AI – What Comes after the Trough of Disillusionment?

I’m a big fan of the Gartner Hype Cycle. It was developed by analyst Jackie Fenn at the US consulting firm Gartner in 1995, and describes, quite cheekily, the patterns of hype that surround emerging technologies. While it’s been widely criticised for not being scientifically accurate, I’ve found it to be eerily correct for our industry, while also being funny.

I like to think we in AV tech are a bit ahead of the general tech curve compared to the public. In the general sense, I think the society-wide hype around AI is on the verge of falling into the Trough of Disillusionment, and a lot of multi-billion-dollar investments are about to blow up in people’s faces. Over here in AV-land, I think we are emerging from the Trough and now heading up the Slope of Enlightenment towards the Plateau of Productivity.

Around the trade show traps of the last two years, AI has been a total buzz acronym. The first couple of products I saw implement it blew me away – Biamp’s AI noise reduction did things no other audio processing can do, and William’s instant multilingual audio to text translation looked like the future. Then everyone started promising to incorporate AI. Few did. At this year’s Integrate, there was a lot of suspicious ‘now with AI’ in product descriptions, where I could swear it was for features that existed before, without the AI appellation.

So, with all this AI-hype bashing, why do I think we’re coming out of the Trough? I’ll give you an interesting case – Insta360.

Those of you who like to film themselves doing extreme sports, or record everything on a small stick to post to socials, will already know Insta360. They’ve been making ‘action cameras’ to rival GoPro for years, and are ubiquitous anywhere there are tourists. So, it was a bit of a surprise in 2022 when they suddenly announced they were going to start making video conferencing equipment for the AV market. At Integrate 2025, they introduced the Insta360 Wave, a speakerphone and video conferencing device with integrated 4K camera, which looks like a portable Bluetooth speaker with an Insta360 Link 2 camera stuck on top.

All of Insta360’s video conferencing products, including their Link 2 and 2C cameras with audio, their Connect video and sound bars, and the Wave, have all come to market in less than two years and have AI built into their core. Insta360 already had the optics; all they needed to add was microphones and speakers. That’s easy enough to buy off the shelf – Sennheiser did a similar thing the other way around with their Team Connect bar – but hard to make into a high-quality result. Where Insta360 has really benefitted from AI is in using it to run their video auto tracking, image enhancement and audio processing, including noise reduction and beam steering. This has enabled them to get an entire suite of pro-level product to market and functioning as it should.

This is the reality of what AI is actually useful for – it can accelerate years of software development. Insta360’s story is a lot like that of EV maker BYD; they started as a battery company, supplying mostly mobile phone manufacturers. When the idea of EVs came along, they took their battery making experience and put a car on top of it. Now they’re outselling most traditional car makers. So, forget using ChatGPT to write your emails – imagine the ways you can use it to expand on what you’re already good at.

Main Pic: Insta360 Link 2 livestreaming