The Myth of the Unequipped Room
At least twice in recent weeks, I’ve heard manufacturers explain that new products debuting at the upcoming InfoComm 2026 are specifically targeting the smaller huddle room market because of the enormous number of unequipped meeting spaces around the world.
The theory is simple. Millions upon millions of rooms still lack proper collaboration technology, and whichever manufacturer finally “gets it right” stands to unlock one of the largest untapped markets in enterprise technology.
That idea – that the overwhelming majority of meeting rooms remain unequipped and represent enormous untapped opportunity – has shaped the collaboration industry and the boardrooms of manufacturers hoping to deliver the winning solution for more than two decades.
But wait a minute.
What exactly is an unequipped room in 2026?
That question matters because the definition of “equipped” has changed dramatically over the years, while the statistics driving the industry narrative have remained surprisingly consistent.
Back in the mid-2010s, Wainhouse Research published influential studies estimating there were between 30 and 50 million huddle rooms worldwide, most containing little or no collaboration technology. Later estimates pushed the total number of meeting rooms globally toward roughly 48 million, with only a small percentage considered video-enabled.
Those numbers became foundational assumptions throughout the AV and unified communications industries.
And the numbers only got bigger and more aggressive over time.
By 2020, market discussions regularly referenced estimates of roughly 48.6 million meeting rooms worldwide, including more than 30 million small and huddle rooms, while only a tiny percentage were considered video-enabled. Around the same period, Frost & Sullivan and others popularized claims that as many as 95% of meeting rooms had “minimal technology.”
At that point, the mythology was fully established.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
- This is why companies acquired other companies.
- This is why products got smaller.
- This is why systems became easier to deploy.
- This is why USB peripherals exploded.
- This is why every manufacturer started chasing the huddle room.
- This is why “democratizing collaboration” became the slogan of our lifetime.
There was a pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow.
At least that was the theory.
And to be fair, at the time, the logic was perfectly reasonable.
Back then, a room system meant a room system.
It meant a dedicated codec appliance.
- Dedicated compute.
- Dedicated cameras.
- Dedicated microphones.
- Dedicated DSPs.
- Dedicated displays.
- Dedicated touch panels.
- Dedicated wiring.
- Dedicated integration.
If a room lacked all of that, calling it “unequipped” was probably fair.
But the market evolved.
The first major shift was BYOD or BYOM – Bring Your Own Device / Bring Your Own Meeting.
The intelligence moved away from the room and back onto the user’s laptop. Suddenly, the room itself no longer needed to contain the codec or even much processing power at all. In many cases, all that was required was a decent camera, microphone, speaker, and display.
At that point, countless rooms that would once have been considered “unequipped” suddenly became perfectly functional collaboration spaces with very little investment.
Dozens of companies unable or unwilling to create full-featured room systems released what were essentially shared peripherals – screens, cameras, speakers, microphones, and USB devices – for laptop users to connect to, improving the meeting experience without fundamentally changing the room itself.
Were those rooms considered “equipped” in the tossed salad of statistics around unequipped rooms?
Well, that depended upon who you asked.
A user might say yes, because he or she could suddenly see and hear much better than before.
An IT administrator, on the other hand, might say no, because there was no reliable way to centrally track, monitor, update, manage, or assure uptime on a collection of peripheral devices the same way one could for a fully integrated room appliance.
Then the BYOD/BYOM model became popular enough for the traditional room systems themselves to adapt.
Fully integrated systems added “pass-through,” “USB mode,” or “peripheral mode” functionality, allowing users to bypass the internal codec entirely and instead use the room’s cameras, microphones, speakers, and displays from their laptops when that was the preferred workflow.
For years now, the industry has quietly been supporting this “whatever you want” model.
And after many years of offering that flexibility, we now appear to be introducing a third category entirely.
The newest generation of products hitting the market no longer fits neatly into either the traditional room system category or pure BYOD peripherals.
These devices increasingly contain onboard operating systems, AI processing, analytics, cloud management, centralized administration, local intelligence, and sometimes even native meeting capabilities. Yet at the same time, many still fundamentally rely on the user’s own laptop or mobile device as part of the workflow.
In other words, the room and the user device are now sharing the collaboration workload.
Which means we may need a new category altogether.
I suggest calling them SACKs: Shared Appliance Collaboration Kits.
A SACK system combines appliance-style intelligence and centralized management with the flexibility of BYOD collaboration. It is not a full traditional room codec, but it is no longer just a dumb USB peripheral either. It lives somewhere in between.
And once you start looking at many of the products being introduced this year through that lens, the pattern becomes hard to miss.
The industry may quietly be transitioning away from standalone room systems and toward Shared Appliance Collaboration Kits without fully realizing it yet.
Ironically, that shift also makes the old “unequipped room” statistics even more fuzzy and questionable than before.
If a user walks into a room carrying a laptop and connects (or sometimes even wirelessly connects) to an AI-powered Android-managed collaboration kit with onboard compute, analytics, and cloud management, is that room equipped?
- What if the room has no dedicated codec?
- What if the meeting runs from the user’s laptop?
- What if the room can also run meetings natively when needed?
At what point does quoting the always questionable number of “unequipped rooms” stop meaning anything useful?
That may ultimately be the bigger story hiding underneath all the recent product launches.
For years, the collaboration industry has operated under the assumption that there are tens of millions of untouched rooms simply waiting to be equipped. But perhaps many of those rooms never required traditional room systems in the first place. Perhaps they simply needed easier ways to collaborate.
That is a very different market opportunity.
There absolutely remains a need for better room experiences. Audio quality still matters. Camera quality still matters. Manageability still matters. Executive rooms, customer-facing spaces, training rooms, divisible rooms, classrooms, and specialty collaboration environments absolutely benefit from professional technology design.
But the assumption that every room with four walls and a table represents a future fully integrated AV deployment may have always been more rainbow than reality.
And now, as the industry stuffs more intelligence, management, AI, and flexibility into increasingly compact devices, perhaps we are no longer chasing the traditional room system at all.
Perhaps we are all just trying to figure out what belongs in the SACK.
So I’ll state here in writing for future manufacturer boardrooms and M&A discussions to reference: there is no pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow. It’s time to give up the myth.
The millions of unequipped rooms just waiting for your new product, on which user companies will finally spend all their money, was probably always a myth, and it is one that’s definitely is not worth chasing anymore. I’m sorry – if that is the premise of your new product launch, then it will likely fail to capture the predicted TAM – as I’m convinced that TAM honestly never existed.
People do not go home at the end of the day with their number one wish being that there were more “equipped” rooms in their offices. Honestly, that probably is not even in the top twenty collaboration support wishes.
Number one is likely:
“Why did you make me commute an hour to the office just to sit on a Teams or Zoom call I could have taken from home?”
And when users are actually in an office, the biggest problem needing solving is usually removing friction, not adding gear.
“If I can just click on my meeting invitation at home and my notebook can automatically figure out what platform to invoke, why can’t my conference room do the same thing?”
And we all know the answer to that question is a business competition problem, not a technology problem.
The industry has now spent more than twenty years chasing a market that may ultimately have been more folklore than forecast.
It may finally be time for our industry to stop chasing the mythical pot of gold and start removing more of the friction instead.