Dan Smith has spent a lot of time in meeting rooms lately. Not his own. But everyone else’s. The Executive Vice President at Almo Pro AV traveled to New York City recently for six back-to-back company meetings. In five of those six stops, the meeting room technology was outdated. The sixth impressed him. That gap, Smith says, tells you everything about where the industry stands right now.
Almo Pro AV distributes professional AV equipment across the United States. Smith sees buying patterns across thousands of end users. I sat down with him ahead of InfoComm 2026 to talk about what those patterns are telling us. The takeaways are worth your time if you manage conference rooms, classrooms, or any shared technology space.
Audio-only is gone. Video first is the new normal.
Smith opened with a point that sounds simple but carries real weight. “I can’t recall being on an audio-only conference call for maybe two years,” he told me. That is not a hybrid-workforce story. It is a behavior-change story, and he thinks the distinction matters enormously.
Hybrid work gets all the press. However, Smith argues the real driver is simpler: people stopped calling and started meeting on video. Everything on his calendar from internal reviews, vendor calls, customer meetings runs on video if it is not in person. Consequently, the rooms that used to support audio-only calls now need to support video. Many of them still do not.
That shift is changing how procurement decisions get made. Smith laid out a useful framework. Refresh projects, remodels, and new builds each have different dynamics. In a refresh, organizations often replicate what they have because consistency across networked rooms matters more than perfection in any single one. New builds are different. There, buyers want video and they want it AI-enabled from day one.
Two megatrends are driving conference room investment.
Smith named two forces shaping the market right now. First, organizations are moving from audio-only to video collaboration. Second, they are moving from standard video to AI-enabled video conferencing. He sees both playing out simultaneously, which makes this moment unusually active for AV procurement.
On the AI side, Smith pointed to a Microsoft statistic he cites often. According to Microsoft, fewer than 10 percent of meeting rooms are AI-enabled today. That number gives you a sense of the runway. Smith says Almo Pro AV’s own internal culture shifted noticeably in the past year. His team now uses AI-generated transcripts and action-item summaries as a standard part of every meeting. A year ago, they rarely used the feature at all.
The platform pull here is Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR). Smith says MTR has emerged as the dominant force in enterprise video collaboration. The reason is straightforward: Microsoft bundled Teams with its Office suite, and most enterprise organizations already pay for the Office suite. Zoom had an early lead during COVID because it was free and easy. However, Smith sees MTR winning the enterprise over time through integration and licensing.
For IT and AV managers, this has a direct implication. When Smith’s team looks at new room builds, buyers increasingly require two things from every component: MTR certification and AI enablement. Cameras, microphones, and control systems that lack either of those qualifications are harder to specify. The standard is moving.
Cameras are the hardware story right now.
Smith said something I found revealing: Almo Pro AV’s camera sales are outpacing its growth in video overall. That means cameras are pulling ahead of the broader category. The reason is AI at the edge. That’s the intelligence built directly into the camera hardware rather than handled by the room controller or the cloud.
Specifically, buyers want cameras that can isolate and track individual speakers automatically, support multiple camera inputs in a single room, and integrate AI-driven framing without requiring manual pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) control. Those capabilities used to live in expensive, custom-integrated systems. Now they ship in off-the-shelf PTZ cameras at accessible price points.
Smith’s framing is useful here. The software platform handles transcription, summaries, and meeting intelligence. The hardware at the edge handles the in-room experience: who is visible, how they sound, and whether remote participants can follow the conversation. Both layers need to work well. Neither covers for the other.
Display sizing: the 115-inch moment.
The flat panel versus projector debate has a new variable. Smith shared a data point that surprised even him: 110- and 115-inch LCD displays are selling at five times the rate Almo Pro AV expected. They anticipated modest demand. Instead, those sizes are moving fast.
The reason is straightforward when you think about it. The installed base of projection screens skews heavily toward 120-inch diagonal. A 115-inch flat panel comes close enough to that footprint. Moreover, it delivers better brightness, better image definition, and no lamp maintenance. For rooms already wired for projection, the total cost of switching to a 115-inch display is increasingly competitive.
Smith said Almo is buying up 115-inch panels from every manufacturer it can find. “We’re at hundreds a month right now,” he told me. That is a meaningful volume signal from a major distributor.
K-12 and higher ed: different problems, different answers.
The education market splits cleanly in Smith’s analysis. K-12 schools are still buying laser-based projectors at surprisingly high volume. The infrastructure math is simple. Many K-12 classrooms already have a ceiling mount, power, signal cable, and a wall screen. Replacing an aging projector with a newer laser unit requires none of that infrastructure to change. Compare that to a flat panel retrofit: new power runs, new cable, a wall mount, and often a display too small to fill the room adequately. The projector wins.
Higher ed behaves differently. Budgets are larger. Classrooms are larger. Smith sees more LED and high-lumen projection in auditoriums, and more large-format LCD displays in standard classrooms. He also sees multi-display configurations gaining ground. Two or three screens per room rather than one.
On LED specifically, the all-in-one market is performing better than Smith expected. Almo Pro AV tracks all-in-one and custom LED installs as separate revenue categories. Smith expected custom modular LED to scale faster. Instead, the all-in-ones are selling at extraordinary rates. He said the revenue split runs roughly 50/50, sometimes 60/40 in favor of all-in-ones. LED revenue has roughly doubled year over year.
The market is running ahead of expectations.
I asked Smith for his outlook on the second half of 2026. He was honest about the uncertainty. Issues like tariffs, geopolitical instability, month-to-month unpredictability. However, he offered a concrete data point to anchor the optimism. Almo Pro AV’s business is running 12 percent above internal projections for the year. That is not a small margin.
Furthermore, the refresh opportunity is real. Smith’s New York City week illustrated it starkly. Five of six companies he visited had outdated room technology. They all knew it. They all said they needed to upgrade. The demand is there. The question is timing and budget authorization, not whether the need exists.
His advice to IT and AV managers: start with one fully AI-enabled room. Not the whole portfolio. One room. Use it long enough to understand what AI-enabled conferencing actually does for your team. Then bring your leadership or your end users in and show them. Smith’s argument is that the value becomes obvious once you experience it. The productivity gains from AI-generated transcripts and action items are concrete and immediate.
The bottom line
Smith’s view of the market is grounded in distribution data, not aspiration. The conference room is changing faster now than at any point in the past 18 months, he says. The two requirements driving new builds are not going away. Those are MTR certification and AI enablement. Display sizing is shifting toward the 115-inch sweet spot. Camera intelligence is moving to the edge. And the refresh pipeline is deep.
If your rooms are still running audio-only infrastructure you are already behind where your peers are heading. The good news is that the technology to catch up is available, the pricing is accessible, and the business case is straightforward. Start with one room. The rest tends to follow.
Tim Albright is the founder of AVNation and is the driving force behind the AVNation network. He carries the InfoComm CTS, a B.S. from Greenville College and is pursuing an M.S. in Mass Communications from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. When not steering the AVNation ship, Tim has spent his career designing systems for churches both large and small, Fortune 500 companies, and education facilities.
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
