By the time a prospect reaches an AV integrator or an integrator reaches them, they have already done most of the work. AI-driven research, manufacturer content, peer networks, consultants, and internal finance teams have shaped their view of what “good” looks like. Gartner reported that B2B buyers are nearly 70% through their purchasing process before engaging with a sales rep. This indicates that the integrator is no longer the primary educator; rather, they are the final validator.
Yet, the sales motion in many firms has not changed. The conversation still opens with hardware, ownership and payment terms. “Hardware-as-a-Service” then appears as a different way to finance the same thing instead of a different way to consume and manage technology.
The outcome is familiar: Subscription stalls while ownership remains the default. Additionally, margins stay tight and relationships stay transactional. This happens not because subscription is broken, but because it is framed as a payment tactic instead of a strategic choice.
Why Logic Is Not Winning
If spreadsheets decided AV deals, subscription would already dominate the category, just as it does in software and cloud. The financial case is usually strong. However, the adoption is not. That gap exists because buying behavior is not driven by math alone. It is driven by perceived risk. People move faster to avoid loss than to capture gain. Ownership feels familiar. And familiar feels safe while subscription feels uncertain.
Until that emotional bias is addressed, the best TCO slide will not move the deal. Hardware-as-a-Service will underperform, regardless of how clean the model looks.
The True Cost of Owning AV
Ownership carries a cost structure that often goes unspoken. More than half of a typical AV project’s value is consumed at commissioning: design, labor, programming, software, services, warranty and embedded margin. What remains is hardware, often less than half of the total spend.
Ownership also locks capital into a single, irreversible decision. Subscription spreads that risk and creates more opportunities to adjust over time. Today’s AV systems are considered “essential use” but not revenue generating. They enable collaboration and communication while they depreciate quickly. Treating them as long-lived assets is a choice, not a requirement.
Product lifecycles continue to compress. What goes in today will be outdated long before it is fully depreciated. As AI, analytics, automation and cloud-managed platforms advance, strict ownership increasingly traps clients in aging infrastructure with no graceful exit. Ownership may feel conservative, but in practice it often creates friction.
Why AV Clients Push Back on Subscription
When clients resist subscription, it is usually because they are unsure about control and risk, and not because they hate the idea of OpEx. In this situation, common questions sound like this:
- Will we lose control if we do not own the equipment?
- Will we pay more over time?
- Are we stuck with this vendor if the relationship goes sideways?
- Is OpEx harder to defend than CapEx?
- Do responsible organizations own their critical infrastructure?
Certainly, these are reasonable concerns. However, the misstep that many integrators make is answering them with payment mechanics instead of outcomes. Opening with “monthly payments” and “approval workflows” keeps the attention on cost, and not on continuity, performance or accountability.
Reframing Responsibility, Not Just Payments
In most cases, clients are not rejecting the subscription itself. They are rejecting how it is presented. When Hardware-as-a-Service sounds like a financing scheme, it amplifies doubts. It feels like a way to move budget around, not a way to shift responsibility and reduce operational risk.
Subscription is not fundamentally about how the AV technology is paid for. It is about who carries responsibility over time. That shift has to be clear in the first few minutes of the conversation and not buried at the end of a proposal.
A simple belief statement to anchor that might be: The real risk in AV today is not the subscription. It is in owning technology that depreciates faster than your clients’ needs evolve. From there, the conversation can move toward outcomes:
- Subscription does not remove client control. It shifts control from fixed hardware decisions to ongoing performance and alignment.
- When AV is delivered as a service, the integrator is accountable every month and not just at handover.
- The relationship becomes operational instead of transactional by tying your role to uptime, user experience and continuous relevance.
The key is to describe what changes in responsibility and not just what changes on the invoice.
AV Subscription: What This Means for Your Business
Hardware-as-a-Service is not a bundle or a label — it is a go-to-market decision. Integrators who lean into it with clarity tend to see:
- More predictable margin and recurring revenue
- Higher retention and lower churn
- Shorter sales cycles once the value story is understood
- Better alignment with outcome-based selling and managed services
- Deeper, longer-term operational relationships with clients
Those who do not will keep competing on upfront costs as buyers continue to self-educate, hardware becomes a commodity and the perceived value of the integrator continues to shrink. The direction of travel across technology markets is clear. Ownership is no longer the signal of responsibility. Accountability is. The future of AV is less about what is owned and more about what is consumed, measured and kept current.
Integrators who learn to talk confidently about belief, responsibility and outcomes, without sounding sales-y, will be the ones shaping that future.
Building The Service Engine Behind the Story
None of this works on messaging alone. To deliver on a service-led, subscription-ready positioning, the service infrastructure behind the scenes has to match the promise being made in front of the client.
That means tightening how services are designed, delivered and measured. It may include standardizing support tiers, defining clear SLAs, formalizing remote monitoring and management, investing in training for a service desk, and aligning project, service and finance teams around a common lifecycle view of each client. Without this backbone, the “as-a-Service” language quickly feels hollow to both staff and customers.
Integrators who deliberately build out or fine tune this service infrastructure can bundle solutions and services together as the default offer, not the add-on. Done well, every system sold becomes a platform for recurring value rather than a one-time event, increasing revenue and margin on each sale while deepening client dependence on the relationship. Those firms will not just keep up with the market; they will define what it means to be the integrator of the future.
Paul Metzheiser is an industry expert in As a Service modeling and positioning for both the AV and security sectors.
