This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Security Business magazine. When sharing, don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter.
The entry of AI-powered video analytics into the marketplace has been discussed and dissected in detail within the security industry – and with good reason. For end-users, these detailed analytics bring an exciting value proposition, going beyond better, faster, and cheaper physical security to deliver business intelligence that transforms video surveillance solutions from cost centers to profit centers.
For security integrators who offer video analytics solutions to their clients, there are also significant benefits. Besides introducing a new stream of revenue into their business model, intelligent video analytics enable integrators to capitalize on existing relationships via a new and exciting service offering. Integrators offering AI-driven video analytics separate themselves from competitors, displaying a willingness to offer new technologies and cutting-edge technology.
To benefit from these increased profits and customer satisfaction, integrators must understand the best way to convey this exciting value proposition and offer the right analytic solution to their customers. One such organization leveraging the power of intelligent video analytics is integrator Security 101, which has long been helping clients make the move from legacy analog video to IP solutions, and is now helping myriad clients further increase the intelligence of their surveillance systems with intelligent analytics.
ROSI: The New Language of Value
Security 101 is actively deploying advanced AI-powered video analytics to transform their customers’ video into actionable, tailored, and trusted intelligence. This is driving what may be an even more significant trend – transforming the Security Operations Centers (SOC) from cost-centers to profit centers. Intelligent video analytics deployed by Security 101 produce a quantifiable return on security investment (ROSI) for clients, enabling customers to justify budgets for new and enhanced systems.
This ROSI is powered by leveraging all the data generated from a client’s surveillance systems to turn them into actionable insights related to employee occupancy and usage, office traffic flows, employee safety and much more.
For example, with integrated analytics like people counting and hotspot detection, security teams can automatically ensure that personnel adhere to new schedules that limit building occupancy and crowd density to meet health and safety protocols. This same data can then be fed via application programming interfaces (APIs) to real-estate blueprint software to plan construction of a new building. In the end, surveillance takes on an entirely new meaning beyond just observation and awareness.
Early liability detection is another example of how value can be derived directly from video analytics. In the field of health and safety compliance, each undetected incident can have a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars if a workplace injury or compliance infraction occurs. New advanced video analytics help detect incidents faster and drive policy changes to shape employee behavior and avoid future liabilities.
Lastly, these powerful new video analytics are helping to reduce time and cost-consuming manual tasks so that security personnel can focus on real events of interest and enhance other areas of security services. Not only does this save time, it also increases operational efficiencies in terms of the allocation of human resources. By automating many of the manual and repetitive tasks traditionally required of humans, such as live video surveillance and event identification, security staff that can be bogged down by laborious manual efforts can now be redeployed throughout an organization, enhancing ongoing guard presence and effective alarm response. AI-driven and automated solutions also reduce human error and speed up other manual processes, effectively optimizing personnel inputs.
The ability to transform a client’s cost center into a potential profit center through the application of new advanced video analytics is helping Security 101 win new clients and increase repeat business.
Delivering New Surveillance Capabilities
Beyond delivering quantifiable value, advanced analytics solutions can address new and emerging security and safety goals.
For example, many legacy video surveillance systems detect moving targets, but are incapable of conducting further analysis. This leads to a high number of false alarms and often alarm fatigue among security teams. AI-powered video analytics can significantly reduce false alarms and improve an organization’s overall security posture.
In real-time scenarios, a layered video analytics solution can autonomously detect, classify, and alert SOC personnel to potentially dangerous or threatening events with extreme accuracy. When people, vehicles, bags, guns, slip-and-fall events are all easily identified, security personnel can gain necessary situational awareness, allowing them to respond quickly and appropriately.
Post-event investigations are also simplified with advanced video analytics that allow Security 101’s clients to search hundreds of videos simultaneously, from any camera source, for persons, faces, subject search, vehicles, objects and even multiple classifications within each category. Instead of scrutinizing hours of recorded video, investigators can easily extract actionable intelligence within minutes of videos being uploaded and processed.
Improving Customer Service with Video Analytics
New video analytics help Security 101 achieve its lofty customer service goals by providing enhanced AI governance. For example, Security 101 customers using advanced AI-powered video analytics have the luxury of utilizing either facial identification technology or whole-body signatures to identify a person during a critical security event.
Giving organizations control of how, when, and where they deploy identification analytics provides exclusive freedoms customers would not traditionally expect from their security integrator. Security 101 is also able to ease fears of AI bias with new video analytics solutions that draw on publicly available and privately built data sets to train and validate their analytics.
