What's your vision for the future of AV? That's the question we asked Ron Holtdijk, Executive Vice President of Business Communication at Sennheiser. Here are his predictions on intelligent audio, the disappearing middle in AV investments, and why meeting equity will define competitive advantage.
IN THIS ARTICLE
In the future, audio systems won’t just capture and reproduce sound, they’ll understand it. A microphone array will recognize who’s speaking. It will adapt processing in real-time, reducing cognitive load for listeners and extending the productive meeting time before fatigue sets in.
Premium spaces will make remote participants sound indistinguishable from those physically present. Remote participants will feel positioned in the room, able to perceive who’s speaking from which direction, and experience side conversations naturally rather than as audio interruptions.
The capabilities exist today. What changes over the next months and years, is scale and expectation. What’s premium now becomes standard, and the bar for “good audio” rises dramatically.
AI in audio will become a baseline expectation. Adaptive beamforming, noise classification, automatic gain control based on speaker distance, and transcription with speaker identification: the intelligence layer enables fundamentally new capabilities. Audio systems will generate data about meeting effectiveness, participation patterns, and acoustic quality. Organizations will use this data to optimize spaces, proactively identify problems, and demonstrate ROI for technology investments. Adaptive systems that continuously optimize for clarity make a real difference in performance and well-being.
The Pro AV market will grow faster than GDP through 2028. But the growth will be uneven. Standard meeting rooms face intense cost pressure and commoditization. High-impact spaces (boardrooms, all-hands auditoriums, hybrid lecture halls) continue seeing premium investment. These are strategic assets where brand, culture, and critical decisions happen daily.
The middle is disappearing. You’re either delivering commodity functionality at competitive prices or differentiated experiences that justify premium investment. This split is accelerating. Organizations will standardize ruthlessly on basic spaces while investing heavily in signature rooms that create competitive advantage.
The most important unsolved problem in hybrid work is ensuring meeting equity, and audio is central to the solution. Poor audio makes people check out mentally, even if the video is perfect. Struggling to hear, asking for repetition, missing conversational nuances, and other issues create cognitive load that exhausts participants and reduces engagement. Great audio is often invisible, but people feel the difference.
Solving meeting equity requires spatial audio that creates genuine presence, intelligent processing that equalizes voice levels regardless of speaker position, and adaptive noise suppression that works without making people sound robotic. Multi-camera systems get attention, but without great audio, those beautiful video feeds become frustrating rather than helpful.
Organizations that crack meeting equity – making remote participation genuinely equivalent to physical presence – will differentiate themselves in talent retention. Those who don’t will find that hybrid work remains a persistent source of frustration.
At recent industry shows and in customer conversations, three themes emerge consistently:
For AV integrators to remain relevant, evolution is essential: from installers to AV-IT solution partners.
Traditional expertise remains critical: understanding acoustics, designing for intelligibility, knowing how sound behaves in different spaces, etc… But it needs to be complemented with new competencies: networking and cybersecurity knowledge, cloud platforms and APIs, and data analytics literacy.
The integrators thriving in 2026 will embrace ongoing relationships and managed services rather than transactional projects. The one-time installation business is becoming commoditized. The long-term relationship business is becoming more valuable.
Ron Holtdijk is Executive Vice President of Business Communication at Sennheiser, where he leads the company’s strategy for professional audio solutions in enterprise, education, and government markets. With decades of experience in the audio industry, Ron focuses on how intelligent audio systems can transform communication and collaboration in hybrid work environments.
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