Every CIO we talk to is under pressure to reduce costs. And every time the budget conversation comes around, AV is one of those line items that looks temptingly large but poorly understood. The instinct is to cut across the board — cheaper equipment, longer refresh cycles, fewer rooms. The result is usually a degraded experience that costs more in lost productivity than it saves in capital.
There's a better way. The opportunity isn't in spending less on AV — it's in spending smarter.
Where AV Budgets Actually Go Wrong
In our experience, most enterprise AV budgets have the same pathologies:
Over-specified executive spaces. The CEO's boardroom has a $150,000 custom installation with motorized screens, a control system that requires a trained operator, and acoustic treatments designed by a consultant who charged by the hour. Meanwhile, the 30 huddle rooms that host 80% of the organization's meetings have a TV and a webcam.
No lifecycle management. Equipment gets installed and then ignored until it fails. There's no depreciation schedule, no planned refresh, no firmware management. This means you're paying for break-fix support on equipment that should have been replaced two years ago, and your support vendor knows it — their margins on legacy equipment maintenance are enormous.
Redundant platforms. You're paying for Microsoft Teams Rooms licenses, but half your rooms also have Zoom hardware, and there's a Cisco system in the training room from a previous initiative. Three platforms means three support contracts, three sets of spare parts, and three times the training burden.
Custom everything. Every room was designed as a bespoke project because someone decided the standard wouldn't work for their specific needs. Custom AV design costs 2-3x more than standardized deployments and is dramatically harder to support.
The Optimization Framework
Step 1: Categorize your rooms. Define 3-5 room types based on capacity and use case: personal/focus (1-2 people), huddle (3-6), conference (7-14), boardroom (15+), all-hands/training. Every room in your portfolio should map to one of these types.
Step 2: Design to the standard, not the exception. For each room type, create a bill of materials that delivers a good experience on your primary collaboration platform at a reasonable cost. "Good" means: one-touch join, clear audio for everyone in the room, a camera that frames participants well, and a display that's readable from every seat. It doesn't mean: 4K, dual displays, wireless presentation from six devices simultaneously, and a control panel that looks like a recording studio.
Step 3: Audit against the standard. Compare every room to its type standard. You'll find rooms that are over-built (candidates for component reuse), rooms that are under-built (prioritize for upgrades), and rooms that are obsolete (candidates for decommission).
Step 4: Consolidate platforms. Pick one. Teams or Zoom, not both. This is a political decision as much as a technical one, but the cost of maintaining parallel ecosystems is substantial. Every dual-platform room costs roughly 40% more to equip and support than a single-platform room.
Step 5: Negotiate as a portfolio. If you have 200 rooms, you should be buying AV equipment through a managed program, not room by room. Volume pricing, standardized deployment, and bundled support contracts can reduce per-room costs by 20-30% compared to one-off projects.
The Hidden Savings
Beyond direct cost reduction, standardization creates operational savings that compound over time:
What Not to Cut
Don't cut microphones. Don't cut network QoS. Don't cut monitoring. And don't extend refresh cycles beyond 7 years for any room that gets regular use. These are the areas where savings today create larger costs tomorrow — in support burden, user dissatisfaction, and productivity loss.
The goal is a tighter portfolio that delivers a consistent, supportable experience everywhere, with intentional investment in the rooms that matter most. Spend less overall, but spend it where it counts.