IT leaders may have detailed cloud costs but no consolidated view of AV. Start with basic questions. How many rooms are supported? What does each room type cost? Which rooms are available when meetings begin?
Without that baseline, room projects, support contracts, and replacement requests enter separate budget queues.
The invisible cost structure
Enterprise AV spending may be distributed across several budget lines:
Aggregate the records into one baseline by room, room type, location, platform, and owner. That baseline shows where costs overlap or lack a corresponding room requirement.
Where the waste lives
Underutilized rooms. Compare calendar bookings with actual occupancy. No-shows, placeholder bookings, and rooms used for individual calls can distort demand and hide space that should be repurposed.
Support friction. When a room fails, record the participants affected, meeting delay, relocation, technician time, and ticket duration. Use those records to calculate impact instead of applying an industry estimate.
Vendor lock-in premiums. Review support contracts for auto-renewal, annual escalators, minimum commitments, and equipment that is no longer in service. Compare the same room scope across qualified providers.
Over-provisioning. A 12-person conference room doesn't need three displays, a 7.1 surround sound system, and a touch panel that controls the lighting. It needs a good camera, good microphones, a readable display, and a reliable connection to your collaboration platform.
Building the business case
The optimization business case isn't "cut AV spending." It's "redirect AV spending from waste to value." Here's the framework:
Quantify current state. Total up all AV-related spending across every budget line. Calculate your cost per room, cost per meeting, and cost per participant. These baseline metrics are essential for measuring improvement.
Measure utilization. Deploy room sensors or use calendar analytics to understand actual occupancy versus bookings. Identify rooms that should be repurposed, consolidated, or decommissioned.
Benchmark against standards. Define what each room type should cost to equip and operate. Compare your actual spend to the standard. The gap is your optimization opportunity.
Prioritize by impact. Focus first on the changes that affect the most people: standardizing the most-used rooms, fixing the most-reported issues, and eliminating the most expensive inefficiencies.
Project forward. Use your asset ages, vendor support dates, ticket costs, and standard room prices to compare the current approach with a planned lifecycle. State each assumption so finance can challenge it.
The strategic framing
Do not promise a generic savings percentage. Show which room, contract, license, or support step changes. Then track the same cost and ticket fields after the change.