A Day in the Life of an AV Team Using Autonomous Operations

By Sam Kennedy

It's 7:30 in the morning, and an AV administrator starts the day by checking what happened overnight. First the alerts, then the open tickets, then one manufacturer's dashboard, then another platform, then maybe another. Which rooms are offline? What changed overnight? What tickets came in? Is anything critical happening this morning?

And once the dashboards have been checked, there's another question: which rooms do we physically need to check?

For many AV teams, that's still part of the daily routine. Technicians walk into conference rooms and classrooms to make sure everything is where it should be: turn things on, check the display, test the conferencing system, make sure nothing has changed, and move to the next room.

Except there may be hundreds or thousands of rooms, and there aren't hundreds or thousands of technicians. So some rooms get checked today, others tomorrow. Some organizations check a percentage of their rooms each morning, and some rooms simply don't get checked until a user discovers there's a problem.

That's what AV operations can look like today. But what happens when we introduce autonomous operations into that workflow? The interesting part isn't that AI replaces the AV team. It's that the AV team gets to spend its day very differently.

7:30 AM: Start With the Exceptions, Not the Search

Imagine that same administrator starting the day another way. Instead of opening multiple dashboards and trying to piece together what happened overnight, they can simply ask Lena which rooms need their attention this morning.

Behind that simple question is a fundamentally different operating model. Room Checks are already scheduled, and Lena can compare rooms against their expected target states, identify configuration drift, correct issues she can resolve through software, and flag the problems that require a person.

That means the administrator doesn't need to start the morning asking what might be broken. They can start with what actually needs them. That's a small change in language and a huge change in workflow.

8:00 AM: Stop Checking Rooms That Are Already Fine

Consider the morning room walk. If an organization has 500 rooms and only enough staff to physically inspect 50 of them, there's an inherent problem. Which 50? And what about the other 450?

The technician may spend most of the morning walking into perfectly healthy rooms just to establish that they're healthy. That's not troubleshooting. That's searching for something to troubleshoot.

Now change the model. Before the technician starts walking the building, Lena performs Room Checks. She compares actual configurations with target states, corrects the issues she can, and identifies the rooms where something still isn't right.

Now the technician doesn't have a list of 50 rooms to check. They have a list of five rooms that actually need them, along with context about why. That's where autonomous operations start to change the economics of AV support.

9:15 AM: A Ticket Comes In

Now imagine a user submits a ticket that just says the conference room isn't working. Anyone who has supported AV environments knows how much can be hidden inside a sentence like that. What's not working, the camera, the microphone, the display, the Zoom Room, the network? Is it a configuration issue, or is something physically disconnected? Has anyone tried restarting it?

The AV technician has to start investigating, which can mean remotely accessing systems, digging through multiple management platforms, or getting up and physically going to the room just to begin troubleshooting.

With Lena, that initial investigation can look different. The administrator can talk to Lena in natural language and ask her to help troubleshoot the issue. Lena can examine the environment, help identify the problem, and offer a potential resolution. If the issue can be corrected remotely, she can take action. If it can't, the technician can go to the room with something much more valuable than a vague ticket: context. Instead of arriving and asking what's wrong, they can arrive already knowing where to start.

10:30 AM: Do We Really Need an AV Expert for a Reboot?

This is where another interesting change happens. Many AV teams have highly skilled people performing surprisingly basic tasks: rebooting a device, restoring a setting, checking a configuration, determining whether something is connected, verifying that a system is responding.

None of those tasks is unimportant, but they don't necessarily require your most experienced AV engineer. And when those issues happen across a large environment, they create noise. Each individual problem might take only a few minutes, but collectively they consume enormous amounts of time and attention.

Autonomous operations give us an opportunity to push some of that work downward, first to software, and then, when human involvement is required, potentially to more generalized IT staff who can use Lena as a troubleshooting partner. They don't necessarily need years of specialized knowledge to begin investigating an issue. They can ask Lena, she can provide context and help identify the likely problem, and the organization's AV experts can become the escalation point for the problems that actually require AV expertise. That's a much better use of a scarce resource.

11:45 AM: The Technician Still Has to Go to the Room

Autonomy doesn't mean everything can be solved remotely. A cable can still fail, something can become physically disconnected, hardware can break. There will always be problems where someone has to walk into the room.

But even then, autonomous operations can improve the workflow. There's a significant difference between sending someone to a room with nothing more than “something isn't working” and sending them with “this room failed its check, we've isolated the problem to this part of the system, and remote remediation wasn't successful.”

The technician still makes the trip, but the troubleshooting process began before they arrived. That's an important distinction. AI doesn't have to completely resolve a problem to save time. Sometimes the value is simply making the human who ultimately resolves it much more effective.

1:00 PM: Another Alert. Another Dashboard. Another Ticket.

This is where the traditional AV day can become reactive. Something happens, someone responds, another thing happens, someone responds. The team spends the day bouncing between dashboards, tickets, rooms, calls, and alerts.

The individual problems aren't always particularly difficult. They're just relentless, and every one consumes a little human attention.

That's why I don't think the biggest promise of autonomous operations is simply faster troubleshooting. It's less unnecessary troubleshooting. If Lena can resolve a configuration issue without involving someone, that's one less interruption. If she can identify that a room is healthy without someone walking into it, that's one less manual check. If she can determine where a physical problem exists before the technician arrives, that's less time spent diagnosing. If generalized IT staff can use Lena to handle basic AV issues, that's one less escalation to the AV experts.

Individually, these may look like small efficiencies. Across hundreds or thousands of rooms, they add up.

2:30 PM: Now the Interesting Work Can Begin

Here's the part of autonomous operations that I think gets overlooked. What does the AV team do with the time it gets back?

Because there is no shortage of work. There are complex rooms that deserve more attention, spaces that need redesigning, new systems to deploy, user experiences that can be improved, standards to develop, difficult technical problems that genuinely require expertise, and an entire environment to make better.

Those are exactly the things you want your most talented AV professionals thinking about. Yet too often, their attention gets consumed by the bottom 10, 20, or 30 percent of operational noise: a simple reboot, a configuration that changed, a basic room check, a vague support request, a trip across campus to discover something that could have been identified remotely.

Autonomous operations aren't about getting rid of those experts. They're about giving those experts their time back.

4:00 PM: From Reactive to Proactive

Now imagine what happens when some of that operational noise disappears. The AV team can start asking different questions. Which spaces consistently have problems? Where should we invest next? Which room designs are performing well, and which aren't? How can we improve the experience for users? What should the next generation of our rooms look like?

Instead of spending nearly all of their time maintaining what already exists, teams can spend more time improving what comes next. That's the larger transformation. The AV administrator moves from being primarily a responder to increasingly becoming an operator, designer, and strategist.

Autonomous Operations Don't Replace Expertise

There's an understandable concern whenever we talk about AI taking action. If software can troubleshoot systems, perform Room Checks, correct configurations, and resolve problems, what happens to the people?

I think we're asking the wrong question. The better question is why we're using highly skilled people for work that doesn't require their skill. You don't need your most experienced AV engineer spending an hour determining that a device needs to be rebooted. You need that engineer designing better environments, solving difficult problems, improving standards, and working on the issues where their experience makes a difference.

And you don't necessarily need an AV specialist to handle every basic support request. If Lena can give generalized IT staff the context and guidance they need to resolve more of those issues, the entire support organization becomes more capable. AI doesn't have to replace expertise. It can help expertise scale.

5:00 PM: What Changed?

At the end of the day, the AV environment hasn't become simpler. There are still rooms, still devices, still users. Things still break, cables still fail, hardware still needs attention, and complex problems still require talented people.

What changed is how much human attention was required to keep everything operating. The old day looked something like checking dashboards, reviewing alerts, walking rooms, investigating tickets, troubleshooting, rebooting, traveling, fixing, and repeating. The autonomous day increasingly looks like reviewing exceptions, resolving complex issues, handling physical problems, improving spaces, and designing what's next.

That's the future I find interesting. Not an AV environment without people. An AV environment where people aren't required for every little thing.

The goal of autonomous operations shouldn't be to remove humans from AV. It should be to remove the work that never needed a human in the first place.

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