There is a number that should be on every sustainability manager’s desk, and it has nothing to do with data centres, supply chains, or air travel.
30%.
That is the average utilisation rate of a corporate meeting room in 2025. Which means for roughly 70% of every working day, your meeting rooms sit empty – lights possibly on, displays glowing, cameras powered up, DSPs humming – waiting for a meeting that never comes, or one that ended twenty minutes ago and nobody thought to turn anything off.
It sounds like a small thing. It is not.
The Scale of the Problem
Global office utilisation currently averages 53%, up from 38% in 2024 and 35% in 2023 – and those figures cover overall office space. Meeting rooms specifically perform worse. In nearly 45–50% of cases, meeting rooms are used by just one person, regardless of room size. Oversized boardrooms are consistently the worst offenders: rooms with a capacity of more than 17 people hosted fewer than 4% of meetings booked and were only 11.6% full on average when in use.
The hybrid work shift has compounded this. Analysis of workplace data reveals that the booking-to-occupancy ratio has plummeted from 0.85 in 2023 to just 0.71 in 2025 – a 16% decline in actual room usage despite maintained booking levels. Employees book rooms as insurance. They don’t always show up. The room and everything in it, stays on regardless.
What AV Equipment Actually Costs You in Energy
When sustainability teams audit their Scope 2 emissions, they typically focus on HVAC, lighting, and server infrastructure. The AV estate – the displays, video conferencing systems, DSPs, ceiling microphones, cameras, and control processors in every meeting room- rarely makes the list.
It should.
A typical commercial display in a meeting room draws between 80 and 200 watts when active. A standard LCD monitor consumes between 20 and 100 watts, while larger commercial displays draw significantly more. A fully-equipped conference room – display, video bar, DSP, control system, cameras – can easily draw 250 to 400 watts when active. Across a 50-room estate running 8-hour days, 250 working days a year, with 70% idle time, the maths is stark:
250W × 7 hours idle × 250 days × 50 rooms = 218,750 kWh wasted per year.
That is energy nobody is capturing, nobody is reporting, and almost nobody is managing.
Recent reports indicate that automation controls can reduce energy consumption by up to 29%. But automation requires visibility. And visibility requires monitoring. Most organisations have neither across their full AV estate.
The Hidden Carbon Contributor That ESG Reports Miss
Office buildings are responsible for about 35% of total electricity consumption in the US, and over 70% of building energy consumption occurs during occupancy periods. The corollary- what happens during non-occupancy – is largely untracked.
AV equipment sits in a regulatory blind spot. It is not a data centre, so it escapes the scrutiny applied to server rooms. It is not HVAC, so facilities teams do not think of it as an energy system. It is not lighting, so smart building automation often ignores it. Yet in aggregate, across a large corporate estate, it represents a meaningful and measurable source of Scope 2 emissions – purchased electricity consumed on behalf of the organisation.
ECO modes -designed to conserve energy by putting devices into a low-power state when not in use – are available in many modern AV devices. When a display device is inactive, sleep mode can drastically cut energy consumption. Video conferencing devices are also beginning to adopt more sophisticated versions of this feature. The challenge is that these features require someone to configure them, monitor whether they are working, and enforce consistency across every room, every site, every brand.
In a 50-room estate spanning three cities, four display brands, two DSP manufacturers, and three video conferencing platforms, that is not a task any IT or AV team can realistically manage manually.
What the Regulatory Landscape Is Demanding
This is not simply an efficiency story. It is becoming a compliance story.
California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act requires entities with over $1 billion in annual revenues to report their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions from 2026. Similar frameworks are advancing in New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Illinois. In the UK, the government sought feedback in 2025 on how climate transition planning obligations should apply to corporates and regulated financial institutions, with formal regulation expected in 2026.
Meanwhile, the number of corporations with science-based climate targets has more than tripled since 2023, with over 11,000 companies having set or committed to set SBTi-validated targets. Those targets require data. Real data, not estimates. Auditable data that can withstand scrutiny from boards, investors, and regulators.
The question for every sustainability and IT team is the same: when your auditor asks for Scope 2 emissions from your office technology estate, what will you say?
How Companies Are Starting to Act
Forward-thinking organisations are beginning to treat the AV estate the way they treat lighting and HVAC — as a manageable, measurable energy system rather than a fixed overhead.
The approaches being adopted fall into three broad categories:
Occupancy-based automation. Rooms that know they are empty shut devices down. Displays that detect no presence after a defined period enter sleep mode automatically. The same room wakes up fifteen minutes before the first booking. No human intervention required, no behaviour change from employees.
Estate-wide monitoring. Rather than managing each room or each device brand in isolation, organisations are moving toward platforms that give them a single view of energy consumption, idle hours, and device status across every room, every site, every brand simultaneously.
ESG data integration. kWh savings are translated into CO₂ equivalents, exported as monthly reports, and fed into Scope 2 reporting workflows. The AV estate becomes a source of auditable sustainability data rather than an untracked footnote.
Using cloud-based AV management to monitor and optimise energy usage in conference rooms, and implementing digital occupancy tracking to ensure meeting rooms and workspaces are only powered when in use, are emerging as best practices for organisations serious about their operational carbon footprint.
Where AVM-360 Fits
AVM-360 was built to give IT and AV teams a single pane of glass across every device in their estate – regardless of brand, location, or network segment. As part of that platform, we built Green Room IQ: a sustainability intelligence layer that turns the AV estate from an energy liability into a managed, reportable asset.
Here is what it does in practice:
Idle waste detection. AVM-360 monitors room activity in real time. When a display is on, no Teams or Zoom call is active, and no booking is registered in the calendar, the room is flagged as idle. Estimated kWh is logged per room, per hour.
Automated power scheduling. Green scheduling configures each display and connected device to power off automatically at the end of day, and to power on fifteen minutes before the first booking of the morning. No manual configuration per room. Consistent across every site.
Sustainability reporting. At the end of each month, AVM-360 generates a report showing idle hours saved, estimated kWh reduced, and CO₂ equivalent – per room, per site, and across the full estate. This is the data your sustainability team needs for Scope 2 reporting. It is not an estimate. It is derived from actual device telemetry.
BMS integration (Intelligence tier). For organisations with building management systems, AVM-360 can push a room-empty signal to Siemens Desigo, Johnson Controls Metasys, or Schneider EcoStruxure — so HVAC and lighting follow the AV system’s occupancy detection automatically. The room that shuts its displays down also drops its temperature and dims its lights.
The Maths, Simply
Take a 100-room estate. Assume:
- Average active draw per room (display + video bar + control system): 250 watts
- Average idle hours per day: 5.5 hours (based on 30% room utilisation across an 8-hour day)
- Working days per year: 250
- CO₂ intensity factor (global average grid): 0.42 kg CO₂ per kWh
Idle energy without AVM-360: 250W × 5.5h × 250 days × 100 rooms = 34,375 kWh/year CO₂ equivalent: 34,375 × 0.42 = 14,437 kg CO₂/year – roughly equivalent to driving a car 90,000 kilometres.
With automated power scheduling capturing even 60% of that idle waste, the saving is approximately 8,625 kg CO₂/year – from meeting rooms alone. No renewable energy procurement required. No capital investment in new hardware. Just intelligent monitoring and automated scheduling applied to equipment you already own.
The Bigger Picture
The corporate estate is changing faster than most sustainability frameworks can track. Hybrid work patterns mean rooms are emptier, longer, more unpredictably. Return-to-office mandates are creating utilisation spikes mid-week and ghost towns on Fridays. The gap between what is booked and what is actually used – and what stays powered on regardless – is widening.
ESG boards and investors are asking harder questions. Regulators are imposing sharper requirements. The organisations that will answer those questions most credibly are the ones that have already built the measurement infrastructure – the ones that know, room by room, device by device, exactly how much energy their estate is consuming, wasting, and saving.
The meeting room is not a data centre. But it is a carbon emitter, and increasingly, it needs to be managed like one.
AVM-360 is a device-agnostic AV monitoring platform built for enterprise AV estates. Green Room IQ is included in the Essentials and Intelligence tiers. Monthly sustainability reports are generated automatically.
Learn more at avm-360.com or connect with us on LinkedIn.
References
- Worklytics – What 2023–2025 Data Reveals About Hybrid Meeting Room Utilization (2025)
- Gable – Space Utilization Tracking: The Complete Guide (2026)
- Ronspot –The 2026 Workplace Statistics and Benchmarks Report
- HubStar / Workplace Insight- Hybrid Working Is Stabilising Around the World (Feb 2026)
- Energies / MDPI – Assessing the Influence of Occupancy Factors on Energy Performance in US Small Office Buildings (Oct 2024)
- Applied Global – 4 AV Design Tips for a Sustainable Office (Nov 2023)
- Cinos – Why Sustainability in AV Is Key to a Greener IT Strategy (Oct 2024)
- Fluid AV – Business Sustainability: Lower Carbon Footprint with AV Solutions (Feb 2025)
- Harvard Law / Conference Board- CEO and C-Suite ESG Priorities for 2025 (Feb 2025)
- ESG Dive – The Number of Corporations with Climate Targets Has More Than Tripled Since 2023 (Nov 2025)
- Breathe ESG – ESG Regulations in the USA: What Companies Need to Know in 2026
- Freshfields – 7 ESG Trends to Watch in 2026
