“What is it you do?” The words that I regularly hear as a follow-up when I tell people I work in AV. Let’s unpack that!The simple answer is that I look after meeting room technology in business meeting rooms and presentation spaces. This often leads to the comment, “So you work in IT?”

While IT people do a fantastic job of providing first-level support for meeting rooms, I find the comparison a little disappointing. Corporate AV is a vast industry in its own right, even though it’s adopting more and more technology and practices from IT. The wider AV industry encompasses everything from the corporate world to live events.

So, what are the key differences between IT and corporate AV (AV)? Let’s take a look at IT first. IT professionals handle a variety of roles. Most people in the corporate world interact with “frontline” IT workers, often known as the service desk or help desk. These skilled people fix issues with your devices, set up user accounts, and tackle many other issues and tasks. But IT is a broad field, with people working on and maintaining servers, networks, and services, each requiring a different skill set and discipline.

You might argue that AV is just another discipline within IT, right? While many share that view, I believe there’s more to it. AV has a similar complexity. There are service technicians who most people interact with, but the industry also includes specialists in system design/engineering, system installation, system programming (often with skills in bespoke programming languages and workflows – see my last post for more!), event setup and support, and the list goes on.

Here’s the thing: without close collaboration with a business’s IT department, AV would struggle to succeed. Most, if not all, of the meeting room technology we install, maintain, and support interacts with IT systems. Whether it’s utilizing a network for communication between devices or connecting to a collaboration tool like web conferencing, the generalisation of “AV is IT” diminishes the diversity of knowledge and effort in both disciplines.

I’ve seen more and more AV ownership within businesses become part of the IT team’s remit. However, I distinctly remember a time when AV was sometimes part of other business teams’ portfolios.

Bridging the Gap, Shaping the Future

Sure, the lines between IT and AV are becoming blurrier. But while the technology overlaps more and more, I believe the distinction between the two fields is still important. Here’s why: maintaining that distinction, while also fostering strong collaboration, ensures we can best support businesses. Maybe then, we can lower the rate of people asking the wrong team member for help – you know, like someone needing their computer fixed ending up with the AV team, or vice versa,someone struggling to hear someone in a meeting room talking to the IT service desk (which often has a heavy workload of tickets to deal with).

This collaboration is key. IT and AV, working together, can create powerful communication experiences. By recognising the unique value propositions of both fields, we can shape the future of work.

So, the next time someone asks “What do you do?”, tell them you’re in AV – it’s more than just turning things on and off (unlike… some people we know. Moss, anyone?).

Ellery Hulme (they/he)

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"What Do You Actually Do?"