In case you walked ISE’s flooring this 12 months 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 individuals deploying this know-how—the integrators managing world rollouts, the enterprise IT groups supporting hybrid work, the schooling leaders attempting to standardise tons 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 had been variations on the identical challenges: How will we obtain consistency throughout tons of or 1000’s of rooms? How will we add AI capabilities with out creating safety issues we will’t handle? And the way will we make choices right now that also make sense in 5 years?
UC At the moment was on the bottom in Barcelona to search out out the solutions.
Platform Methods Change Product-by-Product Choices
QSC President Jatan Shah described AV shifting from product-by-product choices towards platform methods that cowl whole environments. His framework begins with functions—audio, video, management—however locations them inside areas like assembly rooms, which collectively kind locations: workplaces, campuses, venues.
Shah described shifting “past particular use circumstances” towards utilizing information 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. Clients 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 consumers, selecting a platform is now an operational choice, 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 possibly can’t implement platform uniformity throughout suppliers, companions, and inside 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 possibly can’t management what platform the opposite occasion makes use of.
For distributors, interoperability is shifting 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 mentioned:
“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 essential pondering, essential pondering and your means to suppose independently, suppose deeply, suppose autonomously, and your means to discern, so extracting sign from noise are going to be the 2 greatest attributes you possibly can keep.”
The safety implications got here up repeatedly. Promethean Chief Product Officer Lance Solomon was blunt when requested about major challenges in 2026:
“I believe the largest is safety, fairly frankly.”
For consumers, this implies treating AI options as a part of danger evaluation, with questions on information dealing with, replace schedules, and the way governance operates when methods act autonomously.
Simplicity and Consistency: The Massive Room Drawback
One of the crucial concrete themes at ISE 2026 was the place deployment challenges are shifting: to bigger, extra complicated 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 could be bigger rooms: that includes increased stakes, extra complicated setups, and extra frequent expertise failures. “I believe the present this 12 months, there’s two components,” Fluester mentioned. “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 need to be a human being strolling into an enormous convention room and, oh, look, there’s 15 cameras. This appears like a science experiment, proper?”
For organisations deploying tons 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 world rollouts the place consistency determines whether or not the deployment succeeds or generates countless assist tickets.
Schooling: Manufacturing Workflows and Safety Pressures
Schooling know-how at ISE 2026 centred on two operational shifts. First, increased schooling content material cycles are compressing. AVIXA’s Pam Taggart described establishments capturing periods, producing transcripts and summaries, then redistributing content material in a number of codecs—rapidly. School rooms and lecture halls have gotten manufacturing environments the place workflow issues as a lot as {hardware}.
Second, accessibility is shifting 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 pressured 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 assist that simply. So it truly is about attempting to stay to a regular, however not so inflexible that it could’t evolve and alter with the wants of of the college and lessons.”
What Modified at ISE 2026
The shift at this 12 months’s present was refined however important. The consumers 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 possible earlier than ISE 2027. Interoperability will change into a regular 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 concept 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 had 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 consumers, the questions that matter aren’t about specs. They’re about what occurs after the set up group leaves.
Learn extra from ISE 2026:
