For the first time, AVIXA has created a separate paid track for AI inside InfoComm. The AI Accelerator runs Tuesday June 16, a full day, outside the regular education program, with its own pass.

It is a serious program. The agenda runs from a practical AI framework for the industry through AI as a system designer, governance in practice, human oversight, sandbox sessions with Microsoft, AVI-SPL, Zoom, Jabra, and Legrand, rollout culture, and a take-home action plan. The speaker bench is real. The case studies are operational, not aspirational.

It is also worth pausing on what the existence of the track tells us about ourselves.

The decision to stand AI up as a separate day, a separate fee, a separate structure, is a quiet admission that our regular program is not yet equipped to teach the technology AVIXA itself has identified as the highest-impact technology in the category. That is not a criticism of the program. It is an honest reading of where the industry sits.

The supporting picture comes from our own data. In the Channel Survey 2026, AI has overtaken AV over IP as the technology expected to have the greatest business impact. Services have overtaken hardware in revenue contribution. And only 13 percent of providers - the integrators, distributors, service providers, and specialists - that make up the channel, plan to invest proactively in AI skills through hiring or training.

So, the readiness gap is not abstract. AI is the most important technology in the category. The category has structurally shifted from hardware to services. And 87 percent of the channel is not yet building the capability to deliver on either.

This is where it helps to separate two kinds of maturity. There is market maturity, the readiness of the market to deliver, measured by the services-over-hardware shift, governance-led procurement, and AI moving from feature to operational layer. And there is the readiness of the buying organisation to absorb what we deliver. The Accelerator addresses neither directly. It builds tactical literacy, which the channel needs, but literacy is not the same as the operating model that turns a vendor stack into an intelligent workplace.

For anyone in this industry, three things follow.

• First, vendor certifications are no longer a reliable signal of delivery capability for AI-enabled work. The certifications are necessary. They are not sufficient. The 87 percent number includes a great many certified firms.
• Second, the questions our clients are about to ask us are changing. The procurement conversation used to centre on which platforms we support. Increasingly it will centre on what we think the operating model above the platforms looks like, who governs the decisions AI proposes, who diagnoses readiness before the next rollout. The firms that can answer those questions will separate from the ones that cannot.
• Third, the diagnostic step is becoming the differentiator. Specifying and installing capacity for a system the client is not ready to run is a familiar way to lose a relationship after a technically successful deployment. Diagnosing where the client sits before the procurement conversation is the move that protects both sides.

The most honest moment of InfoComm 2026 so far is not on a keynote stage. It is the existence of the Accelerator itself. Our own association is acknowledging, in public, that the channel is not ready for the technology that will define the next decade. That acknowledgement is more useful than any product reveal that follows it, because it tells us exactly where the work is.

The vendors will stage the picture on the show floor. They will not architect the operating model above their own stack, because they have no incentive to. That work sits with the channel, and with the leadership teams who own the outcome. The 13 percent number tells us how many of us are currently preparing to do it.

The Accelerator is a start. Eight hours will not close the gap. But naming the gap, in public, on the industry's own stage, is the first honest step toward closing it.