Half of 2026 is gone, ISE and InfoComm have both had their say, and a clear picture has formed: this is the year AI stopped being a slide in the vendor deck and started shipping inside room hardware. Here are the five shifts we’re actually seeing — and specifying — in Perth meeting rooms this year.
1. The camera got a director
The gap between “video call” and “broadcast” has always been a human camera operator. That gap closed this year. Systems like Crestron’s 1 Beyond Automate VX and Q-SYS VisionSuite listen to the room’s microphones, know who’s speaking and where they sit, and cut between cameras like a director would — wide shot for context, close-up for the speaker, smooth transitions in between.
The practical translation: your town hall, boardroom or council chamber can now produce itself. Remote attendees stop watching a static wide shot of furniture and start attending the meeting.
2. Teams Rooms went audio-first
For a decade, rooms were built video-first, with audio as the afterthought that later became the help-desk ticket. Shure flipped the recipe with its IntelliMix Room Kits — complete certified Microsoft Teams Rooms built around reference-grade ceiling audio, with the MTR compute, touch panel and camera designed around the microphone instead of the other way round.
It’s a telling shift: the industry has finally admitted what every user survey says — meetings fail by ear first.
3. The room rack collapsed into one box
Biamp’s new Devio UCX platform is the clearest example of 2026’s consolidation trend: the UC compute and a professional DSP in a single appliance, in three tiers from huddle room to AI-ready flagship space. Fewer boxes, fewer cables, fewer 8:55am failures.
You can see the same instinct across the industry — amplifiers with built-in sound masking and scheduling, video bars with NPUs running multiple AI workloads onboard, and platforms that treat the room as one system instead of a stack of products.
4. AI moved on-device
The second-order story of 2026’s AI wave: the processing moved into the hardware. New-generation devices ship with dedicated neural processing units running speaker tracking, noise suppression, transcription-grade capture and occupancy sensing locally — no cloud round-trip, no privacy questions about where the room’s audio goes.
Shure’s new MXA925 ceiling array is a neat example: AI echo cancellation, denoising and de-reverberation running inside the microphone itself, so hard glass rooms deliver clean speech to the platforms — and the AI copilots — listening downstream.
5. Outcomes replaced boxes
The quiet cultural shift at InfoComm this year: nobody wants to sell (or buy) boxes anymore. The conversation is uptime, adoption, and rooms that report their own health. That’s been our model at Focus AV from the start — design, install, then stand behind the room with monitoring and support — so we’ll admit some satisfaction watching the industry catch up.
What this means for your rooms
None of these trends demand you rip anything out. They change what “good” looks like when you next touch a room: audio designed first, AI framing where the audience justifies it, fewer boxes doing more, and a support arrangement that treats the room as a living system.
If your meeting rooms are due for that conversation, talk to us — we’ll walk your spaces and show you exactly which of these five shifts would move the needle for your teams.