Stop Measuring Uptime. Start Measuring the Cost of Downtime.

By Sam Kennedy

A meeting room has a small problem. Maybe the display is on the wrong input. Maybe the conferencing system needs to be rebooted. Maybe a setting changed. Maybe the room simply isn't configured the way it needs to be for the next meeting.

The fix itself might take five minutes. So how expensive could that problem really be?

That's the wrong question, because the cost of an AV problem isn't just the cost of fixing it. It's the cost of discovering it, diagnosing it, escalating it, getting the right person involved, potentially sending someone to the room, and all the time employees spend waiting while that happens.

A relatively inexpensive technical problem can create a surprisingly expensive operational problem. And that's why I think we need to change the way we think about ROI in AV.

The Cost Isn't the Reboot

Imagine a conference room where the conferencing system needs to be rebooted. Technically, that's a simple problem. But let's follow what might actually happen.

Five employees walk into the room for a meeting. The system doesn't work. Someone tries to figure it out. Another person tries something else. Eventually they call support or submit a ticket that just says the conference room isn't working.

Now someone has to investigate. An AV administrator checks the room remotely, maybe looks at multiple dashboards, maybe contacts the user for more information. Maybe the issue gets escalated, and maybe a technician walks across the building or drives to another location.

Eventually, someone discovers that the system simply needed to be rebooted. Problem solved. But what did that reboot actually cost? Not in technology but in people.

Small Problems Multiply

This is where AV operations get expensive.

A single five-minute problem doesn't seem significant. But enterprise environments don't have one room. They might have a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, or five thousand, and those rooms contain thousands of devices being used by thousands of people.

Now take all the little issues that happen across that environment: wrong inputs, changed configurations, muted systems, devices that need restarting, basic troubleshooting, rooms that need to be manually checked, technicians walking from room to room, support teams investigating vague tickets, employees waiting for meetings to start, executives frustrated because the technology isn't working again.

Each individual event may look insignificant. Together, they create a significant operational tax. And unlike the price of a camera or a display, that cost doesn't appear neatly on a purchase order.

We Measure Uptime Because It's Easy to Measure

AV and UC teams have historically put a lot of emphasis on uptime, and uptime matters. But uptime can also give us a false sense of success.

A display can be online and showing the wrong input. A conferencing system can be online while the room is muted. Every device in a room can be reachable while the room itself isn't ready for the meeting that's about to begin.

So an organization can theoretically have excellent device uptime and still deliver a poor user experience. That's why I think we need to start measuring something more meaningful: readiness. Is the room actually prepared for what the user needs to do? Because that's ultimately what the organization is paying for.

The Most Expensive Room Is the One That Wastes People's Time

Consider what happens when ten people spend the first ten minutes of a meeting trying to get technology working. That's not ten minutes of lost productivity. It's potentially a hundred employee-minutes.

And if one of those people is an executive, salesperson, engineer, professor, physician, or another highly compensated employee, the economic impact grows quickly. Now multiply that across an organization. The real cost of unreliable AV isn't necessarily the equipment that failed. It's the collective time of everyone affected by it.

And there is another cost that's harder to put into a spreadsheet: confidence. When technology works consistently, people barely think about it. That's exactly what we want. When it doesn't, behavior starts to change.

People enter meetings early because they don't trust the room. They bring backup cables. They avoid certain spaces. They call AV before important meetings just in case. They ask someone to babysit an executive conference. They start meetings by asking if everyone can hear them.

Those behaviors tell us something. The organization has lost confidence in the technology.

There's Another Employee Experience We Don't Talk About Enough

When we discuss AV user experience, we usually mean the person using the conference room. But there's another user experience happening behind the scenes: the experience of the people supporting it.

Imagine being a highly skilled AV engineer and starting every morning walking through rooms to make sure they're working. Or spending an hour investigating a problem that turns out to require a reboot. Or traveling to another building to discover that a cable needs to be replaced. Or spending your day bouncing between dashboards, alerts, tickets, and basic support requests.

None of those tasks is unimportant, but they aren't necessarily the reason someone built a career in AV technology. Your best people should be working on your hardest problems: designing better spaces, improving standards, building new experiences, solving complex technical issues, and planning what comes next. Not spending their time looking for rooms that might be broken.

This Is Where Autonomous Operations Change the ROI Equation

When we talk about Lena, it's easy to focus on individual capabilities: Room Check, troubleshooting, configuration correction, natural-language interaction. But the bigger economic story is what happens when those capabilities work together.

Lena can check whether rooms match their expected target states. She can identify configuration drift, correct issues that can be resolved through software, help troubleshoot problems, identify issues that require physical intervention, and tell administrators which rooms actually need their attention.

Each of those capabilities removes a little friction from the operating model. One fewer manual room check. One fewer basic troubleshooting session. One fewer configuration issue requiring human intervention. One fewer unnecessary trip to a room. One fewer meeting where the user discovers the problem first.

That's where the ROI starts accumulating.

The Best Support Ticket Is the One That Never Gets Opened

Traditional ROI calculations often focus on how quickly a support team resolves a ticket. That's useful. But autonomous operations introduce a better possibility: what if the ticket never existed?

Imagine Lena runs a Room Check before the first meeting of the day. She discovers the room isn't in its expected state, identifies the difference, corrects it, and tests the room. The employee walks in later without ever knowing there was a problem. No ticket, no technician, no interruption, no lost meeting time, no frustrated user.

How do you calculate the ROI of something that never happened?

That's one of the challenges, and one of the opportunities, with autonomous operations. The value increasingly comes from prevented work, not simply faster work.

Don't Just Calculate What Lena Costs

When evaluating a technology like Lena, the obvious question is what it costs. Of course that matters. But it needs to be compared with the right alternative, and the alternative isn't zero. The alternative is the operating model you have today.

How many hours are spent manually checking rooms? How much time is spent investigating basic tickets? How many issues could have been resolved remotely? How often are highly skilled employees handling low-complexity problems? How much time is spent traveling between rooms, buildings, or locations? How many employee-hours are lost when meetings don't start on time? How much time does the organization spend simply determining what requires attention?

Those costs already exist. They just aren't always labeled AV operations on a budget.

And Then There Are the Costs You Can't Easily Calculate

Some of the most important outcomes don't fit neatly into an ROI spreadsheet.

What is it worth for an employee to trust that the meeting room will work? What is it worth for a professor to walk into a classroom knowing the technology is configured for that class? What is it worth for an executive meeting to start without an AV technician standing outside just in case? What is it worth for an AV engineer to spend another five hours each week improving the environment instead of checking rooms? What is it worth to retain talented technical employees because their jobs involve more meaningful work and less repetitive noise?

These things have value. They're simply harder to put into a cell in Excel.

Maybe the Better Metric Is Cost Per Ready Room

This is why I think our metrics need to evolve. Uptime tells us something. Ticket volume tells us something. Mean time to resolution tells us something. But none of them completely answers the question the business actually cares about: are our spaces ready when our people need them?

Maybe the more interesting metrics for the future are the percentage of rooms ready before their first meeting, issues resolved before users encounter them, human interventions per hundred rooms, technician hours spent on proactive versus reactive work, meetings started without technology-related delays, and ultimately what it costs us to keep a room ready.

That's a very different way to think about AV ROI.

Pennies Versus the Cost of Human Attention

At scale, the cost of using software to continuously understand and operate an environment can become small compared with the cost of repeatedly putting humans into the loop.

Because human attention is expensive. Your AV engineer's time is expensive. Your employees' time is expensive. Your executives' time is expensive. Travel is expensive. Interruptions are expensive. Failed meetings are expensive. And frustration has a cost too, even if it's difficult to quantify.

The argument for autonomous operations isn't that software costs nothing. It's that using software for work software can perform is often far less expensive than repeatedly using people to do it.

The ROI of a Room That Just Works

Ultimately, nobody walks into a meeting room hoping to appreciate the AV technology. They want to have a meeting. Nobody wants to congratulate the support team because the display was on the correct input. They expect it to be. Nobody wants to think about whether a Room Check happened at 7:00 in the morning. They want to walk in at 9:00 and have everything work.

That's the strange thing about great AV operations. When they're working perfectly, they're almost invisible. And autonomous operations can make more of that possible: fewer manual checks, fewer basic interventions, fewer unnecessary tickets, fewer interruptions, more time for AV teams to work on meaningful problems, more confidence from the people using the spaces, and more rooms ready when people need them.

So maybe the ROI conversation shouldn't start with how much the software costs. Maybe it should start with how much the way we're operating today is already costing us.

A $100 problem rarely costs only $100. And a room that simply works may be worth far more than we realize.

To learn more or to schedule a demo:
Visit: www.netspeek.ai
Contact: lena@netspeek.com
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