Will AI Be The Top Trend Of 2024 Or Do We Need More Time?
Will AI Be The Top Trend Of 2024 – Things are continuing to hot up around artificial intelligence, including AI as a sensor, AI as a filter, and AI as a worker for security operations. Some of the projections we’re reading about are realistic, others seem a reach.
In our opinion, 12-month trends are too brief to allow foundational trends to emerge on the operations side – we prefer the Roman idea of a clade – a 4-year span that allows a more detailed unfolding. Even considering AI has been impacting on the security industry for around 10 years, the future of the technology remains uncertain, particularly on the end user side.
The next 4-5 years will give us a better sense of exactly what AI is going to be doing when it comes to security operations. It’s likely to significant, given the rivers of data security systems and devices have been gathering all these decades – data that may now be mined to generate alarms, give early warning of events, as well as suggesting areas of developing risk.
It’s likely generative AI is going to play a role here. While people think of generative AI as generating content, the technology has an endless ability to draw conclusions and then report based on the data of multiple inputs. The more inputs, the more discerning these conclusions will be – in the case of large security systems, more inputs is an understatement.
Security managers wrangling airports with millions of weekly events, hundreds of thousands of alarm and automation inputs, tens of thousands of CCTV cameras and thousands of outputs can imagine a layer of AI awareness that conceives their entire site and its users in real time, all the time.
This awareness will allow it to highlight vulnerabilities around people, devices and events, as well as drawing conclusions about general procedures that may be impacting on security posture. If this sounds like HAL, it is like HAL. But security operations will not go to HAL in 2024, regardless of what IT and tech industry commentators argue.
Security people know our industry is at the cutting edge of technology, whether that be computerised automation, biometric authentication, video content analysis, real world LiDAR detection systems, and loads more.
Will AI Be The Top Trend Of 2024?
If any industry is going to charge headlong into AI-based situational awareness, it’s the electronic security industry. Yet there’s more to AI than appetite. Systems need to be reliable, they cannot breach duty of care, they cannot negatively impact on public perception, or fracture user experience. They’re also going to need to march in lockstep with government regulations and corporate governance.
Does this mean security people are going to hold off? We think not. There’s a temptation to think the electronic security industry is a stick in the mud when it comes to new technology. It’s an understandable misconception based on the necessary reliability of security devices and controllers. The mean time between replacement of most solid state security gear is unthinkably long from an IT perspective.
But controllers and sensors are not firmware, and they are not software, either. That means evolving AI solutions can slide in between the physical and networking side and address live operations any time a security department sees a chance to mitigate risk, or senior management sees an opportunity to reduce cost.
Will AI be server-based as a separate layer? Will AI be integrated into hardware and control devices? Will AI solutions be integrated into VMS and SMS? Will AI be integrated into cloud services and emerge from a wider SaaS/VsaaS trend? Given the proprietary nature of worthwhile business models, we’d say it’s likely to be all of the above.
Will AI be the top trend of 2024? For end users, installers and integrators, probably not. For hardware and particularly software developers? Probably yes.
You can learn more about generative AI here or read more SEN news here.
“Will AI Be The Top Trend Of 2024 Or Do We Need Longer?”
