News Poll: AI-powered surveillance top of mind at ISC West
By Ken Showers, Managing Editor
Updated 12:55 PM CDT, Wed April 16, 2025

YARMOUTH, Maine — While the industry focuses on a postmortem of news that came out of ISC West this year, SSN looks at the anticipation and expectations building up to the 29,000-attendee-strong event.
For the May News Poll, we asked readers to give us their take on 2025’s largest security expo. The majority felt that AI-powered surveillance would have the biggest impact, with an extreme majority of 62.5% of responses. “As AI became a prominent topic, especially with the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT, we started discussing its implications for AI modeling in video processing,” Milestone CEO Thomas Jensen told Security Systems News in a recent interview.
ISC West is also a forum where savvy businesses examine adopting new security solutions.
“ISC West allows us to learn about new trends and product offerings before our competition does,” said Chester Gilliam, founder and chief executive officer, Wizard Works Security Systems, Aurora, Colo. “Plus, we have the chance to network with the best of the best.”
The top concern for readers was the ability to integrate new solutions with their existing systems, with over half of responses considering the costs of such an endeavor. A quarter of readers believe that cybersecurity risks are their primary concern, while less than 20% considered cost and ROI.
Poll responses were much less lopsided when it came to industry trends they were most excited to explore during the show. 40% were looking at the rise of AI in threat detection, and 33.33% at the future of identity verification. 26.67% instead were more interested in learning how new developments in automation would affect physical security. In spite of a shift toward smart city infrastructure and IoT devices seen among vendors at the show, no readers appeared excited about the prospect.
Comments