HTSA Encourages Members To “Elevate” At Fall Conference
Nearly 100 members of the Home Technology Specialist of America (HTSA) gathered at The Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, October 27-29, 2025, for the group’s 2025 Fall Conference. The three-day conference brought exclusive opportunities for deeper connection between members and vendor partners as well as industry-specific insights, education, and training to help dealers “Elevate” their businesses.
“Now is the time to elevate our people, our practices, and our partnerships,” said Jon Robbins, Executive Director, HTSA, during his opening remarks. “Together, we rise higher. Together, we elevate the industry. We are having a growth year this year. Last year was our first flat year in eight years, but we’re up again this year in overall group purchases versus last year, which was flat from 2023. We’re anticipating that that’s going to maintain. We’re past the tariff thing. That’s all it is. A lot is driven by the market and our clients.”
Ari Supran, CEO of Sonance, took to the stage to kick off the conference with a deep dive into the practical uses of AI, highlighting a core theme of the conference. Supran showed how members could overcome the common misconceptions surrounding AI and harness its potential and invaluable tools with confidence.
“I feel for a company to really adopt AI, it doesn’t have to be the owner or the CEO, but it takes a leader to personally try it and see some real, light bulb moments go off with AI,” Supran told Residential Systems/TWICE. “Then show the rest of their colleagues, and the leadership team, what the opportunity is, to have the confidence to make the investments that they need to make to do it. I’m not technical, but at Sonance, I was able to get them to go, “Wow, there’s something here”, to go hire some technical people. Now we’re really flying.”
Using AI tools such as Wispr Flow, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google NotebookLM to demonstrate how to research, code simple apps with English, and streamline workflows to free employees to do their real jobs, Supran piqued the interest of members, and he encouraged them to lean into learning AI sooner, rather than later.
“I think the ones [companies] that are going to embrace AI are the same ones that are going to find more valuable uses of that time. And the ones that resist it probably won’t,” said Supran. “For us at Sonance, it’s more about empowering our people. I think there’s just a lot of manual things that people are doing that take too much of their time. And if we can smooth that out and make it more efficient, we’re going to do it.”
“There’s business being done as a result of AI,” Robbins added. “Tech companies are being driven by AI right now, and there are so many new offerings all the time. It’s not about replacing people, and it’s not about replacing products. It’s about transforming from our standpoint; transforming operations to become more efficient, more effective. If anything, we believe that AI is helping to recreate this face-to-face opportunity because people you know, the people that have come out in the last 20 years, everything’s been done through technology.”
The HTSA fall conference expanded beyond AI, with other educational sessions speaking to the timely topics of optimizing labor profit, leveraging CEDIA resources through its education pathways for techs and PMs, as well as industry forecasts for the next six months and how leaders can utilize and implement impactful ways to communicate with their staff, clients, and vendors for maximum returns.
A staple of any HTSA conference, 1-on-1s returned to help members and vendors make and strengthen essential connections with each other. These pairings enable HTSA members to make the most of their membership and forge lasting friendships within the group.
“HTSA is very content-conscious, and we work very hard on creating the right content that’s going to hit those numbers and help the relationships,” Robbins told Residential Systems/TWICE. “We’re constantly working with our members to talk about culture and how to maintain the people that they have. We call it relationship science. We have arguably the best program in the industry. If you talk to members and you ask, tell me about the relationship science program that HTSA offers, most of them will rave that it’s changed them.”
“The members of HTSA are keeping up with the changing landscape very well,” said Tom Doherty, Director, New Technology Initiatives, HTSA. “We’ve always been ahead of the curve, and the HTSA membership, as a percentage of the market, is doing much greater per capita of lighting than any other group. That’s because we’ve got an earlier start, and we’re smaller, we’re just 100 members, so we operate more as a unit, and so new ideas are adopted, and we’re staying ahead of it.”
The HTSA Vendor Awards were also held on October 27, 2025, at the conference, with the following winners:
- New Vendor Partner of the Year: Lenbrook
- Video Partner of the Year: Just Video Walls
- Audio Partner of the Year: James Loudspeaker
- Custom Install Partner of the Year: Coastal Source
- Accessory Partner of the Year: ICE Cable Systems
- Growth Partner of the Year: Samsung
- Lighting Partner of the Year: Lucetta
- Emerging Vendor of the Year: Modular Lighting Instruments
- HTSA Support Partner of the Year: Crestron
- Anchor Award: ADI Snap One
- HTSA Person of the Year: Micke Cleary, Sonance/James Loudspeaker
Innovation Awards:
- DMF Lighting PhaseX
- Lucifer Lighting Timber Glow
- Crestron Videobar 70
- Wisdom Audio Sage Soundbar
- Lenbrook Bluesound Configurator
- AVPro Edge Murideo
- Leon Edge Atlas
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