This year is my first InfoComm and I’m embarrassingly excited about it. I’ve been in pro AV for over a decade, and somehow I’ve always managed to be on the wrong project at the wrong time of year. Not this time. The week is blocked off, the flight is booked, and I’m already trying to reverse-engineer a sensible plan out of a 500,000-square-foot show floor.

I can’t do the full week. Most independents can’t. So I’ve been thinking carefully about what an InfoComm trip actually needs to deliver for someone running a small consulting practice — not for a large integrator with 30 people on the floor at once.

Why bother going at all?

Fair question in 2026. Vendors stream their launches. Manufacturers will happily ship you a demo unit. There’s an AVIXA webinar for almost every product category. So why fly to a convention centre to look at the same gear?

Because there’s a difference between watching a polished sizzle reel and putting your hands on a touch panel that hasn’t been pre-configured for the camera angle. There’s a difference between a deck about “the future of meeting rooms” and standing in a booth where someone hands you a microphone and asks you to break it. As an independent, my recommendations are only as good as the gear I’ve actually used. Reading specs only gets you so far.

The other thing is the people. The corner of the AV industry I work in — Q-SYS programming, Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, BYOD spaces — is small. The folks I’d normally only see on a Slack channel or a webinar are all in the same building for four days. That’s worth a flight.

Q-SYS first

QSC’s booth is the one I want to spend the most time at. Q-SYS is the platform I do most of my programming in, and the roadmap conversations at InfoComm tend to set the tone for the next 12 months — new Cores, new peripherals, new UCI capabilities, the direction of the cloud tooling.

I want to look at:

  • What’s new in NV-32-H and the AV-over-IP family.
  • Where Q-SYS Reflect is going for clients who actually want centralized monitoring of all their rooms.
  • Anything new in the Lua / scripting story that makes UCI development faster or more maintainable.
  • Third-party plugins from the partner ecosystem — particularly anything that simplifies integration with Teams Rooms and Zoom.

The unified comms gauntlet

The Microsoft, Cisco, Poly, Logitech, and Yealink booths are basically a connected ecosystem at this point, and you can usually do the whole loop in half a day if you’re focused.

What I want to come back with is a clearer picture of where the line is between “Microsoft Teams Rooms certified” bars that just work, and the spaces where I should still be designing a Q-SYS-driven room with a separate compute. The market keeps moving. Every six months, a Logitech bar can do something that used to require a full DSP. Every six months, a DSP-driven design solves a problem that no bar can touch yet. Walking those booths back-to-back is the fastest way to keep that internal map current.

Yealink in particular is on my list. I spent some time at their showroom in Xiamen earlier this year, so I’m curious to see what they’re bringing to the North American floor and how the messaging lands here versus over there.

The booths I’ll skip

I’m an independent. I don’t need to look at every projector, every LED wall, and every DSP on the planet. If a category isn’t something I’m actively designing into client systems, I’m not going to spend an hour pretending I am. That’s the trap of a big show: you can easily fill three days with stuff that’s interesting but irrelevant.

The point of going to InfoComm isn’t to see everything. It’s to come back with three or four things you can credibly recommend on a quote next month.

Education sessions versus floor time

I’m still figuring out the balance. The AVIXA education tracks look genuinely good this year — especially the sessions on AI in meeting rooms and on the lifecycle of UCC platforms. But I also know that, for me, two solid hours in a real demo room beats two hours in a hotel ballroom listening to slides. So I’ll probably pick one or two sessions that I really can’t replicate elsewhere and treat the rest of my time as floor time.

What I want to bring back to clients

The whole point of this trip is the next conversation with a client back in Vancouver. When someone asks me “should we standardize on Microsoft Teams Rooms or build something custom?”, I want my answer to come from having stood in a real Teams Rooms booth that morning, not from a vendor PDF. When someone in the Lower Mainland is choosing between three video bars, I want to have actually compared them.

That’s the value proposition of an independent AV consultant in the first place: I’m not tied to a brand, so my opinions are only useful if they’re informed. A week at InfoComm is one of the cheapest ways to keep them informed.

Going? Let’s meet

If you’re going to InfoComm 2026 — whether you’re an integrator, a manufacturer, an end client, or another independent — I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line, and we’ll find a coffee or a corner of a hotel lobby where we can talk shop. I’ll write a follow-up post once I’m back, with the actual things I think Vancouver clients should care about from the show.