Traditionally, three major components make up a physical security plan: access control, surveillance, and security testing. However, the growing number of threats in today’s world demonstrates why schools and other organizations need to take the next step to protect the people on their properties at any given time and their assets.
Citing the 2022 State of Protective Intelligence Report, Security Magazine reported that 88% of business and security leaders observed a dramatic increase in physical threats to their organizations between 2021 and 2022. As such, it’s no surprise that some security companies are seeing their revenues rise rapidly.
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One estimate pegs the global physical security market at $127 billion in 2022 and estimates it will be worth $216.4 billion in 2030 — representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)of 6.8%. The same firm estimates the global artificial intelligence market at $136.6 billion in 2022 with an impressive CAGR of 37.3% through 2030.
Artificial intelligence represents the next generation in physical security, and it's changing the face of the market forever. Saagar Govil, CEO of AI security firm Cemtrex, shares the latest updates on artificial intelligence AI and how this technology can be used to significantly ramp up an organization's security efforts.
What are some of the most benefits of applying AI to the security sector?
I think artificial intelligence is going to change a few things pretty dramatically. The first one is simply that AI is going to be able to see better than humans. At the most fundamental level, the cameras themselves are going to be able to track human behavior with a much greater accuracy than ever before and better than humans themselves. As a result, you can detect threats faster and more effectively.
As an extension of that, I think AI is going to make the conventional manned security operations obsolete and evolve that experience. Traditionally, organizations would have security guards watching video feeds, often with eight cameras on each screen. There's no way anyone can see and digest all that information, but an AI builds a full view of all that data and analyzes it far more efficiently.
A third key aspect is that AI will be able to, with reasonable accuracy, determine the appropriate response for a given incident in real time, meaning who should be alerted and when and how they should be alerted. All of that can be handed over to a computer system rather than humans deciding when to alert the police, what information to provide, and how to quickly provide and curate that information.
How do you expect technology to shape the future of the security sector?
Technology removes almost all of the human error element, and it drives a lot of automation. It also provides more sophisticated data that can be parsed and analyzed and leveraged to ultimately drive better outcomes. At Vicon (a subsidiary of Cemtrex), that's a term that we really hang back on is that you have all this technology, but ultimately, our goal here is to drive a better outcome. We expect that AI is going to do exactly that.
There are a lot of concerns around privacy as well. Nobody wants to build Big Brother. I think it's about responsibly deploying this technology, and that's going to be a fine art going forward.
What are the benefits of applying AI technology to cameras directly rather than running the AI separately as software in the background?
One of the key advantages is bandwidth. A lot of these facilities don't have high bandwidth. So you have a couple of different options when it comes to running AI.
In a security system, you can either run the AI on the camera themselves, you can run them in the cloud, or you can run them on a server in the facility, and they all have different pros and cons. The advantage of doing it in the camera itself is that you can process the data in real time where the camera is, and then you can have whatever valuable data needs to come straight from the camera directly to your management system.
As a result, the amount of data that you actually need to collect goes from, let's say, a 4K video, which is a massive amount of data at 30 frames per second, to a handful of metadata every second. As a result, the amount of data you need to store and send up to the cloud drops dramatically. That's really the most critical advantage, but in general, it's a way to get the best technology that's out there today while minimizing your cost.
Another advantage is response times. By processing data locally rather than sending it to the cloud, you can react faster. With fluctuating internet bandwidth, network traffic, and processing data in the cloud, it can be more difficult to achieve real-time response. By running AI on the edge, it’s possible to achieve faster desired reactions based on what the data is telling you.
What new technologies are at the cutting edge for the world of security?
It’s easily AI. While there are some interesting new ideas, artificial intelligence is way out in front in terms of overall potential impact on the world of security. A lot of security, at least in the commercial and enterprise market, is now using cloud or at least considering cloud in a way that it wasn't before. So I think the latest numbers show that using cloud solutions is maybe 20% to 30% penetrated in the market.
So there's a significant opportunity with that in terms of leveraging the best kind of deployment for a security solution. Ultimately, I think it's just going to be making the system smarter, and AI drives that.
What was it that drew you personally to the security technology industry?
My initial interest as an investor is that this was a good business and a good industry for a number of different reasons. It has a very sticky customer base with a lot of recurring customers. It has good gross margins; It has software at the core of its product portfolio, which is a very high-margin product.
The need for security is ubiquitous, and it's only growing in the world we live in today. We have a strong macro environment. You have unique things about this business in this industry that make this attractive, and that's ultimately what drew me to this business.
However, what made me want to stay is that school shootings are such a devastating problem in this country, and we are not doing enough to solve it. I feel grateful that I have an opportunity to actually help solve this problem because I didn't go into this with that mindset. But now I don't want to leave until I've actually made an impact on it.
Regardless of your political affiliation, everyone can agree that we need to protect our children. And so to the extent that we can leverage better security to do that, my team is highly motivated to try and solve this problem. We believe that there's certainly a path to making schools safer by leveraging better AI security solutions, and our mission is to drive the industry forward to do just that.
