Editor’s Note: This article featuring Joe Way and his 2026 predictions is part of Commercial Integrator’s series running throughout the month of January. In this series, we spotlight forward-looking insights from some of the pro AV industry’s most notable luminaries.
As we look ahead to 2026, the pro AV industry stands at the cusp of exciting opportunities and transformative trends. To explore what lies ahead, Commercial Integrator turned to Joe Way, PhD, CTS, Cofounder of HETMA + Higher Ed AV, for his expert predictions on the technologies and strategies that will shape the future of pro AV.
Joe Way 2026 Predictions
Commercial Integrator: Without getting into any specific vendor or particular branded solutions, what technology category or solution area do you see as 2026’s ripest, most profitable growth opportunity for pro AV integrators and installers? Explain your reasoning.
Joe Way: The ripest, most profitable growth opportunity for integrators is going to be in open-AV ecosystems that allow for a recurring revenue, ability to program, support and monitor remotely, limiting the need for boots-on-the-ground, in order to be a full-stack business. Architecting and supporting solutions built on open standards, open APIs and vendor-agnostic control rather than closed, gives more opportunity to deliver personalized solutions to their customers.
We’re at a point where end users are tired of being locked into one manufacturer’s worldview for every classroom, conference room and event space. We want to mix best-of-breed hardware, cloud platforms and workflows, and we want all of it to talk to their identity systems, data lakes and ticketing tools.
In higher education, we are no longer self-isolating our spaces, but supporting from an enterprise view. That doesn’t magically happen because a spec sheet says “supports API” or “standards-based,” it happens because an integrator can design a coherent, open architecture across AV-over-IP, control, monitoring, analytics and content services. The money isn’t just in deploying gear, it’s in helping customers unwind legacy proprietary systems, migrate to open protocols and interfaces, build internal governance around them, and then offering ongoing services. This type of design means true personalization, integration with campus or enterprise platforms, data dashboards, and lifecycle planning that doesn’t require ripping and replacing everything every five years.
This is only possible with a cloud-first, open-AV mindset that’s done well and actually aligns with the customer’s mission. In the end, customers get flexibility, resilience, and long-term choice, while integrators earn recurring revenue as the trusted steward of the ecosystem by updating integrations, adding new capabilities, and ensuring that as new devices, apps, and AI services appear. They once again become the distributors of solutions that tailor to the end goal.
Commercial Integrator: Which emerging AV technologies do you think are overplayed? Which ones do you think will truly transform the practice of integration in the coming years?
Way: While I used to be a huge proponent, I now believe that ultra-high-res displays, VR/AR, holograms and 3D environments are not going to be a standard of any type. They are fine for one-offs and experiential environments, but they have lost their appeal.. Too expensive to install, too difficult to keep content fresh, and too hard to support even at a Tier 1 level.
The fact is, most content is viewed on a cell phone or laptop, and when customers visit a location, they don’t care as much about “wow factor” as we hoped they would. Especially in a time of economic uncertainty with technology, customers are ok with “good enough” as long as it’s reliable, intuitive and aligned with their actual business outcomes. Customers would much rather have spaces that always work, are easy to manage and integrate cleanly with their existing tools than something that looks like a sci-fi movie for the first six months and then becomes outdated, broken or ignored. For integrators and in-house teams, that means the real opportunity isn’t in chasing the next shiny immersive toy, but in designing open, flexible, stable systems that can adapt over time should needs change.
Commercial Integrator: What’s getting better about the pro AV industry these days? What seems to be getting worse?
Way: In my opinion, what’s getting better about pro AV is the quality of the relationships and conversations up and down the channel. Manufacturers, integrators, consultants and end users are talking to each other earlier and more honestly than I’ve ever seen. End users have more of a voice in roadmaps, not just in “customer councils,” but in real joint planning. We are being asked about our institutional strategy, and we are getting solutions aligned with that. Integrators are true partners who engage, and manufacturers are actually listening when it comes to product development. We’re seeing more transparency around pricing, more willingness to share APIs and documentation, and more recognition that long-term success comes from the partnership itself, not necessarily a particular SKU. Relationships are moving beyond just winning a bid. With margins are thinner at every level, timelines seem to be even more crunched, and expectations that remain remain high, this is when these strong relationships are most important so that the project can be navigated successfully.
Commercial Integrator: What’s liable to catch some pro AV industry integrators and installers off guard in the coming year?
Way: What’s going to catch a lot of integrators off guard is how fast the business is shifting from “projects” to “platforms.” The days of winning a room-at-a-time build and walking away are numbered. Customers are starting to expect open, API-driven ecosystems that tie AV into identity, data, security, scheduling and support workflows, not just a stack of gear installed in a space. Those who still think in terms of boxes, macros and one-off programming are going to wake up and realize the real decisions were made upstream, at the architecture and governance level, long before a bid went out. The integrators who understand platform open-AV, who can speak the language of IT, analytics, and user experience, will be sitting at the strategy table. The rest will be reduced to labor providers executing someone else’s vision for thinner and thinner margins. The advantage for those integrators who do recognize this is that if chosen as the key strategic partner, there is recurring revenue for the long run. This moves from winning a bid on one space to likely winning it across the enterprise for years to come.
Commercial Integrator: What’s the single most pressing challenge that professionals in the pro AV industry must tackle right now? And how would you suggest tackling it?
Way: The single most pressing challenge we have to tackle right now is the support and staffing reality of a world where AV is truly mission-critical. We can’t keep pretending we’ll magically deliver enterprise-grade uptime, security, and user experience with thin teams, unrealistic SLAs, and systems that require a unicorn engineer every time something breaks.
Rooms are no longer single “sneaker-net” installs, but integrated into the ecosystem and infrastructure of the enterprise and need to be supported that way. The way to tackle it is twofold… First, design differently, focusing on standardized, open, supportable systems with clear documentation, remote management, and workflows that Tier 1 and Tier 2 staff can handle without the need for calling external third-party support.
Second, get honest and strategic about service and build realistic support models, invest in training and career paths for support techs, and bake uptime, patching, and incident response into the scope from day one instead of treating them as afterthoughts.
It becomes about investing in the people managing the systems more than the tech itself.
Commercial Integrator: Finish this sentence: 2026 will be remembered as the year that the pro AV industry…
Way: 2026 will be remembered as the year that the pro AV industry stopped selling boxes and finally started shaping a true data-driven experience by embracing open-AV architectures, real APIs and cloud-native management that reflects the customer’s organizational mission instead of clinging to proprietary locked-in ecosystems.
Stay tuned with Commercial Integrator as we gather year-end insights and 2026 pro AV predictions from the brightest minds in the industry. If you’d like to be featured, contact our editorial team (Alyssa Borelli, Amala Reddie and Dan Ferrisi).
