Is AI Replacing Security Operators? (ISC West Breakdown)

If you’re in the security or life safety industry, the biggest shift happening right now isn’t incremental—it’s foundational.

In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the biggest takeaways from ISC West, including the rapid acceleration of AI, the rise of startups, and what it all means for operators, monitoring companies, and the future of the industry. From AI-powered video monitoring to fully autonomous agents replacing operators, they unpack where things are actually headed—and what’s already changing today. 

They explain why legacy players may be too late to the cloud shift, how AI is reshaping video surveillance into the core of the security stack, and why pricing pressure and automation could disrupt traditional monitoring models. Whether you attended ISC West or not, this episode gives you a clear picture of where the industry is going next—and who’s at risk of getting left behind.

They cover:

•  Why AI dominated ISC West—and what that really means for operators 
•  The shift from alarms to video as the core security solution 
•  How AI agents are replacing human monitoring operators 
•  Why video monitoring pricing is under pressure 

If you run a security, fire, or service business, this episode will help you understand where the industry is heading, what trends actually matter, and how to prepare for the next wave of change.

More Entry & Exit — https://www.entryandexit.co/

Owned and Operated

New Episodes Every Wednesday!

Subscribe For More

Transcript

Cloud Catchup Begins

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, so Acre Security is just now announcing that they are going all in on cloud. Bulldog, new tricks. You're about 10 years late. Hey, look at this awesome tech for selling to your customer, but there was not a lot of AI solution stuff for how to make you run your business better. Yeah, great. Like we want to do video monitoring, but stop charging us$65 a month. Video monitoring centers showing how they're using full agents now to replace their operators.

ISC West Debrief Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:31

It's gonna be like massive ripple effects of that. It's gonna change a lot of things. Welcome to Entry and Exit. Today we're talking ISC West. I did not get to go. Colin left me at home. He got to go do the fun Vegas thing. I was making sure our company survived. You know, it I really just I put the team on my back and you went and ate nice food, you know, whatever. We're switching next year. Okay. It's gonna be a little flip-fight.

unknown 1:05

Fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Fine. Okay. Fine.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

This is a big year. It was a big year this year.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Yeah, and and I want to know. So we're we're letting you in on our catch up combo because we really haven't had it. No, we have not. And I want to know, you know, what you what you saw, what the themes were, you know, what's trending, uh, what was, you know, if there's any kind of main buzz. So fill me in.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

I I'm curious uh if you can guess the number one overarching theme of what the show was. Just guess one, like, one overarching theme. If you just had to guess, and and truly, like, if you're listening to this, we have not talked about ISC West. We we literally like, hey, let's record an episode about debriefing on it. So here we are. What is what is the one thing that you think was the overarching theme?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I I have one very specific guess, and if it's not this, then I don't I don't know what you were doing. Like, I don't understand what anyone was doing out there if it was not AI.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yeah, it was AI. AI, of course. Uh what was interesting though is it was it was AI. Well, I'll tell you this. It was AI, but then the other the other theme was the the first booth, like big booth you walk into, was Vercotta's booth. And I shouldn't say booth, I should say booth castle, because they literally rebuilt the Louvre in the middle of the trade show floor. It uh truly was spectacular. They had a security guard team for the line to get into their booth. Wow, naturally, unbelievable. Yeah, okay, so so that was that was wild, but you're you're absolutely right. The theme appeared to be this year was everything was AI. And I'll tell you one thing that was really interesting. So, Acre Security, which is a manufacturer that manufactures a lot of these older on-prem brands, it had a ton of mergers and acquisitions over the last year, is just now announcing that they are going all in on cloud. And here's one really interesting theme that I thought was crazy was the startup section for the first time ended up being like the busiest section of the entire all of ISC West. Like where all the startups exist, they usually put them over in the corner, and it's like nobody goes over there, and it's all about you know, Acre, Linnell, Vercotta, you know, nope, not this year. This year it was like there, I think there was a startup this year that won best VMS, which is wild because everything is driven towards AI, and so a lot of these old legacy manufacturers who have had a chokehold on the market through their dealer base, that I think they're in trouble. It's gonna be an interesting next 10 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

So, was there any startup, so if like me and our friends who didn't get to go, was there a specific startup, like anybody you talked to that was really impressive that you thought, man, like these people are gonna crush it over the next few years?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, there was a couple. Um, I'm trying to look back in my notes. There was one that won, I don't remember what they won, but it was called iPop.ai, and they do basically like computer vision. So they basically make an AI that it's essentially what you need for um to interact no code with computer vision to be able to do analytics for your for your uh video surveillance solutions. Got it. And a lot of these startups were two or three people and all their open claw agents. Um and I I really do believe that like for these folks that are going to cloud right now, it's like um you're about 10 years late, and you need to be thinking about I if I were them, I would scrap all my investment and all that, and I would go acquire a bunch of these new startups and make like an incubator within your own business and figure out what's the best one and just use their tech because old dog, new tricks, not sure it's gonna work out.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

That it's uh so similar to my time in the senior living industry. Uh that's where I was like in my early to mid-20s, and there were these old businesses, and they were trying to catch up with these modern EHRs, and you know, they were seven years late to you know their cloud announcement. It's you know, just eerily similar. So, okay. So startups were uh, you know, got some respect, got some love, a lot of people interested. Everyone talking about AI, anything else AI from like a new solution or anything that was announced, that's all that's all we're gonna be talking about.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

I mean, here's what's really wild. I'll I'll say this that I think that there's an opportunity in this space. Um, and I think it's the nature of the trade show, so I can I guess I get it, but like everything is AI solutions that you're gonna sell to an end user, right? So everything that was there, or them for the most part, there was a few booths that were not, but everything there was, hey, look at this awesome tech for selling to your customer, but there was not a lot of AI solution stuff for how to make you run your business better. Isn't that interesting? Like, there was no like, hey, here's an AI operating system for billing, for field service, for whatever. And and even it was really funny. Salesforce had for the first time I've ever seen since I've been there for the last 15 years, whatever, 14, they had a little table off the trade show floor that was like a little sign and it said meet with Salesforce, and there was like two reps that were sitting there.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

First time I've ever seen that interesting, yeah. I've never seen that either. Okay, I yeah, I'm I'm not surprised based on what we've experienced. I'm not really surprised that there was a lack of you know, solutions to help improve from like an operations perspective for the dealer, but there should be. Um and did you feel like all the solutions people were promoting were, or most of them, especially from the big boys, were just kind of it all tastes like chicken, or was there anything that stood out?

Agents Replace Operators

SPEAKER_00 7:34

It all kind of tasted like chicken. A lot of it was everybody trying to keep up, and a lot of the startup section was interesting because they were using a lot of like natural language for security stuff. But what what everyone is talking about right now is um so the whole thing it's kind of a funny thing, and we're gonna talk about this on another pod, but like alarm monitoring companies, monitoring centers, I should say, sorry, monitoring centers, are like not talking about alarms anymore because alarms are basically dead or gonna be dead very soon. And so they're all talking about video monitoring, and all their dealers like, yeah, great, like we want to do video monitoring, but stop charging us$65 a, you know, a month, and then we've got to market out whatever. Like, it's like, dude, this is it's there's no margin in it for us, and it's like the cut, it's extremely expensive. And so one thing that was really unique, and the first time I've ever seen, is they had uh video monitoring centers showing how they're using full agents now to replace their operators, not like oh, to help us be more efficient. Like they used to use AI to help like filter out signals that were like so that their operators could be more efficient. Now it's like we've got full operators that are being run by AI agents. That was pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Who was doing that?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

And ideally, ideally, that's well, actually, Motorola had something about that. Like, I need to I don't really remember what it was. It's something to do with their offering some like video surveillance solution, which if Motorola owns a vigil on.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

And they had something out there about some new agent, I can't remember the name of it, I'll have to go back and look at my notes, where um it it is fully autonomous video monitoring. Like it's a subscription, they call, they make a decision, they call the police. Pretty wild. Video verification. I think that that's where it's gonna go. Like, I I effectively, here's the major overarching theme. The overarching theme is uh alarms are dead, and video surveillance is now going to be your full security stack. Like, you're not even probably gonna have a reader at the door anymore. You're this is a big new technology that was like it's been out for a while, but it's like everyone's doubling down on. It's like you walk up to a door, the camera is identifying your face. There's not like a station where you have to go up and do video biometric, it's just like your face is in the AI and it just lets you in. And so your access control is now controlled by video. So video is the central hub for everything in the security stack, and everyone is racing to be the unified platform. We went to the DMP event, that was amazing. Shout out to DMP event team, dude. Yes. Holy smokes, their events, dude. They they are so dialed on their events. Um, anyway, their whole, you know, they're doubling down on video. They hired a guy named Ken who came from Eagle Eye, who kind of helped run Eagle Eye for a few years. He's now over at DMP running um their whole video solution and everything is unified platform.

Big Deals and Wrap Up

SPEAKER_01 10:41

It's gonna be like massive ripple effects of that. It's gonna change a lot of things in the industry. Um and I think there will definitely be some operators that that get left behind. Um really not just not just operators, I mean kind of across the whole ecosystem. Be new entrants and it's gonna be it's gonna be fun to watch. Um, okay, so what about industry news? Anything buzzy? Was there like the thing that's a bigger one?

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Well, there was a lot of talk of the the security 101 acquisition.

unknown 11:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

I think Morgan Stanley bought them. And um I think that's Morgan Stanley's first venture into physical security. I may be wrong on that, but that was a talk of the town. Fact-check. Fact-check. Yeah, I gotta get fact-checked on that. Uh, because I don't I don't know if they if that is their first one, they may have some investment. But I but I think that's that's their only their first platform. And it and it kind of makes sense. They've got a really uh interesting model, Security 101 does, because they were a franchise, basically. Um, so they have a lot of operators that are all over the place. It was kind of an interesting way to create a distributed, and then they went and started buying up the franchisees to do basically one large exit, from my understanding. Aggregated. So now Morgan Stanley's involved, BlackRock is involved. Uh who else is involved? Who else is involved? Cobalt's involved. Uh there's a lot of folks out there.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

And was there was uh the um the purchase price made public? Were people throwing numbers in?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

I did not get a multiple. I didn't know we'd have to we should look that up. I I did not get well let's look that up right now. I don't know uh if if there was a multiple um 101 acquisition. We're gonna find that out right now because I'm actually curious about that. Elevator music. Yeah, I'm not I'm not finding I'm not fine, I'm not finding uh a valuation. Dang it. That would have been fun to know.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

I have a I have a feeling that they paid a bit of a premium for that deal.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

U Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. Um, especially when these the big private equity companies want to get I mean, that's big, right? That's not like a smaller private equity group that's jumping in. That's like uh a big boy doing multi-billion dollar hunt, you know, 10 10 billion dollar deals across different industries. So yeah, so that was interesting. So I think that we're starting to see that. Um, the multiples in this industry have been frothy for a while, but a lot of it has been consolidation um from regional players or you know, new roll-ups or whatever, but now we're getting very large private equity companies that are coming in. And I think that that's that's gonna be the new norm. I think that's gonna what we're gonna start seeing.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

And I think we're gonna start seeing them running AI playbooks across these businesses to make a more we were we were talking about this the other day that we feel so comfortable in this industry for a really, really long time because physical security is so much more defensible against you know, we're not worried that AI, I don't think we're gonna, you know, license a robot to go touch a panel anytime soon.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

So uh well, I think what what's the thing we talked about? We talked had some some folks in this week at our office, and we said, Hey, I think AI is farther along than people think, and robots are farther behind than people think.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Elon Musk will probably argue with me about that, but I uh Yeah, we'll get him on.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

We'll get him on soon to pod.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Well, anyway, so that was the big thing. That was the debrief. The debrief was uh AI is taking over literally every solution. Um, customers are asking about AI, video monitoring, hopefully we'll start to the pricing will start to get compressed a little bit with agent operators, some big industry kind of buzzy news around the security 101 deal that took place, and a tremendous amount of startups. That to me was the biggest headline was everyone was paying attention to the startup section and really spending time to see what they have built. Because, man, you can develop a software application with AI at lightning speed now. Yep. So it'll be interesting. Uh, last thing I'll say that there's always been this idea around like the physical security industry has lagged the IT world, meaning like business apps by what what they used to say is five to seven years. I think that window is getting compressed. I think it's getting compressed down into one, two, three years because I think now the speed of development, now what you have to do is develop it, and then you got to go test it on low risk applications to make sure because it's a life safety, so you you really can't have it not work. Yeah, so yeah, it'll be interesting to see what shakes out next year. Um well that's I'm going, so you can go you can stay home.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Hey, you were the one that said that trade shows are dead, by the way. Just to remind you of that, and I said they were far from dead. So I think your hot take is cold.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Yeah, I was wrong. I'll admit it. Ooh, I like that. Um, all right. Well, um, if you enjoyed what you heard, or if you didn't, I still want you to like and subscribe, comment, send us a picture of your cat, whatever you want. Yep. Uh, we'd love to engage with you. Yeah. Um, and uh yeah, see you on the next one. See you on the next one.