Control solutions are one of the biggest and hardest decisions integrators and end users need to make on a project. Sean Carroll looks at what’s happening in both commercial and residential spaces.

In Iron Man 3 (2013), there’s a scene where Tony Stark analyses a crime scene with J.A.R.V.I.S., his personal artificial intelligence (AI). After scanning through multiple news reports on an incident, the AI assistant “compiles a database” that Tony pulls out of the screen and throws into a central hologram.

J.A.R.V.I.S. then reconstructs the crime scene, expanding the hologram out to a 1:1 scale so that Tony can walk through the scene. With his entire room now a light blue version of the crime scene, he finds a pair of dog tags strewn amongst the wreckage and digitally picks them up with the flick of a hand before his AI assistant expands the dog tags to a legible size.

At the end of the scene, the doorbell rings and Tony has to wipe the entire hologram away with a two-arm swipe. Pretty wild that the head of Stark Industries still has a regular old doorbell in his mansion.

The hologram stuff is neat, albeit the work of fiction, but it’s interesting to see Hollywood’s interpretation of how humans in the sci-fi world would control their technology.

As our AV and smart home solutions get closer to what Tony Stark uses, the topic of how we control our systems is never far behind. In the past few years, control solutions have changed considerably, and the proliferation of AI should only continue to change the way users control their solutions as we learn more about large language models (LLMs).

Josh.ai, a US-based AI company that developed its voice-controlled home automation system known as Josh, launched nearly ten years ago with its proprietary AI solution.

“We entered the market years ago with our own AI voice platform for the luxury home. It just so happened that because we had to build our own AI that was smart and contextual to control a smart home, we ended up building a complete automation system as well,” Josh.ai director of business development Casey Levy-Tulloch says.

Fast-forward to today and AI is everywhere, especially with solutions like ChatGPT entering our homes and offices.

“We were closely watching ChatGPT and other generative AIs gain popularity, and as a result, our team at Josh.ai decided to build our own LLM and add it to the Josh experience. So now we can offer an on par – or better than – AI solution to control your smart home and offer general assistance across unlimited use cases,” Casey explains.

But when it comes to control, Josh.ai is careful to ensure that they’re not locking out any solutions with their product. Casey describes the company as a software company that happens to make hardware and in his time with Josh.ai, he sees people switching out products every two or three years, at about the same rate as a new TV is released. Because of this, he believes the control platform has to be flexible enough to upgrade over-the-air with the technology ecosystem and offer freedom of choice for users to enjoy their preferred devices.

At the time of writing, Casey says the company is successfully deploying its Nimble DevSuite update to enable rapid third-party device integration, and it is proud to say that every system processor in the Josh.ai suite can support the new software update.

Clipsal by Schneider Electric and its C-Bus lighting control solution has been on the market for 30 years this year, and the company’s offer manager for C-Bus room control products in Australia and New Zealand, Brett Coppins, says that every solution it makes has a backwards compatible design ethos.

“If you buy Clipsal C-Bus, you retain the product reliability with added peace of mind that any new C-Bus products will integrate into your existing system and enhance your experience,” he says.

“Our design team at our Adelaide facility, including myself, have been around the C-Bus solution for over 15 years so the team is very experienced with the product suite.”

AMX, distributed by MadisonAV in Australia, has recently released its latest range of MUSE Controllers aimed at giving integrators and IT professionals modern tools that they’re already familiar with to solve problems like integrating with collaboration, scheduling and sophisticated API-driven applications.

“We’ve fully embraced open standard technologies and tools to create the most flexible, interoperable and easy-to-use solution in AV control,” HARMAN Professional product marketing manager Colin Mahoney explains.

“While the MUSE platform is designed to leverage the open communication protocol, called HControl, that all our HARMAN Professional products have standardised upon, MUSE also supports our legacy ICSP and HiQnet protocols.”

Colin adds that by including these legacy protocols, the MUSE platform can communicate natively with not only older AMX touch panels, controllers and keypads, but products from the company’s audio brands as well.

Commercial projects, by nature, are typically stitched together across years. A great example is in the education space, a topic Connected magazine has plenty of experience with after attending and covering the AETM Conference for several years. As universities receive more funding and green-light additional classrooms or upgrade existing rooms, there’s a chance that the AV and IT team may want to change the control solution or product manufacturer. Sometimes, the move is seamless and there are no issues, but sometimes the move can be painful as some products may not integrate with different control solutions.

A game-changer in the control space is the Innomesh solution from Innomate, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for multi-vendor AV/UC/IoT environments that gives end users a single management interface for monitoring, remote management, control, automation, insight and support.

In these commercial environments where several different solutions may be at play, the Innomesh service can come in over the top and give integrators the ability to control everything under one interface. The Innomesh product acts as a middleman that helps different control solutions talk and work under the one interface.

“Our offering in the control space is highly interoperable and allows our customers to control AV and automate it regardless of the manufacturer,” Innomate chief executive Paul Yahchouchy explains.

“The control aspect of Innomate is agnostic, but also native in the sense that we are customer-focused, depending on the environment. A project might be best controlled via native proprietary manufacturing technologies, but the integrator can decide to go fully agnostic and control the entire environment from the cloud. Or they could even opt for a hybrid method and include a mix of everything from the one platform.”

Paul says that Innomate has seen success in large university deployments but has recently crossed over into the corporate, banking, government and health sectors.

“Our solution is an enterprise-grade solution, so typically Innomesh starts to show a return on investment in the range of 30 rooms and as you scale up, the return on investment is higher and higher,” he says.

Innomesh is ideal for deployments where a lot of the control solutions are older and less inclined to be interoperable compared to modern solutions like the aforementioned AMX MUSE, which is capable of simultaneously processing multiple standard scripting languages including Python, JavaScript and Groovy.

“Additionally, it supports no-code and low-code development with Node-RED, opening the possibility for technicians and IT managers of all skillsets to deliver advanced automation with the tools they’re most comfortable using,” Colin outlines.

“We fully understand that there are end users who have made significant investments to standardise their installations on NetLinx and that there are integrators and programmers that have built businesses around designing, installing and supporting those technologies. We have no plans to stop selling or supporting NetLinx for customers that want to continue to use that solution.”

AV control also represents a significant opportunity for recurring revenue for integrators since it’s the furthest thing from a set-and-forget product.

While speaking with Snap One APAC vice president and general manager Adam Merlino about the future of the custom install channel, he says that integrators need to ensure they’re charging for their time: “In both commercial and residential jobs, there are a lot of things that need to be done after the install and in the past, a lot of integrators never charged for those call outs. That just isn’t a tangible business model.

“These businesses can actually build a recurring revenue model based on service maintenance contracts and ensuring that the sale doesn’t just end with the install.”

Casey from Josh.ai says that integrators are a critical part of the company’s ongoing support: “We have a full support team at Josh.ai and we’re operating every day of the week during most hours. We have a six-minute average response time to get back to installers because we understand that the time of our partners is critical.”

He adds that Josh.ai puts high importance on ensuring that products can be remotely serviced and after the installation to make supporting systems as efficient as possible.

Moving forward, the AV industry mostly recognises that the old way that control solutions used to operate doesn’t hold up anymore. Supply chain disruptions and the plethora of different products on the market mean that end users and integrators can’t always stick to one brand (or under one umbrella of brands).

Solutions like Innomate’s Innomesh or the AMX MUSE’s focus on flexibility prove that integrators are happy using a third party to connect solutions rather than bending over backwards to make one manufacturer’s solutions fit even if they may not be the most suitable.

Additionally, Clipsal’s C-Bus lighting control solution is rolling out a revised programming interface for its controllers and gateways.

“In 2024-25, we’re releasing a revised programming user interface that will return to a more widget-based programming method with auto-graphics creation. With this, we aim to bring back more of our trusted electrician partners who want to offer high levels of lighting control,” Brett Coppins explains.

When laying out the product roadmap for Innomate, Paul says that security is paramount: “For the past year and a half, we have been concentrating on security, something we believe that the AV industry is lacking. We want to provide all sorts of automation and management tools to secure the large environments that we work in.”

Casey agrees, adding that privacy is a big value for his company: “Privacy is paramount at Josh.ai and we want people to know that even though we’re collecting this rich data to enable these greater automations, we’re not going to share data with anyone, it’s only being used to improve their experience.”

HARMAN Professional echoes these beliefs, adding that its solutions need to have an exceptional level of security given the sensitivity of its commercial environments.

“With all of our AMX MUSE solutions, it’s important to use to ensure that they have met high standards for security and reliability that our customers have come to expect from AMX,” Colin says.

“Our solutions include professional-grade hardware and leverage a common secure OS, the latest IP security and management technologies and are put through the most rigorous government security testing.”

Snap One’s Adam Merlino says that there are a lot of questions surrounding ‘big data’ and the AV industry needs to teach people what’s happening in the background and ensure that everyone’s aware of what they may be installing into their home.

But the real future of control might be less control.

Josh.ai is putting a lot of its time and effort toward making complex automations easy to program with conditionals and ultimately, proactively adjusting devices based on machine learning. For example, instead of having an integrator or end user set the air conditioning to trigger at a certain temperature, the company makes it simple to automatically adjust the climate when external conditions change, sensors are triggered or the room’s temperature hits a certain level.

“Outside of just temperature, these environmental triggers can get very complex when you start to include automations based on motion detectors, time of the week, holiday seasons and so on,” Casey says.

“It’s Josh’s job to understand all of the complexities involved and make your smart home interactions as natural and convenient as possible.”

The same applies to commercial environments where all the same climate automations apply, but the education and corporate sectors have seen several companies pass the control of rooms over to the end user. Countless flat panel room controllers let most, if not all, employees book vacated rooms and use them to their heart’s content.

The future of control might not involve a large voice assistant like Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. being thrown around and projecting a scene across his room, but that doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic. The way control is going, there’s a chance that when we’re at a Stark Industries level of control and automation, we won’t even have to tell it what to do… it’ll be so user friendly and flexible that it won’t need a name.