Modern businesses and organizations have new potential value. Beyond high-quality employees who create physical building space, office equipment and organizational functions, four of the five organizations currently maintain the petabytes of data in their systems, maintaining the market value of trillions of dollars and the legal and ethical ability to effectively manage that data. The surge in physical and digital assets held by companies means that modern security ecosystems must utilize all the tools they have as they become more attractive targets for threat actors. More and more, artificial intelligence has helped answer this challenge.
If physical security was once dominated by manual monitoring, physical access control, and reactive security measures, AI-driven solutions have been developed to prioritize the needs of modern enterprises. AI provides the operational efficiency and seamless user experience that organizations need to effectively combat threats. The arrival and evolution of AI is certainly an exciting time, but it is important for organizations to consider specific applications of technology. This will make it realistic to see how we provide the next generation of security solutions to protect our products and data globally.
Enhanced human-driven security
AI offers the potential to revolutionize physical security risk assessment and decision-making, and works with human teams to reduce the impact of fatigue, distraction, or bias in managing and mitigating security incidents. It has the power to analyze huge amounts of security data in real time, identifying potential threats to people, products and data with greater accuracy than manual monitoring alone. This leads to exponentially informed decisions that can make all the difference in mission-critical security.
One application we’ve seen so far is providing AI-powered behavioral analysis. Human Security Teams employ AI at the edge of security cameras to flag individuals who exhibit suspicious patterns such as unauthorized access attempts and lotes in restricted areas. This allows human security teams to respond proactively, rather than responding to events after the damage occurs. For example, behavioral analysis can be integrated with access control systems to reduce tailgating at entry points. By quickly identifying discrepancies between badge scans or biometric authentication and ground-related behavior, the system can instantly alert security personnel.
In high traffic locations such as airports and stadiums, security teams use AI-supported surveillance to detect unmanned bags, unauthorized access to restricted zones, or upsetting behavior. However, human surveillance remains important to ensure that AI models do not use bias in their algorithms. Taking into account usage, teams are already deploying a smarter and more accurate security ecosystem than ever before.
Beyond simple surveillance
Security has evolved, not merely monitoring activity, and is being exercised to provide overall operational efficiency across the physical and digital spaces within an organization’s infrastructure. By processing huge amounts of data from cameras, sensors, sensors, access controls, video, fire and life safety systems, AI can generate actionable insights that help security and facility management teams improve workflows, reduce costs, and increase the safety of individuals and organizations.
In industries and roles where personal protective equipment (PPE) is mandatory, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and construction, AI can be integrated with access control systems to verify PPE compliance before entry. This approach can transform workplace safety by automating compliance checks and eliminating the need for manual inspections. As a result, workers can start tasks faster and more safely, reducing the burden on staff responsible for monitoring compliance.
AI-powered analytics can also optimize building occupancy by monitoring real-time space usage. Whether in an office, warehouse or parking, AI can dynamically manage building systems and security protocols, such as accurately observing traffic levels in feet and vehicles and denying access when space exceeds capacity. In this way, organizations can automate capacity enforcement and maintain detailed occupancy logs for audit and compliance purposes. This increases work efficiency and, in some cases, the sustainability of the facility. The benefits of “non-security” are continuously discovered, such as actions unique to preemptive construction, such as changing lighting levels at facilities to align with the number of residents, adjusting the use of air conditioners in parking garages to minimize energy usage, or promptly promoting elevator dispatch upon arrival of catering vehicles.
You can also use the same system that monitors intrusions by external actors to increase workplace safety. AI-powered surveillance can train workplace incidents to reduce and increase productivity in order to monitor and identify potential safety hazards such as warehouse mobile vehicles and unsafe environmental conditions. Predictive maintenance that integrates with AI allows security devices to detect early signs of equipment failure and help facilities deal with problems quickly. By equipping a camera to inspect yourself, you can identify obstacles, inconsistencies, poor resolution or feed losses, and quickly flag these to your maintenance team. AI can effectively handle security system issues, increase system reliability, and ensure uninterrupted service.
The possibility of AI-driven compliance
Security compliance has traditionally been a labor-intensive process that requires extensive documentation and regular audits. AI-driven compliance tools have begun to make this a thing of the past. Streamline these processes by continuously monitoring and enforcing security protocols. Ultimately, it helps the organization stay compliant.
Automating access control audits enables organizations to detect violations in real time and adhere to security policies. The AI-driven platform can also automatically generate incident reports, providing teams with real-time updates on security and policy violations. Additionally, by encrypting personal data and restricting access based on the individual’s role in an organization, AI ensures compliance with globally deployed and updated privacy regulations. Integrating AI-driven compliance tools enables security experts to ensure regulatory compliance while reducing the administrative burden of manual auditing and reporting.
Ai is everything, and will it end everything?
AI is certainly extremely useful for modern security ecosystems, but as security experts, we should not treat it as the ultimate determinant of security operations. In addition to the ethical issues it raises, its applications must always be deployed with human creativity to resolve evolving security threats. Security teams need to maintain the flexibility to decide when to use AI, depending on the size and capabilities of their organization.
I’m looking forward to AI lenses
AI continues to fundamentally transform physical security to meet the physical and digital security needs of modern companies. It took only a few years to implement more accurate, efficient and robust protection for enterprise properties, labor and data. We are excited to continue developing new use cases. While ethical considerations should be kept in mind, we need to recognize that AI is not a complete solution to an organization’s security needs, the benefits of security that AI supports are proven. The future of security is working with AI, and those who embrace it today are best positioned to navigate the evolving situation of physical security tomorrow.
