Relentless Relevance: Rich Mulholland on the Future of AV and More

There are moments when an entire industry seems to move forward with confident steps, convinced it understands its own map. And yet, all it takes is a small shift to realize we may have spent years staring at the same drawing without noticing that we no longer see what we thought we saw.

That’s how well‑known innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), and audiovisual (AV) communication expert—and founder of the acclaimed communication company Missing Link—Rich Mulholland framed it at Integrated Systems Europe 2026.

During his talk, Rich Mulholland challenged the AV world to rethink certainty and embrace change. Here’s his advice for remaining relevant in a connected future.

The audiovisual world is a sector that has historically thrived on precision. For decades, competitive advantage was built on the ability to control every variable in the environment.

But Mulholland reminds us of something uncomfortable: certainty is a luxury that ages quickly. 

BlackBerry is his favorite example, not out of technological nostalgia, but because of what it reveals about strategic blindness. The company didn’t fall for lack of initial vision; it fell because it failed to reinterpret its own success. It created BBM, transformed corporate communication, invented instant messaging before the category existed… and still believed its business was the physical keyboard.

WhatsApp, Mulholland says, was the company that BlackBerry could've been. And it was, because it looked at the same problem with new eyes.

In audiovisual, the question becomes inevitable: how many of our current certainties are physical keyboards disguised as innovation?

Mulholland insists on a word that, coming from someone else, might sound like a corporate slogan: relevance. But he uses it with almost surgical precision.

“Relevance is the state of being appropriate to the matter at hand,” he said.

The phrase seems simple, but it’s a time bomb. Because it forces us to ask what the matter at hand is today... And that question, in the AV industry, no longer has a single answer.

For years, the sector defined itself by the technology it sold: projectors, screens, matrices, microphones, codecs, etc. Today, however, the conversation has shifted toward something broader and more diffuse.

Relevance is no longer measured by hardware power, but by the ability to remove friction. By the smoothness of the flow. By the invisibility of the system.

And that demands the humility to accept that what made us great may not keep us relevant.

Mulholland laughs—fondly, but sharply—at the sector’s obsession with the “‑est”: the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the brightest.

It’s a logic inherited from another era, when innovation was measured in centimeters and decibels. But today, he says, that race is a mirage. The industry no longer competes for the “‑est,” but for the “why”: why a system exists, what problem it solves, what experience it enables.

The client no longer wants a brighter projector; they want a meeting that works without anyone having to call support. They don’t want a more powerful audio system; they want the room to “just work.”

Audiovisual, in other words, is ceasing to be a catalog and is beginning to be a nervous system.

Mulholland talks about artificial intelligence, yes, but not like a carnival futurist. In fact, he questions the term itself: “artificial” suggests something fake, and what we’re seeing, he argues, is not an imitation of human intelligence but another form of intelligence.

However, his strongest thesis isn’t about AI. It’s about connectivity. For him, the real megatrend isn’t artificial intelligence, but the difference between connected intelligence and disconnected intelligence.

Humans, he explains, communicate at 39 bits per second. Machines, at terabits. We send postcards; they fire lasers.

And in that world, audiovisual carries a huge responsibility: to increase human bandwidth. Not just to transmit image and sound, but to help people think together with less friction.

Mulholland devotes part of his talk to Neuralink and brain–machine interfaces. He frames it as a warning that the speed of change is no longer linear—it’s exponential.

When he shows the video of the patient moving a cursor “at the speed of thought,” he doesn’t do it to provoke awe, but to remind us that the boundary between human and machine is becoming porous.

And whether we like it or not, that will directly affect audiovisual.

Because if the future lies in connecting intelligences—human, artificial, hybrid—then AV won’t just be an accessory. It will be the emotional and cognitive infrastructure of that connection.

There was a beautiful moment in the conference, almost hidden, when Mulholland said: “Connected intelligence is what this industry has always done.”

And he’s right. The AV industry, from its origins, has been a bridge: between a speaker and an audience, between a teacher and a student, between one team and another, between a space and an idea.

What changes now is not the mission, but the scale. It used to connect rooms. Now, it connects systems. It used to connect people; now, it connects intelligences.

The challenge isn’t new. What’s new is the speed.

Mulholland introduces a concept from the world of hacking: the red team and the blue team. The red team attacks; the blue team defends. And by design, the red team always wins.

The problem, he says, is that many companies have settled into a blue‑team mentality. But innovation doesn’t happen in defense. It happens when you dare to attack your own model before someone else does.

“Don’t get caught building a better fax machine in a world in which email exists,” he says. And although the line sounds like a joke, it’s a serious warning.

How many current AV solutions are fax machines with updated firmware?

Mulholland closed his conference with a quote from Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

The AV industry, like so many other industries, is at that exact point, stuck between what it knows how to do and what it must learn to do. The good news is that few industries have as much experience translating complexity into clarity. Few know as much about making something work without requiring the user to understand it. Few have been so essential in moments of technological change.

The bad news is that this experience doesn’t guarantee future relevance. It only guarantees having the tools to build it.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Mulholland’s talk isn’t his vision of the future, but his invitation to look again. To question what we take for granted.

Audiovisual is at a turning point. It doesn’t need more brightness, more decibels, more pixels. It needs more questions. More courage. More capacity to unlearn.