Sydney, 2 September 2026 – Videopro’s Chief Experience Officer, Yas Grigaliunas, joined a panel of global AV and technology leaders to open the 2026 Integrate Expo Tech Talks program at ICC Sydney, where they discussed how AV can help organisations turn data into meaningful insights and better experiences.
The opening session, “The Intelligence Economy: Navigating the Next Frontier of AV,” was moderated by Richard Morrison, Technology Services Leader at Stantec. “For decades we’ve been thinking of Pro AV as infrastructure, but largely invisible,” Morrison told the audience. “As we step into 2026, that’s fundamentally changed.”
Yas was joined on stage by Dave Labuskes, CEO of AVIXA, Kyle Spiess of Microsoft, and Paul Gunia of HP, bringing perspectives from across an industry increasingly focused on measurable business outcomes.
AI and Human Judgement
For Yas, the conversation kept returning to a theme she’s passionate about: the balance between AI and human judgement. “AI can be incredibly valuable to collate the data and deliver intelligence, but if the human eye isn’t interrogating it, we lose the value of what differentiates our industry, and that difference has always come down to people.”
Labuskes built on the idea from an infrastructure perspective: “AV is the eyes and ears of artificial intelligence. Without effective eyes and ears, you don’t have the data coming in that you can use to augment and make better decisions and drive better outcomes.”
Spiess described how expectations of meeting rooms are changing: “Previously, how we measured success was: can you hear people, can you see people, are people using the room. Now it’s more about what data was captured in that room, and whether that data contributed to downstream workflows to get work done.”
Gunia said the opportunity extends beyond the meeting room. “Every single meeting, every single message, every single email has become a piece of useful data for the enterprise,” he said, pointing to how much of that intellectual property still goes uncaptured.
Looking beyond room metrics
The panel also discussed what the numbers can miss. A room might be working as designed, but that doesn’t tell you whether the people using it feel confident it will work when they need it. That experience deserves attention alongside data, workflows and business outcomes.
“It’s got me thinking around the BOM versus the behaviour,” Yas said. “The data might say a room is perfect, always on, fully utilised, and everyone downstream believes it, but the actual people using it every day, not the people who designed it, not the people who deployed it, may tell a completely different story.”
Labuskes backed the point from the data side. AVIXA’s own research shows 78% of end users making AV purchasing decisions now expect it to directly impact revenue and profitability, but he drew the line straight back to what Yas had raised: “Revenue is short term, profit is short term, without that connection of people to people, which creates sustainable business models.”
Sustainability and the Circular Economy
The discussion also turned to growing expectations around sustainability. Yas noted that clients, particularly larger organisations, now subject to mandatory sustainability reporting requirements, are asking for far more than they were five years ago: full visibility of supply chains, material provenance and end-of-life, not just energy use.
She pointed to Crestron’s stand on the Integrate show floor, where a whole wall celebrates their sustainability credentials, as an example of how manufacturers are responding. Crestron, she noted, was the first manufacturer globally in the audiovisual (AV) industry to achieve SAVe Certification through Sustainability in AV (SAVe).
Gunia gave examples from HP’s supply chain: “One of our most recent products leverages 80% post-consumer recyclable materials. We grade our suppliers and partners on where they source their electricity from, and how environmentally friendly they are.” He added that the changes, from reduced packaging to soy-based inks, have often paid for themselves. “We actually found that it saved us money.”
Yas is also working on sustainability beyond Integrate. Yas shares the role of SAVe (Sustainability in AV) Ambassador for Australia with Sarah Drysdale, COO of CommBox, working together to build awareness and action for the circular economy across the AV industry. In October, both are scheduled to speak at the SAVe Global Conference at UCLA in Los Angeles (13-14 October), alongside worldwide SAVe Ambassadors.
What AV leaders should focus on next
Asked to identify the most important shift AV leaders need to make, each panellist offered a different perspective.
For Gunia, it was about proving value: “Stop selling capabilities and start selling outcomes, and being able to measure it, because the only AV investment that’s going to survive a downscaling is one you can prove.”
Spiess urged the industry to look beyond individual spaces: “Stop designing for particular spaces, and really invest in the experience the customer is after and what their business requires.”
Labuskes, emphasised the purpose behind the technology: “Connecting people to people with technology continues to be the thread you need to bring into the conversation, inclusive of the entire ecosystem, from the customer’s customer through to the end user.”
Yas brought the conversation back to experience: “Experience matters, and it matters not just in ideation and integration, but in interpretation and intuition, equally.”
Integrate’s Tech Talks program, delivered in partnership with AVIXA, ran across the three days of Integrate Expo 2026, covering intelligent spaces, digital signage, AI-powered collaboration and more. AVIXA Asia-Pacific also shared its own recap of the opening panel, calling it a session that “went beyond technology to ask a bigger question: how do we prove the value AV delivers.”
