Ask integrators what’s holding up their next project and the answer may surprise you. It isn’t lead times or a lack of business. It’s finding someone to program the system.
According to AVIXA’s 2026 Channel Survey, staffing and skilled labor shortages remain the top concern among AV providers. Anyone who has tried to hire a control programmer knows why.
People in technical fields often lose an afternoon learning about a technology they’ve just heard of. That kind of self-teaching is how most of us built our skills. General-purpose programming languages support it well: they’re well documented, free to try and backed by huge communities.
AV control platforms have been the exception. Their documentation, tools and training sometimes sit behind dealer agreements and login pages.
And for many traditional AV control platforms, access to training, development tools and practical experience has historically depended on dealer relationships, certification programs or proprietary hardware.
A Self-Inflicted Shortage
The AV industry has contributed to this challenge. If control ecosystems are closed and proprietary, they tends to keep the pool of people who can learn them relatively small. There’s also no direct path from school into AV control.
Talk to people in our field and you’ll find most came from somewhere nearby: the musician who needed to pay the bills, or the IT professional who found a niche. Those backgrounds carry over, but the route in is harder than it needs to be. The outcome is often a skill set closely tied to a particular vendor ecosystem.
The result is predictable. Specialized programmers are in short supply, booked months out and there is bottleneck on projects that are otherwise ready to install.
Breaking the Cycle With an Open Foundation
Low-code and open programming environments offer a different path.
Because they are more accessible, people can begin learning without first needing access to proprietary hardware, dealer portals or closed development environments.
Additionally, documentation, tutorials and community resources are often publicly available, lowering the barrier to getting started.
Low-code programs are typically built by wiring together visual flows instead of writing code line by line. Visual flows can make control logic easier to build, understand and troubleshoot than traditional line-by-line scripting.
That puts system programming within reach of people who were never trained as programmers.
Who Can Program Now?
This is where low-code starts to address the skills shortage. When the bar comes down, the pool of people who can do the work grows: Field technicians and installers can handle routine programming and on-site changes without waiting for a specialist.
IT professionals will already recognize concepts such as JavaScript, JSON data handling and standard network protocols. Students and newcomers can learn on a laptop at home, at no cost, and bring usable skills to their first job. Senior programmers can hand off repetitive work and spend their time on complex, high-value systems.
For integrators, that can mean fewer projects waiting on one specialist, faster changes on site and more effective use of senior programming resources.
What Low-Code Won’t Do
Low-code doesn’t make expertise unnecessary, and it would be misleading to say otherwise.
Large or mission-critical systems still need people who understand system design, networking and good programming practice. A tool that makes programming easier also makes it easier to build something badly.
What changes is the gap between “can’t program” and “can program.”
Standard rooms, simple changes and troubleshooting no longer all have to go through one scarce specialist. Moving that work away from the bottleneck is how projects start moving again.
The Bottom Line
Can low-code solve the AV programming skills shortage? It can’t fix it alone, but it can make programming accessible to a much wider group of people —and give the next generation a clearer way into the industry.
Open, low-code platforms can lower the barrier to getting started while still leaving complex systems in the hands of experienced professionals.
If AV wants to address its skills shortage, opening the door wider is a good place to start.
Joseph Gagliardi is product manager at WyreStorm Technologies.
