Security Sales & Integration May 2023 - 24

EXCLUSIVE!
Executive Interview
ADT Builds Bot Business
are playing into it. As mentioned, customers
just want the output. They don't need to see
how the sausages are made they just want it
to work.
We're still a
generation away
from the point
where these
technologies can
talk to each other,
but that's what's
really needed.
- Ed Bacco,
ADT Commercial
ADT Commercial has been
showing off robotics by 1X
and delighting attendees at
industry trade shows such as
GSX, ISC West and CES.
I imagine there'll be menu options for
certain functionality or paying at
different tiers or something like that?
Bacco: Absolutely, there'd be more and more
feature sets, particularly driven by the customers.
One of the advantages, why nobody on
my team is from the industry, is we're from
the end-user side. We've experienced firsthand
the pains of the industry and what we needed.
We're solving problems that are close to home
for us. We're also wide awake, aware of the fact
that as we put this technology out in the field,
customers are going to say, " Hey, what about
this and this and this? "
That's the feedback we want to get from them
and be able to offer that back. That's why having
platforms that we don't need to physically
train or change the hardware - which has been
the model over and over again in this industry -
isn't OK where if you want something new, rip
and replace what you're doing. We're trying to
build very adaptable pieces of hardware, work
with partners to do that, and so the AI, the intelligence
behind it, can really change without
having to change the hardware.
From the software side of it, what are
some practical AI use cases presently
and around the corner?
Sawaya: There's a ton of opportunity in the
monitoring world for companies like ADT to
make services more efficient. There's a lot of
vendors doing this today at a basic level, for
example verifying alarms based on video information.
Are there people, or is it just a balloon
swinging in the wind that triggered a motion
camera? Basic analytics like that are getting
more commonplace. There's a lot of interesting
ways to take it a step further that, as an industry,
it's not quite there.
For instance, clueing in on nonvideo information,
looking at the natural frequency of
when burglar alarms go off and trying to see
if there is always an anomaly at 2 a.m. because
that's when the store gets their overnight delivery.
It's incorporating that other genre of information
as well as more sophisticated visual
analytics to gain an intense behavioral analysis.
Loitering isn't always a problem, but what if
we can determine that someone is both loitering
and brandished a weapon a minute ago?
Or what if we can detect more sophisticated
events like glass-breaks and move to just using
video as intrusion sensors? There are a lot of
interesting possibilities.
It'll likely be driven in the next year or two
with advances in moving from a fixed point
in time to what's happening in this current
viewpoint, what are the objects there, all the
way toward looking at broader context across
a temporal span of video. What is this person
doing now? What did they do before? How can
we ascertain what they're probably likely to do
in the future?
Bacco: The false alarm rate for the industry is
above 90%. It's very frustrating and very costly
to clear those alarms. For responders, the
solution is to either go to every one of those,
which is expensive, or start ignoring them,
which is also very common. We're trying to
help the monitoring, so the systems would autonomously
do that. They're not doing it today.
That is on our roadmap.
Once we start integrating it into the various
systems, you could see in the future an alarm
coming in through a system getting routed directly,
without a human involvement, to the
closest bot to go validate it using AI to say
there is or is not something happening. May24
Security
Sales & Integration MAY 2023
securitysales.com
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Security Sales & Integration May 2023

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