AI Roadmap Essentials: How AI and AV Can Work Together to Build Your Tech Roadmap

AI is most effective when it has all the relevant and contextual information. The most up-to-date systems will provide the most accurate outputs. So, it is imperative to keep those AI systems up to date.

Think about the places in your organization where the latest information is generated—conference rooms, lecture halls, and huddle spaces. These spaces are where teams convene to pitch a new idea, outline the latest strategy, plan the next big initiative, or get the latest updates on team projects.

How can we ensure AI tools have access to that mission-critical information? How can AI get eyes and ears on the inside?

Even more important, how can we securely give AI access to that information?

The answer is simple. Those rooms need quality AV solutions—reliable cameras and microphones.

As more organizations look to AI for productivity gains and cost savings, some interesting use cases are emerging that use AV technology as the eyes and ears of AI agents.

I recently had a fun conversation with Mehryn Corrigan (Microsoft) and a couple of my AV friends to explore these emerging use cases more closely.

Here are some of the takeaways.

Bring Your Own AI

It’s no secret that most people are using AI regularly. But what happens when your organization doesn’t provide AI solutions?

Mehryn is all too aware of “BYO-AI. " She touched on the consequences: “There are people who will absolutely use ChatGPT themselves and generate their own notes, and then you risk even more.”

She’s right. People have already felt the value of AI in enhancing their workflow. If your organization doesn’t provide those tools, they will find that value independently. Now, you have no idea what information they’re sharing and with what systems. That data is out in the open and leaves your organization vulnerable.

When discussing ways to introduce AI into organizations safely, Mehryn brought up another great point...

Agentic AI

AI doesn’t need access to every bit of your organization’s data to provide value.

To decrease risk, consider slowly rolling out solutions by deploying AI agents.

Agents need a specific data set to help people perform particular tasks.

“It’s an assistant that’s in your meeting. You’re giving it tasks to do things for you.” Mehryn explained as she outlined the approach Microsoft is taking with their Copilot agents.

Some of the most common tasks agents can tackle in meeting rooms are:

• meeting notes

• recaps

• automated action items

• reminders

To perform these tasks, the agent needs access to the room. The eyes and ears need to know who’s talking and what was said.

That’s why AV equipment – microphones and cameras – are so foundational.

System Checks, Technology Usage, and Audits

Another point we discussed as a group was how AI can enable different departments to access information.

A School Registrar

The example I used was a use case for an educational facility like a college.

Imagine the registrar’s office asking, “Are we enabling minority groups for academic excellence by ensuring they’re in classrooms with technology?”

That’s a perfectly reasonable question for the registrar to ask. But imagine how difficult it is to answer that question without AI. It would take a lot of time and investigation. A natural language interaction could provide that information within seconds.

IT Teams

Gary Kaye (rAVe pubs) also made an excellent point for IT teams about the importance of having your technology on the network.

All of us in the AV industry have been shouting about AV-over-IP solutions for over 10 years. It was important when IoT was a hot topic, and it’s even more critical now that AI has entered the scene.

With AV-over-IP, we have been able to provide organizations with cloud monitoring, global system updates, event reporting, and more. We’ve also built great dashboards for these.

Imagine how powerful that information could be if you layered on an AI agent with natural language processing. You could essentially bypass the dashboard and ask a simple question like:

Do I have any devices that require a firmware update?  What devices are due to be refreshed? How frequently is technology being utilized per room?

The possibilities for cost savings, productivity, and job satisfaction are immeasurable.  This is the beautiful thing about using AI tools: They take the monkey off your back. They can do those mundane tasks that I dread and allow me to be more creative and productive with my time.

I love having these conversations with my peers in the AV industry. We’re all technology enthusiasts at our core. That’s what got us into this industry. We don’t scoff at new trends, and we don’t get scared. We get excited about the possibilities. And new opportunities to incorporate AI into AV are emerging every day. We’re at the forefront of these developments, and we hope to have more conversations like these to see how far we can take this and show more organizations the value of great AV systems.

You can listen to my entire conversation with Mehryn, Gary, and Tim Albright (AV Nation) here.