.”

That is an important line because it moves the conversation away from product categories and towards outcomes.

A workplace team is not just buying room devices.A retailer is not just buying signage.A university is not just buying classroom AV.A venue is not just buying production tools.

They are trying to shape how people behave, engage, learn, collaborate or experience a place.

That is why “from rooms to experiences” feels like the right lens for InfoComm 2026. The room still matters, but it is no longer the whole story.

The takeaway from Las Vegas

InfoComm 2026 did not prove that every smart room will be successful, or that every AI feature will be useful.

It did show where the market is heading.

The strongest ideas at the show were not about adding technology for its own sake. They were about making rooms easier to use, easier to manage and more responsive to the people inside them.

That will require better devices, but also better interoperability, stronger AV/IT alignment, clearer workplace data, and a more honest focus on user experience.

Heinold described 2026 as a convergence point for the industry:

“I really feel like 2026 is the year of convergence for AV, IT, broadcast, and AI.”

That convergence was visible across InfoComm, but the challenge now is execution.

The industry has plenty of intelligent products. The harder task is turning them into experiences that feel simple, consistent and worthwhile for the people using them.

That is the real takeaway from InfoComm 2026: AV’s next chapter will not be judged by how smart the room claims to be, but by how much better the experience actually feels.