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.

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

Published on May 30, 2026

avtechnology

As recurring revenue becomes increasingly important to AV businesses, many integrators still manage after-sales service using disconnected tools such as email, spreadsheets, phone calls, and group chats. While the industry has modernized design, documentation, and installation workflows, service operations often remain manual and fragmented, creating inefficiencies that impact profitability and customer satisfaction. This operational gap leads to challenges such as missed contract renewals, poor visibility into technician performance, inaccurate tracking of labor costs, and delayed issue resolution. Technicians frequently arrive on-site without access to original project documentation, resulting in additional service visits and reduced margins. As managed services continue to grow faster than the overall AV market, these inefficiencies become increasingly costly. The article argues that the solution is not adding another standalone tool, but integrating service management into the same platform used for des