Like our colleagues on the Xyte product team, the Xyte sales team spent a lot of time demoing our solution and speaking with people in our booth at ISE 2026. And we also got to spend a significant portion of the week in listening mode, picking up signals that don't always make it into the official show narrative.
After a week of conversations with integrators, end-users, and partners on the show floor in Barcelona, my teammates and I came back from ISE with a clear read on where the market is: what the people actually buying, deploying, and living with these systems are asking for. What’s interesting is that the questions they brought to our booth this year were different. They were bigger - the kind that land on a CFO's or COO's desk, alongside the IT manager's.
In this blog, I'll lay out the ideas that defined our conversations at ISE 2026 — what buyers are asking for, what they're assuming, and what the expanding scope of AV means for the platforms and partners that are building for AV’s next phase.
AV's Expanding Mandate
Not long ago, the central question we’d get about AV management was a hardware one: how do I ensure that everything is online, rooms are available, and meetings are hassle-free? That framing made sense when AV was primarily about conferencing gear. But it's narrower than what the market needs now.
There are devices showing up on the radar today, but they’re different. Air quality sensors, people counters, occupancy trackers - these are becoming standard room components. And the data they generate feeds conversations that go well beyond IT. The questions we heard in Barcelona reflected that shift. "Are our employees safe when they come into the office?" "Are our spaces being used efficiently enough to justify renewing this commercial real estate lease?" These are C-suite questions. And AV data is now part of that conversation.
The numbers back this up. The global occupancy sensor market is projected to nearly double between 2025 and 2032, reaching over $7 billion. The indoor air quality monitoring market is on a similar trajectory, slated to grow almost 12% annually through 2032. Organizations are investing in environmental intelligence at scale, and AV infrastructure is becoming the delivery mechanism.
For Xyte, this plays directly to our platform’s strengths. The dashboard we brought to ISE – offering real-time room information on occupancy and similar data points - landed exactly the way we hoped. Visitors immediately started connecting our interface to the broader operational questions they're trying to answer.
The AV industry has always been about enabling people to work together. We’re now understanding that the scope of what that means is expanding. The platforms that will matter are the ones that can handle that broader responsibility.
If you’re responsible for AV infrastructure across distributed sites, see how Xyte centralizes monitoring, remediation, and lifecycle management. Book a demo with Xyte.
Interoperability Has Moved from Interest to Expectation
The interoperability conversation at ISE 2026 matured significantly from what we'd heard in previous years. There was a clear shift from "interest" to "expectation" - buyers were asking specific questions about cross-vendor data flows, platform handoffs, and integration timelines.
As a founding member of OpenAV Cloud, this is a shift we've been anticipating. Our product team noticed it too. From the vendor side, OEMs with their own cloud platforms were approaching Xyte to discuss deeper data sharing and device access. From where the sales team sits, the same energy was coming from integrators and end-users arriving at our booth with very specific expectations about how platforms should work together.
What's worth noting is that this pull is coming from every layer of the channel. Manufacturers want visibility into how their devices perform across deployments. Channel partners want workflows that don't require custom integration for every new vendor. Enterprise end-users want ecosystems that simply work together - because their operational questions are too big to be answered by any single platform alone.
The Big Hits at Our Booth
The reception to Xyte's newest products and features at ISE was a strong signal that we're on the right path. Our new Rooms dashboard drew consistent enthusiasm, and companies like Logitech stopped by to express genuine satisfaction with how their devices are represented in our platform. Xyte Secure Edge resonated strongly with our SI partners - it accelerates time to value and eliminates the internal cost of procuring and spinning up a device themselves. For a busy SI, having Xyte ready off the shelf is a meaningful operational advantage.
Sustainability and AI (of course) came up regularly in conversations on the floor. On sustainability, the conversation spanned the entire channel - from manufacturers looking to track power consumption and carbon footprint across regions, to channel partners hoping to roll fewer trucks and manage product refreshes more sustainably, to enterprise end-users automating connected devices to reduce energy consumption. On AI, the market is at an inflection point: vendors who aren't improving their products with AI are falling behind, yet vendors deploying AI features with no clear immediate impact are losing credibility.
And of course, if we’re talking about the big hits at our booth, the popsicles were popular, as always.
The Bottom Line
The sales team's job is to stay close to what the market actually needs - what the people deploying, managing, and living with these systems are telling us directly. ISE 2026 gave us a week of exactly that.
We came back from Barcelona with a clear sense of where the market is heading, how the scope of AV is expanding, and most importantly, the problems yet to be solved. The questions buyers were asking touch bigger subjects than last year - workplace safety, real estate strategy, operational efficiency, sustainability and more. The platforms that will define the next phase of this industry are those (like Xyte) that are listening to real needs and building for that larger conversation.
