Beyond AV Distributor: Inside Almo’s Service-Driven AV Strategy

If there’s one thing you can count on at an Almo E4 Experience, it’s that the conversation stretches beyond products. Sure, there are walls of displays, AI-enabled cameras, and collaboration setups you can actually touch. But beneath the demos, E4 has become a pulse check for where the pro AV industry is really heading and how an AV distributor like Almo are rewriting their role in the process.

This year, that message came through loud and clear: the future of distribution isn’t just moving boxes. It’s moving the industry forward.

A Market in Motion

Dan Smith, Executive Vice President of Almo Pro AV, doesn’t shy away from economic realities. He describes the current environment as “a time when the markets are doing this well, but the indicators are doing this bad.” In other words, there’s opportunity, but it’s complicated.

“Businesses, universities, and institutions are still investing,” Smith noted, “but the consumer slowdown affects everything downstream. You have to look at where those shifts create opportunity.”

That opportunity, he says, comes from sectors adapting to new realities and new technology. Meeting spaces, hospitality, and even first responders are evolving, creating demand for AV in ways the industry hasn’t seen before.

At E4, Smith pointed to AI-enabled collaboration as a catalyst for that transformation. “If you’ve ever sat in a fully enabled Microsoft Teams Room,” he said, “you know it’s not just a meeting anymore. The system tracks faces, recognizes voices, takes notes, assigns actions.  It’s a dramatically different experience. Once you’ve been in that room, you don’t want to go back.”

From AI-driven meeting intelligence to drone-based infrastructure inspections and AR/VR training tools, Smith painted a picture of an industry diversifying fast. And while technology is expanding, he says the real differentiator lies in training and integration. “After you put the hardware in place,” he added, “until people understand what the AI tool can do, how to use it, and how to turn it on it won’t live up to its capability.”

From Gear to Guidance

The mindset of enabling people, not just products, has fueled Almo’s most significant transformation in years: its services ecosystem.

Cory Allen, Vice President of Services at LinkLab (an Almo business), remembers when the company treated services as a “bolt-on.” That changed in 2020, and Allen was the one asked to rebuild it from scratch.

“My first day was March 17, 2020,” Allen said with a laugh. “Everything was shutting down. My job was to put people in places to install stuff and all the places were closed.”

Instead of waiting it out, Allen and his small team began designing what would become one of Almo’s fastest-growing divisions. “We started with three employees. Now, we’re breaking records month after month,” he said.

The growth stems from a simple but critical truth: integrators are struggling to scale. Between labor shortages, skill specialization, and nationwide deployments, there’s more work than qualified people. Allen built LinkLab to fill that gap quietly. That team is a “ghost in the background,” as he calls it, delivering services that let integrators focus on relationships and design instead of logistics.

Solving the Integrator’s Headache

Almo’s services fall into two major buckets: contracted labor services and in-house solutions like design engineering, drafting, programming, commissioning, and now logistics.

On the contracted side, LinkLab partners with regional experts across the country, but not through open bid platforms. “We don’t go to national networks and post for labor,” Allen explained. “These are people we know personally. We talk to them every day. They might as well be our own employees.”

That relationship-driven model gives integrators something they can’t get from gig-style labor networks: trust and consistency. Projects flow smoother. Documentation matches standards. And when the next big rollout hits, the system scales without breaking.

Beyond manpower, Almo has leveraged its vast warehouse network to tackle another persistent pain point: damaged displays and disorganized staging. “Every customer I’ve talked to complains that their displays arrive broken,” Allen said. “We can’t change how freight companies operate, but we can minimize the risk.”

The company now offers inspection and protection services, adding an extra layer of packaging, unboxing and testing displays before shipping, and sending customers photo-verified reports. “We’re even doing rack builds and advanced kitting now,” Allen added. “Some customers just don’t have the space or people to handle projects that big. So we do it for them.”

Services as Strategy

Smith sees all of these offerings, from meeting-space intelligence to warehouse logistics, as part of a broader shift in how the AV industry operates. “Whenever there’s a new technology, if there’s an application for it, it gets fun again,” he said. “We stalled for a while as an industry. Now, it feels like we’re innovating again.”

That innovation isn’t just in the products; it’s in how companies collaborate. Integrators, Smith argued, are now less about installation and more about orchestration, assembling technology ecosystems that deliver consistent, intelligent experiences for clients.

And that’s where Almo’s hybrid role makes sense. From distributor, logistics provider to service partner. It gives integrators leverage in markets that demand both expertise and efficiency.

Allen agrees. “Our customers don’t want another vendor,” he said. “They want a partner that helps them scale, adapt, and get to the finish line. If we can be that quiet partner behind the scenes, that’s success.”

How AV Distributors Help IT Users

For AV and IT end users, the benefit might not be immediately visible. But they’ll feel it. Better-trained integrators mean smoother deployments. Pre-tested equipment means fewer delays. And service-driven distributors mean faster response times when something inevitably changes mid-project.

E4 exists, in part, to showcase that evolution. Walking the show floor this year, you could see how the pieces fit together: AI-driven collaboration rooms on one side, integrator support programs on the other. It’s not about one product line. It’s about the ecosystem that connects them.

Almo isn’t just connecting products anymore. It’s connecting people, processes, and potential.

The Bottom Line

In a landscape shaped by AI, hybrid work, and unpredictable economics, Almo’s strategy offers a clear signal: the future of AV belongs to those who can turn technology into experience. Distribution alone won’t do it. Integration alone won’t either. The winners will be the companies that merge both into something seamless and their partners

Or, as Dan Smith put it, “We’re focused less on predicting what’s next and more on finding what’s materially different in the marketplace. That’s where the opportunity is, and that’s where we can help our integrators grow.”