ISC West 2023 show floor report: wave of technology innovation advances security industry
ISC West 2023, a show in transition for the positive, delivered a diverse and often fragmented ecosystem this week, with artificial intelligence dominating much of the attention.
Ironically, Goldman Sachs had just reported this week that artificial intelligence (AI) could eventually replace 300 million jobs worldwide. So attendees, integrators and security executives had plenty of questions about implications for this technology.
Leading this massive trend for change in the industrial employment economic sector were areas that leverage data storage and scale, like security, that benefit from decision making made on a broad range of threats and opportunities -- including legal (44% share), architectural modeling/building information management/digital twins (37% share), and engineering design and sales (31%).
The security industry is supported by employment in the largest category overlap of office/administration (46%) plus business/IT/facilities/financial operations (35%).
The show opened on positive trends of collaboration to deliver services, both on the floor and through show management.
The Security Industry Association joined members of Expo Seguridad and Expo Seguridad Industrial Mexico to form an expanded International Relations Committee and collaborate on both Expos with national and international technology, solutions and knowledge for manufacturers, distributors, integrators and users.
“Our committee will focus on developing and evolving SIA’s expansion plan to maximize the promotion of international cooperation between SIA and Latin American security companies and industry trade associations,” said Jason de Souza, vice president, Latin America at Hanwha Vision and International Relations Committee chairman.
Future of AI Discussed
Activities in the expo’s meeting rooms ranged from solution demonstrations for integrators and end users, sales, standards, committee meetings on a variety of topics and a unique AI forum delivered by Intelligent Security Systems Corporation (ISS).
Richard Burns, chairman of ISS, assembled a group of panelists, including myself, Bill Bozeman, Matthew Kushner, Pierre Trapanese (Northland Controls), Eli Gorovici (Nice Systems, DV Tel founder), Sameer Sharma (former Intel Smart Cities program manager) and Matt Powell, managing director of Intelligent Security Systems.
While most agreed security industry members need to both be educated and participate in delivering AI solutions, the comparison with “analytics” and the challenges of managing “Big Data” dominated the discussion.
The processing and performance challenges solution providers experience by deploying AI at edge devices was a realistic view by ITS subject matter experts.
Richard Burns opened the session with a synopsis of artificial intelligence delivered by ChatGPT, that was far eclipsed by Powell’s “State of the Security AI Industry,” proving that human intelligence delivery is far different than an expert Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform.
Bozeman plans on participating with SIA Standards to develop AI best practices to help get systems integrators on the right education and deployment tracks.
Partnerships, Ecosystems at Work
The recurring theme in an estimated 30% of the exhibitors was collaboration through ecosystem technology partners, service providers, software developers and even hardware solution providers.
The show and education sponsors usually had expanded partner areas, with meeting spaces and the popular “software demo” kiosk or station where a member of the ecosystem would present their user interface, demonstrate operations, AI decision making, policy deployment and links to the physical device that links AI and “real” worlds.
See our article on product innovations in this e-newsletter for more on AI-focused innovations released at the show.
