Cloud AV and modern ProAV promise flexible, intelligent meeting spaces, but for the people who have to deliver them, the job is getting harder, not easier.
What used to be relatively contained AV projects have turned into systems that are difficult to design, slow to deploy, and expensive to support at scale.
That tension sits at the heart of Yealink’s ProAV strategy.
On one side, Yealink is expanding its portfolio from meeting bars and phones into full-stack audio, video, control, and sensing.
On the other, partners such as DEKOM have to turn that strategy into real-world projects for demanding enterprise customers.
As Logan Lu, Director of the EMEA Sales Engineer Team at Yealink, puts it:
“The complexity in modern ProAV environments is what’s making repeatable deployment so difficult for partners today.”
From the integrator side, Tobias Weise, Business Development Manager at DEKOM, is even closer to that operational reality: “Every project looks simple on paper, but once you get into programming, integration, and room logic, the complexity multiplies very quickly.”
Their perspectives highlight why projects have become so demanding and where AI and standardisation are starting to make a difference.
A recurring theme also surfaced in conversations at ISE 2026, where industry discussions broadly pointed to the same inflection point: AI and platform convergence are beginning to reshape how complexity is managed across modern meeting environments.
A similar direction is emerging from the platform side too.
As Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn put it, “2025 for us was really a year of broadening AI for powering the workplace,” with Copilot moving beyond a personal assistant into “a co worker” that can take common tasks off people’s plates in chats, channels, and meetings.
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When Every Room Becomes A One-Off
From Lu’s perspective, the core problem is that there are simply more moving parts in every room.
Modern Cloud AV and ProAV environments combine audio, video, control, and networked components in ways that were rare a few years ago.
Each of those elements brings its own configuration options and integration requirements.
“Technology changes so fast,” Lu says.
“Every day we have new technology, new ideas – but that means you need a lot of effort to learn new stuff, new vendor solutions, background technology, how it works.
“Design, programming, commissioning – those guys need to know a lot. With multi-vendors, multi-solutions, multi-hardware, that makes ProAV very complex.”
Weise sees the same reality in the field.
Control programming is heavier, system diagrams are more intricate, and there are more devices and vendors to assess.
On paper, a rollout may look straightforward: ten rooms, a defined set of functions, a familiar platform at the core.
In practice, each room still must be programmed, integrated, and tested individually.
He describes a recent project where deploying ten Cloud AV rooms for a large enterprise consumed about a full working day of engineering time.
Hours are lost in programming and background configuration that the customer never sees, but which sit on the integrator’s delivery timeline.
Each variation, each vendor-specific quirk, and each custom control logic decision makes it harder to standardize deployment across larger estates.
Multi-Purpose Rooms Multiply the Challenge
Lu sees this most clearly in the rise of multi-purpose spaces.
A traditional meeting room with a single camera and microphone may not be particularly complex to standardize.
The difficulty emerges when rooms are expected to behave differently depending on use case.
One large space might host a training session in the morning, then be divided into two separate rooms for smaller meetings in the afternoon.
The same physical environment must support multiple layouts, signal paths, and control states.
Each mode introduces additional complexity around audio routing, camera behavior, display configuration, and user interaction.
As Lu points out, the more flexible the space becomes, the more vendors and systems tend to be involved. The challenge is making a multi-vendor environment feel like a single coherent system.
For Yealink, this is exactly the type of environment its ProAV portfolio is designed to support. For DEKOM, it defines the daily reality of whether projects can scale beyond one-off deployments.
AI as a Delivery Tool
Lu sees AI less as a feature and more as a way to reduce operational friction in real deployments.
In audio environments, machine learning can identify acoustic patterns and automatically optimize system behavior that previously required manual tuning.
In system design, AI tools can generate initial control logic and interface layouts, reducing repetitive configuration work while still allowing engineers to refine outputs.
This direction also reflects broader industry thinking reinforced at ISE 2026, where the focus has shifted toward AI reducing operational load rather than acting as a demonstration feature.
As Bukshteyn notes, Copilot is increasingly designed to handle routine collaboration tasks inside meetings and workflows.
For integrators such as DEKOM, the impact is practical rather than theoretical. A good AI layer is invisible to end users, but reduces troubleshooting cycles and time spent returning to site.
Stability as a Long-Term Discipline
Despite rapid innovation, stability remains essential.
Unreliable systems increase support costs and reduce confidence in large-scale rollouts.
Lu describes Yealink’s approach as incremental, with solutions validated internally and tested with selected partners before wider release.
Feedback from real deployments is then used to refine performance and harden systems.
For integrators, this stability directly influences whether a vendor can be deployed across large estates with confidence.
From Hero Installs to Repeatable Systems
The industry is under pressure from rising system complexity, increasing user expectations, and the need to scale deployments efficiently.
In this environment, complexity becomes the limiting factor.
AI helps reduce friction in configuration and support, while standardization enables repeatability across deployments.
The future of ProAV will depend less on what can be demonstrated in controlled environments and more on what can be delivered consistently across hundreds of rooms.
For Yealink and DEKOM, the challenge is to translate technical capability into systems that behave simply in practice.
