A corporate meeting room has to do one thing well: support a meeting. A university campus has to do everything at once. Hybrid lecture halls, rural learning centres, faculty offices, student collaboration areas, sports arenas, commencement venues, retail spaces. One estate, hundreds of room problems, all running on the same budget and the same support team.
That is what makes higher education the hardest place to deploy UC and AV technology, and the most revealing. If a platform can hold up across a university, it can hold up almost anywhere.
Two conversations at InfoComm 2026 make the case from opposite ends of the campus. At Utah State University, UC rooms have become the infrastructure for teaching across an entire state. At the University of St. Thomas, AV turned a new arena into a professional venue built to pull in recruits and revenue.
How Utah State Uses UC Rooms as Access Infrastructure
For Utah State, Zoom Rooms are not meeting rooms. They are how the university teaches across an entire state. Kevin Reeve, Academic Technology Officer at Utah State University, lays out the scale:
Utah State has about 30,000 students, but they’re not all on our main campus. They’re throughout rural Utah and also in the cities. We have 30 locations across the state.
The university runs more than 300 academic courses a semester this way, with faculty teaching from multiple sites and students joining from campus, a regional centre, or home. That changes the test entirely. A corporate room is judged on call quality. A Utah State room is judged on whether a student in a town of 1,500 people can attend class at all.
Why Workflow Integration Drives Faculty Adoption
The rooms only matter if faculty use them, and Utah State’s answer was to stop making faculty go looking. Zoom is built directly into the Canvas learning management system, so there is no second login and no separate URL. Reeve says that integration is where adoption took off:
“That tight integration, class rosters, ability to do whiteboarding, the chat, the AI Companion getting those class notes, it’s opened up a whole new world of interactivity in classes beyond video.”
The same logic applies in the enterprise. People adopt the room that lives inside the calendar, the project tool, or the CRM they already use. Adoption fails when the room is one more thing to learn.
What Higher Ed Reveals About Scalable Room Costs
Universities run large estates on tight budgets, which is exactly why their cost numbers are worth listening to. Reeve says standardised, software-led rooms have cut deployment costs by 30 to 50 percent against earlier build-outs that could run past $50,000 a room. His advice to other AV teams is blunt: stop over-building.
“Zoom Room technology has allowed it to be simplified and easier to install, easier to maintain and less things to go wrong.”
Simpler rooms are not a compromise. They are cheaper to deploy, faster to fix, and have fewer parts that can fail.
How AI and Self-Healing Rooms Are Being Tested on Campus
AI on campus earns its keep at the student level, not in a meeting summary. Reeve describes a lecturer who stopped mid-class and had students ask AI Companion to pull up material from the session itself:
“If they didn’t hear something or they zoned out or they wanted some clarification, so cool things.”
The bigger problem is keeping rooms working when the nearest technician is two hours away. Utah State’s answer is a self-healing classrooms project: rooms that spot and fix common faults before anyone calls for help.
“We are on a quest to figure out how instead of being reactive, it’ll be proactive.”
For a campus spread across a state, that is not a nice-to-have. A dead display or a broken input can take out a class in three towns at once.
When Campus AV Becomes a Pro-Level Venue Strategy
St. Thomas moves the story from the classroom to the venue. Patrick Eisenhauer, Director of Audio Visual and Event Services at the University of St. Thomas, explains that jumping from Division 3 to Division 1 athletics meant building something far bigger than a sports hall:
“What we built was beyond just an arena.”
The building pairs a 4,000 to 6,000-seat venue with practice courts, an ice sheet, team spaces, offices, meeting rooms, concessions, and retail, all of it carrying serious AV.
A space that size exposed the limit of consumer kit fast. When early plans floated consumer-grade TVs, Eisenhauer pushed back to keep the build to university standards, specifying professional Panasonic displays built for the job:
“Not only matched and would work correctly with the AV systems, but also have the appropriate uptime, since a lot of these displays will be running 24/7.”
Put the two interviews side by side and you get the whole procurement equation: simplify where you can, but never under-spec the spaces you cannot afford to have go dark.
How Campus Spaces Become Recruitment and Revenue Engines
The arena also pays for itself in ways a classroom never could. It opened on time for hockey season and has already hosted the university’s own commencements and local high school ceremonies, with external rentals, tournaments, and concerts to follow:
“It will be much more than just an arena. It’s going to become more of a central space on our campus.”
For a venue like this, the return is not cost savings. It is recruitment, community use, and brand. Higher education is testing UC and AV not just technically, but commercially.
The Real Reason Higher Ed Is the Ultimate UC Test Bed
The two stories meet in the same place. Universities make vendors fix real operational problems instead of showing off features, and the themes UC Today tracked across the show, from rooms to experiences, all turn up here: AV over IP, software-defined rooms, AI, and remote monitoring.
The modern UC room will not be judged on meeting quality alone. It will be judged on whether it scales, fits the workflow, keeps costs down, supports AI, stays up, and earns its place across a whole campus. Pass that test, and the rest of the market is easy.
