Stop Buying AV. Start Designing Experiences.

Why the next generation of workplace technology won't be defined by products

AV beyond the meeting room

Nobody wakes up on Monday morning wishing their workplace had more AV. Employees aren't asking for more displays, customers don't visit an office hoping to see a particular model of LED screen, and very few business leaders have a strategic objective to install more audiovisual equipment. Yet this is often where conversations about workplace technology strategy begin. We need a new screen in reception. We need to upgrade the boardroom. We need digital signage. We need some Teams Rooms. We need a video wall.

There is nothing wrong with any of those requirements. The problem is that they describe the technology an organisation thinks it needs rather than what the organisation is actually trying to achieve. Somewhere between recognising a business problem and issuing a purchase order, the objective has a habit of turning into a shopping list.

Perhaps that is something we need to change.

Businesses don't really want audiovisual technology. They want people to communicate more effectively. They want customers to have a better experience. They want employees to find information more easily, meetings to start without frustration, remote colleagues to participate properly and workplaces to function more intelligently. They want training to be more engaging, important messages to reach the right people and technology to help rather than hinder the working day.

AV is simply one of the ways we make those things possible.

The distinction might sound philosophical, but it has very practical consequences. If a project starts with a product, success tends to be measured by whether that product has been successfully installed. If it starts with an outcome, success is measured by whether something has actually become better.

Those are two very different definitions of a successful technology project.

When the specification becomes the strategy

Consider how a typical workplace technology project develops. A business identifies a problem. Hybrid meetings aren't working particularly well, employees aren't seeing important internal communications, a reception area no longer represents the organisation properly, or perhaps a growing company has accumulated several offices containing completely different technology.

Initially, the conversation is about the problem. Then products inevitably enter the discussion and, before long, the requirement has become a specification: a 75-inch display, a conferencing camera, two microphones, six room-booking panels, three digital signage displays and perhaps an LED wall.

At some point the specification becomes the project.

That is understandable. Technology has to be specified, budgeted, purchased and installed. But it is also the moment at which organisations risk losing sight of why they started the project in the first place.

A screen can be technically excellent and communicate nothing useful. A meeting room can contain some of the best cameras and microphones available and still frustrate everyone who uses it. A sophisticated room-booking platform can be deployed across an office without solving the underlying problem of how people use the available spaces. An impressive LED wall can dominate a reception area while contributing surprisingly little to the experience of someone visiting the business.

None of those examples necessarily represents bad technology. In many cases, every individual component may be doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The problem is that the technology has become the outcome.

This is a theme we explored recently when looking at why good AV equipment can still produce poor meeting rooms. The same principle applies much more widely across the workplace. Selecting excellent products is important, but products only become valuable when they have been designed around something people actually need to achieve

Start with what someone should experience

A more useful way to approach workplace technology is to begin at the opposite end of the process. Instead of asking what technology should be installed, ask what somebody should experience.

Take something as simple as arriving at an office.

The conventional AV question might be what size display should sit behind reception. The more interesting question is what a customer, employee or prospective recruit should feel when they walk through the door. Should they immediately understand where they are and where they need to go? Should the environment communicate something about the organisation before anybody has spoken to them? Should technology demonstrate the company's work, reinforce its brand, provide useful information or simply disappear into the architecture?

Once that experience has been defined, the technology conversation becomes much more meaningful. The answer might be a commercial display, LED, interactive technology, digital signage or perhaps something considerably simpler. The important point is that the product has become the consequence of the design process rather than its starting point.

The same applies to a meeting room. The objective isn't to own a sophisticated conferencing system. It is for somebody to walk into the room, understand immediately how it works, start their meeting and communicate naturally with people wherever they happen to be.

A warehouse provides a completely different example. Someone starting a shift doesn't necessarily need another communication platform or another email waiting in an inbox.

They may simply need today's priorities, safety information or operational performance presented clearly in the place where they are actually working.

The technologies in these examples may be completely different, but the principle is identical. Begin with the person, the environment and the outcome. Then decide what technology belongs there.

The workplace is much bigger than the meeting room

The AV industry has understandably spent much of the last few years talking about meeting rooms. Hybrid working accelerated investment in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, cameras, microphones and collaboration platforms. Businesses suddenly needed to connect people working in offices, homes and different locations, and meeting technology became business-critical almost overnight.

That investment was necessary, and meeting environments remain enormously important. But communication doesn't begin when somebody enters a meeting room and stop when they leave it.

Walk through almost any organisation and communication is happening everywhere. It is happening when a visitor enters reception, when employees see an operational dashboard, when a leadership team addresses the wider business, when somebody attends a training session or when colleagues gather informally around a display to solve a problem. It happens through signage and wayfinding, in communal areas, warehouses, factories, showrooms, customer spaces and increasingly between people who aren't physically present in any of those locations.

This is where the definition of workplace AV starts to become much more interesting.

The opportunity isn't simply to make individual meeting rooms better. It is to consider how technology can improve communication across the organisation as a whole.

That changes the conversation considerably. Instead of seeing reception, meeting rooms, digital signage, training spaces and collaboration areas as unrelated AV projects, we can begin to see them as different parts of the same workplace experience.

A workplace isn't a collection of technology projects

Traditionally, workplace technology has often been designed room by room. There is a boardroom project, a meeting-room project, a reception project, a signage project and perhaps a town-hall project. Each has its own budget, equipment and specification.

From an installation perspective, that makes perfect sense.

From the perspective of an employee or visitor, it makes considerably less sense.

People don't experience an organisation as a collection of projects. They experience one workplace.

If joining a meeting works completely differently depending on which room someone enters, the organisation hasn't really delivered five successful meeting-room projects. It has created one inconsistent user experience.

If three offices use completely different digital signage platforms, each installation might work perfectly well, but the organisation has created an unnecessarily complicated communications estate to manage.

If a customer walks through a spectacular technology-led reception and then spends ten minutes watching their host struggle to share a presentation in the meeting room, the fact that both systems technically work is largely irrelevant. The overall experience has failed.

This is why workplace technology increasingly needs to be considered at an organisational level rather than simply room by room.

That doesn't mean every space should be identical. A two-person huddle room shouldn't look or behave like an executive boardroom, and the technology on a warehouse floor obviously has different requirements from the technology in reception. But there can still be a consistent philosophy behind them.

Users can encounter familiar interfaces. Technology can be centrally managed. Platforms can be standardised where appropriate. Support can become simpler. The organisation can decide deliberately where consistency matters and where individual spaces need to be different.

That is the difference between installing technology and developing a workplace technology strategy.

Collaborate anywhere

Communication has changed, but some workplaces haven't

There is another reason this matters. Organisations now have more ways to communicate than at any point in history, yet many still struggle to get information to the right people.

Email, Teams, SharePoint, intranets, mobile apps and messaging platforms have created an extraordinary communications infrastructure. For somebody sitting at a laptop all day, these channels can work extremely well.

But not everybody works that way.

Someone in a warehouse, factory, retail environment, reception area or operational workspace may interact with corporate information very differently. Sending another email doesn't necessarily solve the communication problem if the person who needs the information isn't looking at email.

This is where technologies such as digital signage become much more interesting when viewed as part of an experience rather than simply as displays on walls.

A screen showing live production information on a factory floor has a purpose. A display communicating company news in a communal area has another. A customer-facing screen in reception has another again. The hardware may be similar, but what matters is whether the information reaches the right person, in the right place, at the right moment.

The technology isn't the strategy. The communication is.

This is an important distinction because it prevents businesses from assuming that deploying another platform automatically improves communication. Sometimes the better answer isn't another system people have to remember to open. It is making existing information visible in the places where it becomes useful.

The best technology often disappears

There is a curious contradiction at the heart of good workplace technology. The better it works, the less people tend to notice it.

Think about a genuinely good meeting room. You probably don't remember the model number of the camera. You remember that the meeting started immediately and everyone could see and hear each other.

Think about a good visitor experience. You probably didn't leave the building thinking about the digital signage platform. You simply knew where you were going and felt that the organisation was professional and well organised.

Think about a presentation where every person in the room could hear every word. Nobody congratulated the audio processor afterwards.

The technology succeeded precisely because nobody needed to think about it.

This becomes even more important as AV grows increasingly sophisticated. AI-enabled cameras can identify speakers and frame participants automatically. Intelligent audio systems can distinguish voices from background noise. Displays can dynamically change content. Workplace platforms can analyse how spaces are being used. Devices can be monitored remotely and problems identified before users are even aware that something is wrong.

All of that capability is impressive, but the purpose shouldn't be to demonstrate how clever the technology has become.

The purpose should be to remove friction.

If AI makes a hybrid conversation feel more natural, it has succeeded. If automation means somebody doesn't have to work out which input to select, it has succeeded. If remote monitoring prevents an employee discovering a failed device five minutes before an important meeting, it has succeeded.

The technology can become increasingly complicated behind the scenes while the experience becomes increasingly simple in front of the user.

That is progress.

The same technology has many customers

Another weakness of product-led thinking is that workplace technology rarely has a single stakeholder.

An employee wants technology to be simple and reliable. IT wants it to be secure, manageable and supportable. Facilities needs it to fit the building and work consistently.

Finance needs confidence that the investment represents value. HR may be thinking about employee experience and inclusion, while Marketing may care about how customer-facing spaces communicate the brand. Leadership ultimately wants people to communicate effectively and make better decisions.

All of those people can be looking at exactly the same technology and judging its success in completely different ways.

A product specification can tell us what a camera is capable of doing. It cannot tell us whether employees will enjoy using the room. A display specification can tell us its brightness, resolution and connectivity, but it cannot tell us whether the content being shown will influence behaviour. A room-booking panel can tell someone whether a space is available, but it cannot tell an organisation whether it has the right mixture of spaces in the first place.

Specifications matter. Good engineering matters enormously.

But context matters more.

Understanding those different stakeholders before designing the environment makes it much more likely that the eventual technology will solve the wider business requirement rather than simply satisfy a technical specification.

Value is bigger than the equipment price

Thinking about experiences rather than products also changes the conversation about cost.

AV procurement is understandably price-sensitive. When two quotations appear to contain similar equipment, comparing the bottom line is an obvious way to assess value.

But the true cost of workplace technology isn't simply the figure on the original invoice.

There is a cost when employees repeatedly lose five minutes at the beginning of meetings. There is a cost when IT spends time supporting rooms that should be intuitive. There is a cost when a digital signage platform becomes so difficult to manage that the content gradually stops being updated. There is a cost when different offices contain completely different technologies that all require separate knowledge and support. And there is a very real cost when equipment has to be replaced early because the original design never properly considered how the organisation was going to use it.

None of those costs appears prominently on an equipment quotation.

Perhaps the most expensive technology of all is technology that people don't use.

This doesn't mean organisations should spend more. In many cases, good design can lead to simpler solutions and lower costs because unnecessary technology is removed.

The objective isn't to maximise the AV budget.

It is to maximise the value the organisation receives from it.

Products change. Outcomes endure.

There is also a longer-term advantage to thinking this way.

Technology changes remarkably quickly. Collaboration platforms evolve, AI capabilities improve, new display technologies emerge and today's premium feature can become tomorrow's basic expectation.

Businesses change just as quickly. They grow, acquire other organisations, move offices, change working practices and redesign their workplaces.

A technology strategy built too closely around today's product list can therefore become outdated surprisingly quickly.

An experience-led strategy is much more resilient.

If the objective is that an employee should be able to walk into any collaboration space and immediately understand how to use it, the products delivering that experience can evolve without changing the principle.

If the objective is that important operational information should reach employees wherever they work, displays and software platforms can change while the communication requirement remains.

If the objective is that remote participants should be able to contribute equally to a meeting, new cameras, microphones and AI capabilities can continually improve how that is achieved.

Products have lifecycles.

Outcomes endure.

Defining those outcomes first makes it easier to make good technology decisions today without unnecessarily restricting what can happen tomorrow.

Corporate communication

This isn't an argument against products

None of this diminishes the importance of choosing good technology.

Quite the opposite.

Professional AV products exist for good reasons. Reliability, commercial warranties, manageability, security, performance and interoperability all matter enormously, particularly when technology becomes business-critical.

Manufacturers are also developing genuinely transformative capabilities across cameras, audio, displays, LED, control, signage and collaboration platforms.

The point is simply that product selection should be the result of the design process rather than the beginning of it.

There is an important difference between asking, "We want this 98-inch display — where can we put it?" and asking, "Everyone in this space needs to see detailed information clearly — what is the best way to achieve that?"

The first question begins with an answer.

The second begins with a requirement.

Good technology design starts with the second question.

The changing role of the AV integrator

This way of thinking also says something about how the role of the AV integrator is changing.

Traditionally, the word integration could be interpreted quite literally. Different pieces of audiovisual equipment needed to be connected together and made to work reliably.

That remains a critical technical discipline, but modern workplace integration increasingly involves connecting something much broader than products.

It involves people, spaces, platforms, information, physical environments, remote participants, IT infrastructure and business objectives.

The value of an integrator therefore shouldn't simply be measured by how efficiently equipment can be installed. Increasingly, it lies in understanding what an organisation is trying to achieve and translating that requirement into an environment that works for the people using it.

That sometimes means recommending sophisticated technology.

Sometimes it means simplifying what was originally proposed.

And occasionally it means telling a customer that the product they thought they needed isn't actually the right answer.

The important part is being able to explain why.

From products to systems, and from systems to experiences

Perhaps this is the wider evolution taking place across workplace technology.

Initially, AV was largely about products. Displays, projectors, microphones, speakers and cameras were selected to perform individual functions.

Then the industry became increasingly focused on systems. How should those products connect? How should they be controlled? How could they work together reliably?

Now the conversation needs to move again.

From systems to experiences.

Because it is entirely possible to have technically excellent systems and still deliver poor experiences.

A meeting room can work while the meeting itself remains frustrating. A digital signage platform can function perfectly while nobody pays attention to the content. A reception display can operate flawlessly while adding nothing to the visitor experience. A room-booking platform can accurately report availability while employees continue struggling to find somewhere appropriate to work.

Technical success and business success aren't always the same thing.

The next generation of workplace technology will be defined by organisations that understand the difference.

A different question

Perhaps the next time an organisation begins discussing an AV project, the first question shouldn't be what it needs to buy.

A better starting point might be to ask what it wants to make better.

Communication? Collaboration? Customer experience? Employee engagement? Productivity? Access to information? The burden on IT? The experience of coming into the workplace?

Once that is understood, every subsequent design decision can be tested against the same objective.

Does this technology help create the experience we're trying to achieve?

If it does, it has a reason to be there.

If it doesn't, perhaps it shouldn't be.

And that might ultimately be the most important change in how we think about workplace AV.

The future of AV isn't really about AV

That might sound like a strange conclusion for an AV integrator, but perhaps the future of audiovisual technology isn't really about audiovisual technology at all.

It is about people.

How they communicate, how they collaborate, how they experience a workplace, how they interact with information and how they connect with colleagues and customers.

The newest camera will eventually be replaced. The biggest display will eventually be superseded. Today's most impressive AI feature will eventually become something everybody takes for granted.

Technology will continue to change.

The underlying objective won't.

We want people to communicate better. We want them to collaborate more naturally. We want information to reach them more effectively. We want workplaces to function better.

Technology is simply one of the tools we have to make that happen.

Which is why perhaps the most important question in your next AV project isn't:

"What technology should we buy?"

It is:

"What experience are we trying to create?"

At Collab AV, that's where we believe the conversation should start.

Because the best workplace technology isn't necessarily the technology people notice.

It's the technology that allows them to stop thinking about technology altogether.

Contact our team today