RA. Blog: Technical Thoughts from the AV/UC World

AV & IT in the Enterprise — Post 2 of 6

A question I’ve been asked. A question most people in this industry have been asked, more than once.

Strip it back far enough and that’s genuinely all it is. Screens and cameras on walls, microphones on a ceiling or a table. How hard can it be?

And therein lies the rub.

Because complexity in this space rarely comes from the requirements. It comes from the environment those requirements have to land in. The width of the space, the lighting fixtures, three sides of windows in a 30ft boardroom that leave you wondering where the AV is supposed to go. A beautiful room. A nightmare to design for.

All while the budget insists on hardware that was never really meant for any of it.

A client sees a screen on a wall. You see five converging systems, no obvious install points, a budget that doesn’t match the brief, and eight stakeholders with different definitions of done.

That gap is what this post is about.

The Client’s World

The expectations clients bring to an AV project are almost always shaped by what AV used to be, not what it is now.

They remember the projector that dropped from the ceiling. The conference phone in the middle of the table. The laptop cable that either worked or didn’t. Simple systems with simple failure modes. You knew what was broken and roughly how to fix it.

Modern rooms are a different problem entirely. And most clients don’t know that yet when they walk into the first meeting.

The request sounds completely reasonable. “We want people to be able to join any meeting from any room.” Of course they do. Everyone does. It sounds like a single sentence of requirement. It is not.

Behind that sentence is a question about which platforms the organisation needs to support, which guests will be joining from outside it, and what the acceptable failure mode is when the two don’t speak the same language. In the Microsoft Teams Rooms ecosystem that means navigating Windows MTR, PEXIP, SIP dial strings, DTMF tones, and Direct Guest Join flows that behave slightly differently depending on which platform is on the other end of the call.

The interop story has improved. In 2026 it is meaningfully better than it was. But the knowledge burden of making it invisible to the user is still significant. The moment it surfaces, a dial string on screen, a protocol choice presented to someone who just wants to press join, a button that isn’t there, it has already failed. Not technically. From the user’s perspective.

This is where the client’s world and your world diverge. They asked for a room that works. You are now designing a support model, a platform hierarchy, and a set of placement decisions about which rooms carry which capability. A space used primarily by technical teams can absorb more complexity. A client-facing boardroom cannot. The room that needs to handle anything, with anyone, on any platform, with no technical support in the building, is a different design problem entirely.

And when the requirement pushes beyond what standard certified OEM kit can deliver, which it often does, that conversation needs to happen early and honestly. Not as a caveat at the end of the project. As a constraint at the beginning of it.

The Environment Fights Back

Assume for a moment that the requirements are clear, the platform is agreed, and the budget is sufficient. You still have the room.

The 30ft boardroom with three sides of windows is a real example, and a useful one. There is no obvious wall for a display. The ceiling is feature-heavy and the lighting designer got there first. The acoustic spec was written without a microphone array in mind. Every decision that makes the room beautiful makes it harder to design for.

And then there is the question of being seen.

There is significant discussion in the industry around multi-camera setups, cloud intelligent framing, and speaker attribution within the Teams Rooms ecosystem. The technology is genuinely impressive. But we still routinely deploy AV into traditional columnar meeting rooms with non-optimised furniture and expect it to perform. The person at the opposite end of the table to the camera. The delegate on the far side of a wide room, outside the field of view of a single framing camera. The technology exists to solve these problems, but those solutions require decisions about camera placement, power, data, and ceiling penetrations that have to be made before the walls close and the electrical installation is completed.

By the time someone raises their hand from the far end of the table and nobody on the call can see them, it is too late to have that conversation.

Now make it flexible.

Hyper flexible spaces are the modern brief. Divisible walls that turn one room into three. Furniture on castors. Screens that need to serve a 200 person all-hands on Tuesday and a six person workshop on Wednesday. AV that has to work in every configuration or it effectively works in none.

But flexibility compounds the problem in ways that are easy to underestimate. A divisible space isn’t just a switching challenge. It’s a control surface challenge. Each configuration of the room needs an interface that makes sense for that configuration. A panel that works for a boardroom setup may be completely wrong for a training room or a casual collaboration space. And in a space where the furniture moves, where the wall folds away, where the room becomes something different depending on the day, the question of where the control surface lives and what it presents to the user is not a detail. It is a design decision that determines whether anyone in that room can actually operate the technology without calling for help.

The switching logic alone for a properly divisible space is a project within a project. The control design is another one.

But the harder conversation is still the upstream one.

By the time AV is typically engaged on a new build or major fit-out, the building decisions are already made. The walls are placed. The floors are poured. The conduit routes don’t exist because nobody thought to ask. In the US and across much of Europe, coring through a concrete floor is not an afternoon’s work. It is a planning conversation, a cost conversation, and sometimes a conversation with the building owner about whether it’s permitted at all.

The argument for getting AV involved at test fit stage is not about ego. It is about avoiding expensive compromises later. Where walls are placed, where ceiling zones are defined, where power and data are provisioned, all of these decisions shape what AV can and cannot do in that space for the lifetime of the fit-out. Getting a seat at that table early is one of the most valuable things a Workplace Architect can do for a project. And it is still, frustratingly, the exception rather than the rule.

Complexity Is Not The Enemy

Here is what the 30ft boardroom, the divisible wall, the interop requirement, and the eight stakeholders have in common. None of them are problems. They are inputs. The complexity they produce is not something that went wrong. It is the honest output of honest requirements meeting a real environment.

The mistake is treating complexity as something to be hidden, smoothed over in a presentation or buried in a schedule. It doesn’t stay buried. It surfaces later, at higher cost, with less time to resolve it.

The real work is distillation. Separating what is needed from what is wanted. Identifying what is an imperative and what is a nice-to-have. And then asking a question that the industry does not ask often enough.

Does the requirement, and its associated cost, actually match the profile of this location?

Not every room needs to do everything. A small satellite office has different functional needs to a regional hub. A regional hub has different support requirements to a flagship headquarters. Treating them identically is how projects become overspecified in some places and underdelivered in others.

Location profiling gives you the framework to have that conversation early. Small Office, Large Office, Regional Hub. Each with a defined functional capability. Each with a defined support model and the team size required to deliver it. Each with a cost profile that the business can evaluate against the value the space is expected to deliver.

That conversation, about what each location actually needs to be, is not a technical conversation. It is a business conversation. And it is the one that, more than any other, determines whether the project delivers what was intended.

The complexity was always there. The job is to find it early, name it clearly, and build something that the environment will actually support.

Next: The standard that sets you free.