InfoComm 2026 closed a seven-day run at the Las Vegas Convention Center today, and the question that organized the floor was not whether AI belongs in audiovisual systems but how fast those systems can absorb it without breaking the network underneath. AVIXA’s annual show drew more than 30,000 attendees to over 750 exhibitors, with education running June 13–19 and the exhibit halls open Wednesday through Friday in the North and Central Halls. The framing word for the week was convergence. The old boundary between AV and enterprise IT has stopped meaning anything, and the people specifying conference rooms are now the same people specifying network infrastructure.
Microsoft set the tone. Ilya Bukshteyn, the company’s corporate vice president for Teams calling, devices, and premium experiences, took the Vision Stage on Wednesday to argue that AI’s value comes from assembling context, data, and detail in one place so people spend their attention on judgment rather than logistics. The substance behind the rhetoric is MDEP, the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, which has spent the last several years standardizing the Android hardware that runs Teams meeting rooms. Vendors have converged on it while keeping enough room to differentiate on management and features, and that tension — common platform, competitive edges — shaped most of the meeting-room hardware on display.
Cisco took the adjacent position. Espen Løberg, who runs collaboration devices, made the case for the agentic workplace with a pointed reminder that an AI assistant is only as capable as the room it runs in. The convergence argument cuts both ways there. The agent needs cameras, microphones, displays, and a network that can carry the load, which is precisely the hardware the integrators in the hall sell and install.
Beneath the collaboration story sat the less glamorous and more consequential one. AV-over-IP has been the industry’s structural shift for a decade, and this year the Alliance for IP Media Solutions used InfoComm to launch a free, three-level IPMX training curriculum covering systems design and the networking fundamentals — Precision Time Protocol, SMPTE ST 2110 — that make IP video behave on a shared network. Training programs are a tell. They appear when a technology stops being a bet and becomes an expectation, and IPMX has reached that point.
The show also debuted its first Media Day, a curated tour splitting 19 exhibitors into Future of Work and Future of Experience tracks for credentialed press. The move is a recognition that the product-announcement cycle has outgrown the floor’s ability to surface it, and AVIXA wants InfoComm to be the launchpad rather than one venue among many.
The announcements clustered where the keynotes pointed. 22Miles wired Microsoft Places into its signage and room-booking platform, extending wayfinding and space data from desktops to kiosks and room boards. Sennheiser expanded its DeviceHub platform and pushed updates to the Spectera wireless ecosystem and the TeamConnect line. Watchfire brought new indoor and outdoor LED. Shure, the show’s exclusive headline partner, anchored the audio story. The pattern across all of it is the same: the camera, the microphone, the display, and the sign are no longer endpoints but sensors feeding the data layer the AI sits on top of.
InfoComm has run in some form since 1946, when the trade was selling film projectors to schools. Eighty years later the projector is a network node and the school is an enterprise, but the underlying business has not changed: someone still has to make the room work. What changed in 2026 is that the room now thinks back.