Artificial intelligence is here, and while the technological improvements are obvious, it can do wonders for small-to-mid-sized AV integrators. Myke Ireland writes.

I’ve held off writing about artificial intelligence (AI), not for lack of things to say, but because everyone’s already saying them. The term is everywhere. It’s the dot-com of 2025, and while this wave might not burst the same way, the cracks are already showing. Not in the tech, but in how we’re choosing to use it.

So, let’s get one thing straight before we go any further: What we’re calling AI today isn’t intelligence. It’s compute. It’s speed. It’s simulation.

We’ve built machines that can recall more than we’ll ever read, generate language with near-human fluency and process data at a scale we can barely track. But none of that is thought. None of it is self-aware. And when we do eventually get to artificial general intelligence, if we get there, will it even qualify as intelligence in the way we understand it? Or will it be something entirely different?

What’s certain is this: AI is already embedded. It’s in your phone, your bank, your inbox, your browser. It’s changing the tools we use, it’s changing how we think, how we work and how we show up in the world. Whether we like it or not, that shift is already underway.

But what does it mean for an industry like ours?

AI’s a lot like the wind; it doesn’t care which direction you’re facing. It can push you forward or hold you back. The only difference is whether or not you know how to sail.

That’s the context I keep coming back to, especially in business. Because when people talk about AI, the first concern is always jobs. Lost jobs. Changed jobs. No jobs. But most of that fear comes from the same place it always has, people clinging to what they already know rather than getting ready for what’s coming.

This isn’t the first time the gatekeepers fell

We’ve seen it before. Napster in the late 90s kicked the legs out from under the music industry. Record labels didn’t fall apart because the music stopped being good, they fell because they’re ability to gatekeep was removed.

So, whilst at the time it looked like the internet was killing the music, the gift of hindsight shows us it actually gave it back to the people who were making it. And suddenly, artists didn’t need a million-dollar marketing deal to make a living. They just needed a phone and something worth hearing.

That same shift is hitting us again, only this time it’s not about music. It’s about knowledge.

For decades, your value in a career came from what you knew and how long it took you to know it. Years of study. More years of practice. Law, medicine, accounting, all fields are built on information that’s expensive to acquire and hard to access. But now that knowledge is open. And in some cases, it’s free. You can prompt ChatGPT to be a half-decent tax agent, legal assistant or entry-level analyst.

I’m not saying you won’t need a lawyer if those photos ever get out, but you could probably get the hearing adjourned a couple of times with the help of a little more than ChatGPT.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not sentient. But it’s enough to flatten the playing field.

Which brings us to the real shift: if you know how to work with AI, if you understand how to prompt, iterate and refine, you’re no longer stuck waiting on people or process that hold you up. How often in your working life are you held up by something else with information you’re waiting on? I can answer that for you, it’s more often than you’d like. Delays are inevitable, but the time lost in waiting for a specialist person, with specialist knowledge to provide that knowledge to you are fading.

I don’t need it to work for me, just like me

Every job I’ve ever worked in has been admin-heavy. And admin is something I’ve never been able to manage—not properly. I’m ADHD and autistic, and if you read any of my school reports, they all said the same thing: Easily distracted, talks too much, would probably be alright if he paid attention. But it wasn’t about attention—it was about the system. I wasn’t wired for the kind of structure that life demanded. I’d get a brand-new school diary every year, and by week two, it was gone. Same with a pencil case. Same with every “this time I’ll be organised” moment.

But if I cared about something? I’d bulldoze the admin just to make room for it.

That didn’t change when I moved into the corporate world. I came from music, ten, maybe fifteen years of it, and then ended up in AV. I wasn’t trained for a desk job, and I definitely wasn’t ready for how much admin came with it. It wasn’t until later, after finally getting diagnosed and medicated, that I even had a fighting chance of keeping up.

And then AI showed up – and something clicked.

Because here’s the thing: using ChatGPT or any large language model (LLM) to do your work for you is a mistake. That’s not how you get value from it. The real play is using it to build systems that reflect how you work. Prompt it, train it, engineer it, until it thinks like you, writes like you, moves like you. Then duplicate it. Build one for reporting. One for meetings. One for client emails. Strip the noise out of your week.

That’s where the leverage is.

People worry that AI will replace their role. But that’s the wrong lens. The real question is how much of your role is nonsense; noise, admin, repeat tasks and how much time you’d win back if it disappeared. Because if you automate the friction, what’s left is time. And you can do something with that.

The AV industry’s next bottleneck isn’t hardware

Take an AV designer or estimator. You know the drill, endless back and forth, chasing the same documents, rewriting the same answers, ticking boxes just to tick them. Tender responses are the worst: pages of bureaucratic fluff just to get to the bit that matters. But if you automate that part, if you use AI to clear that noise, you spend more time doing the actual job. The valuable part. And when you’re spending more of your time delivering value, your worth to the business multiplies. That’s the lens to use. Not fear. Function.

Look at platforms like n8n, Low-code, Open source. Easy enough for someone who’s never touched a line of code. And what you can build with it? Wild. Stuff that used to take a five-person team and a $30,000 agency bill, you can now do solo.

Need a campaign? Just set the inputs: Product, price, timing and call to action. It writes the posts, builds the images, logs everything in a spreadsheet and schedules it. No designer. No copywriter. No scheduling software. Just flow.

That’s $80-$90k of overhead you don’t have to carry. That’s time and cost back in your pocket. And it’s only the start.

And while we’re on the subject of code, let’s go there.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the past decade, if you’ve caught a podcast or heard me unloading at Integrate or any AV industry event, you’ll know exactly where I stand when it comes to software in AV. And here’s the truth: Programming, as it’s traditionally done in this industry, is about to get obliterated by the X-multiplier.

AI, as it stands today, can write better code than 95% of programmers in the AV space. Yep. I said it. And I’ll keep saying it because I’ve said it before, just maybe a little more politely.

So, to the 95%, same choice as everyone else: Evolve, or fall behind. The real opportunity isn’t replacement, it’s replication. Turn yourself into ten programmers. Even if your rates are premium (and rightly so), value’s now measured differently. Doing the job of one programmer at the speed of one just doesn’t stack up anymore. And ten programmers are always better than one, particularly when they cost the same as one.

You can push back on that, sure, but imagine quoting a farmer to mow his fields based on the time it takes you to push a yard mower? You can argue all day about how experienced you are, how detailed you are, how those big John Deere machines never get it right, the farmer’s still going to look at you like you just tried to trade a goat for a Tesla.

Even I’ve fallen back in love with programming, and it’s because I don’t have to carry the weight of syntax and memory anymore. Before my music degree, I studied computer science. And I hated programming. Loved the logic, loved the creation, hated the admin of it. Remembering function names, formatting, all that mental clutter that just dragged it down for me.

But now? I don’t need to remember it. I just need to know how to speak to the machine. I engineer prompts instead of lines of code. I describe intent. I feed it structure. And now I can sit with our dev team, contribute to the codebase and actually move work forward, because I know enough to guide the AI, test the output and get results.

Six months ago, I couldn’t code to save myself. I hadn’t written anything in two decades. But I’m doing it now. And I’m doing it well.

That’s the angle.

Small teams. Big wins.

So where are the quick wins? Easy: admin. Every time.

If you’re a small to mid-sized integrator or any business without a huge headcount, you’re the one set to benefit the most. Big companies have blockers. Security concerns, data governance, hosting policies, bandwidth limits, approvals, policies, red tape, you name it. They move slowly. But if you’re a ten or 12-person outfit, the barriers are gone. You don’t have a CFO? You’ve got one now. Can’t afford marketing staff? You’ve now got a 24/7 social media coordinator. All for the price of knowing what prompt to type.

And what about where and when you work? This has been a massive one for me.

I’m ADHD. I’m autistic. And if that rings any bells for you, you’ll know what it’s like to have inspiration strike, and then completely lose it trying to get it out. That’s why music always made sense to me. Playing an instrument, creating something in real time, feeling it and just letting it happen, that was natural. There was no lag between thought and output. But trying to work like that with a keyboard and mouse? No chance.

I’ve never been able to touch-type. I hunt and peck with three or four fingers. Every sentence I write is interrupted by red underlines, spelling corrections, lost flow and starting again. And again. I couldn’t riff the way I could with a guitar or a synth. That whole natural, creative rhythm I had with music, it just never existed for me in corporate work.

So, building reports, presentations, month-end summaries, all that stuff that demands structure, accuracy, process, that’s always been brutal for me. Until now.

Now I barely use the keyboard and mouse.

And that, has changed everything about how I work. My bosses would tell you the same. My productivity has never been higher. Not because I’ve become more disciplined, but because the friction’s gone. I don’t need to sit down at the right time and force ideas into existence. If something hits me in the middle of the day, I can grab my phone, talk it out, prompt my LLM and shape it later.

That 5% of effort gives me 95% of the result. And the time I used to spend fighting through the mechanics of the task, I get that back. I can use it for the part that matters: The creative. The problem-solving. The actual joy of what got most of us into this industry in the first place. Because let’s be honest, once you’re in the business, especially if you’re running it, everything starts to feel like admin.

The wrap

There’s no way one article can capture everything AI is, or what it’s going to be, nor how it’s going to manipulate our industry. That’s not the goal here.

What this has been about is efficiency. Effectiveness. The simple truth is that it won’t be AI replacing you, it’ll be the person next to you who’s figured out how to use it better, to do your job quicker, so they don’t have to wait anymore.

So, the question isn’t whether AI is coming. It’s what you’re going to do with it.

Start now, and you stand a chance to empower yourself as the most important asset a business could ever want. As a business, empower yourself to fill those gaps that usually cost you 10’s of thousands of dollars in semi-reliable people.

Because entities that learn to work with AI, shape it, with relevance and apply it well?

They’ll be the ones defining it.