100s of custom integrations across AV & IT

The Challenge

American Sound designs, integrates, and supports complex AV & IT solutions, tailored to the diverse needs of customers across the enterprise, including health care, higher education, government, retail, and financial services. This creates an incredibly wide and complex integration surface: thousands of AV device vendors, enterprise software stacks, communication platforms, and networking technologies need to be delivered and managed quickly and efficiently.

The challenge is felt across all parts of American Sound - from developers who needed to maintain custom-built automation and control programming for hundreds of individual projects, to architects, designers and systems commissioning personnel who had to deal with numerous device state management and configuration issues.

In the words of Doug Schaefer, CTO of American Sound: “We have a lot of customers that have made very good business decisions about what their environment should look like, and we want to be able to meet them where they’re at. As a result, we own the variance in solving their problem - and we must solve it without sacrificing consistency.”

The Solution

Using behavior-centric AI design with Swamp, the team at American Sound has built an ever-growing library of integrations that span the complex array of technologies they support. Swamp helps them discover what is already in a client’s environment, learn the wide array of custom APIs and IoT interfaces needed to interact with it, and deliver internal AI solutions to manage them.

How it works

As the team encounters pain points in their day, they turn to Swamp to understand the client’s status quo and build automation that lets them manage and improve it over time.

One example is developing custom digital signage. Customers come to American Sound with a vision for an intricate custom marketing and communications requirement and need help implementing their vision. These platforms lack a standardized method of deployment, and frequently are developed directly by individual engineers. Using their expert knowledge of the underlying systems, they use Swamp to query the underlying structure of the digital signage, compare it to American Sound standards for building custom content, and quickly develop an implementation plan to meet the client’s needs.

“What makes us unique as an industry is that we don’t just learn how to scale and support one application - we’re always learning how to build and support hundreds of new ones,” says Schaefer. “Swamp allows us to adapt to the circumstances and technology we need to deliver for our clients at a speed that would have been impossible with traditional automation. We can integrate with anything.”

Benefits

Swamp provides the necessary controls and visibility to allow American Sound to do production IT & AV work at scale with AI agents. They moved from doing no production artificial intelligence work to having front-line AI agents, enabling them to deliver custom solutions to clients quickly and safely. By building a large corpus of behaviors for each technology they integrate with, each new solution provides ready building blocks for the next challenge they face.

Lessons Learned

As the team at American Sound adopts more AI-forward solutions with Swamp, they have developed a clear learning methodology. They work with AI to accelerate their understanding of a customer’s environment and technology stack - in order to ultimately provide easier learning experiences and grow the expertise of their team. When they encounter challenges, they focus development there, ensuring the team levels up together.

Futures

In addition to continuing to build their library of integrations, Swamp is also starting to impact how they run the business. Swamp integrations into the finance and ERP systems are enabling them to directly surface information to internal accounting teams, with more to come.

Conclusion

Swamp has enabled American Sound to bring the benefits of production-grade AI solutions to the highly complex and dynamic AV & IT industry. They can quickly integrate with new vendors and equipment, understand a customer's unique environment, and build automated solutions that deliver high-quality results.