Hotel AV services have been stuck for the entirety of the 21st century.
There are two key phenomena that caused this inertia:
AV companies continue to be little more than equipment rental services. They’ve evolved only enough to accrue better equipment, not provide a better experience. Don’t get me wrong: they still believe in putting on a great conference. It’s just that “putting on a great conference” to them means renting your customers a more expensive projector and more lighting instruments. Sadly, they take little care in helping your conference attendees deliver their messages in the best way possible.
The second reason AV is stuck in time happened with the evolution of the slide deck. Although the slide deck originally initiated a progressive vision, that tool had a devastating impact on the meetings industry. From that point forward, the role of Producer was eliminated. Now armed with slide deck creators, CEOs assumed their administrative assistants could make their presentation slides. Today’s prevailing wisdom that simply building a slide deck and connecting a laptop to a projector constitutes “production value” is woefully incomplete.
