Integrate 2026 To Pair AI And Workforce Sessions As AV Industry Grapples With Both

Two free sessions at this year’s Integrate expo in Sydney will address AI-driven workplace collaboration and the AV industry’s skills shortage back to back, framing the two issues as connected parts of the same challenge.

The Lunch and Learn sessions, running over the midday break on the first two days of the show, are designed to put a question the AV sector has been circling into a single room: as AI takes on more of the work, who is left to do the rest, and what do they need to know.

Integrate 2026 runs from 2 to 4 September at ICC Sydney. The Lunch and Learn sessions are free to attend with no separate ticket required and are open to all visitors on the show floor.

AI in the workplace takes day one

The first session, sponsored by Microsoft, runs on Wednesday 2 September from 1:00pm to 1:50pm in the Tech Talks Theatre. It is focused on how AI is changing the way people meet, collaborate and connect in workplace environments.

Microsoft’s Asia AI-Powered Workplace Lead for Teams Engineering, Andrew Higgs, and Mehryn Corrigan will present. The session will cover Teams Rooms, intelligent meeting experiences and AI-assisted workplace tools, with an emphasis on how these are being applied in practice rather than in theory.

The session sits at the intersection of AV and IT, where meeting room hardware, cloud platforms and AI-driven features are converging. For AV professionals, the shift raises questions about the skillsets required to design, deploy and support workplace environments that increasingly rely on software intelligence as well as physical infrastructure.

Skills shortage takes day two

The second session, sponsored by AVIXA, runs on Thursday 3 September in the same timeslot and venue. It turns from the technology to the people, examining the growing difficulty of attracting, developing and retaining skilled workers in an AV industry that is becoming more complex.

The panel format will address the widening skills gap across technical, creative and hybrid AV roles, where professionals are increasingly expected to work across traditional AV, IT networking, AI systems and smart building environments.

Topics will include the role of apprenticeships and vocational training, how training frameworks need to adapt as AV converges with IT and digital experience design, and why industry collaboration matters in co-designing curricula and career pathways that reflect where the work is heading.

The session will also look at how structured workforce development can affect project delivery, quality and safety outcomes.

Two sides of one problem

Taken together, the two sessions capture a tension that extends well beyond AV. Industries adopting AI-powered tools are gaining capability at the platform level while facing thinning talent pipelines at the operational level. The AV sector is a case in point: meeting rooms and collaboration spaces are becoming more intelligent, but the workforce needed to specify, integrate and maintain those systems is not growing at the same pace.

The pairing of the two sessions appears deliberate. The day one AI session demonstrates what the technology can now do. The day two workforce session asks who will be equipped to work with it.

Integrate returns to ICC Sydney

Integrate 2026 will feature more than 120 exhibitors across 10 technology zones. The show is co-located with the Security Exhibition and Conference and, for the first time in 2026, the Fire Security Expo. All three events are accessible on a single registration.

Entry to the show floor is free for registered trade professionals. The broader Integrate and AVIXA Tech Talks education programme runs across all three days of the show and is ticketed separately from the Lunch and Learn sessions.

The Lunch and Learn sessions form part of that Tech Talks programme but carry no cost and require no advance booking beyond standard show floor registration.

Last Updated on August 17, 2026 by Nick Ross