The AV Industry’s Recurring-Revenue Problem — and the Operational Gap Nobody Is Fixing

The AV Industry’s Recurring-Revenue Problem and the Operational Gap Nobody Is Fixing By [Sahil Dhingra ], [Co-Founder and CEO ], XTEN-AV ​ LAS VEGAS, USA — May 30, 2026 — Ask an AV integrator where their most profitable revenue comes from, and most will say service. Ask how they manage it, and the answer is usually some combination of email, a shared spreadsheet, and a group chat. That contradiction is the operational gap holding the industry back and it is worth naming plainly ahead of InfoComm 2026.

The industry has spent two decades professionalizing design and installation. We have AV-native CAD, automated bills of materials, and standards for everything from rack layout to signal flow. After-sales service, the part of the business that compounds in value, has been left to improvised tools. A service call comes in, someone writes it down, a technician is reached by phone, and the record of what happened lives in whoever’s memory was on site that day.

Industry context — The stakes are well documented: recurring revenue increasingly drives AV firm valuations, and managed services are forecast to grow around 8% annually — faster than the overall industry — yet much of the sector still manages service delivery with general-purpose tools (Commercial Integrator).

The cost of that gap is not just inefficiency. It is invisible margin. When commute time is not separated from billable service labor, profitability per call is a guess. When a technician arrives without the original schematics or the project BOM, the first visit often does not resolve the issue, and a second truck roll erases the margin on the contract. When renewals live in a spreadsheet, they get missed.

Closing the gap does not require a new category of software bolted onto the side of the business. It requires service to live where the project already lives — in the same platform that produced the design, the proposal, and the installation documentation. A technician who can open the original signal-flow diagram from inside the service ticket is a technician who fixes the problem on the first visit. An owner who can see technician utilization and close rate in real time is an owner who can actually scale the service business.

The recurring-revenue conversation in AV has focused almost entirely on selling more service contracts. The harder, more valuable question is whether we can deliver them profitably once we have them. That is the gap worth closing — and it is the conversation worth having on the show floor this year.