Continuing a series featuring security industry leaders reflecting on 2025 and forecasting 2026, we hear from Abraham Alvarez, vice president of product at Verkada. He reviews trends that shaped the security landscape in 2025 and outlines capabilities that will define the coming year.
Photo courtesy of Verkada
Abraham Alvarez says, “Security data will become a strategic asset that extends far beyond safety. Security cameras, access control systems, alarms and sensors are capturing valuable data that is often disparate and underutilized.”
The proliferation of cloud-connected devices and advances in artificial intelligence promises to turn this raw information into a powerful tool for understanding and optimizing physical environments. Entry events, occupancy trends and movement patterns can reveal how workspaces serve teams or how retailers staff their floors. By linking these records with HR, facilities and building management systems, leaders can create dashboards that highlight underused zones or alert on unusual population shifts.
Organizations that tie these security streams into other corporate applications can make operational choices for space utilization, energy management and workforce experience more swiftly and accurately. That shift positions security teams as partners in business planning, driving efficiency, insight and strategic decision-making at every level.
Alvarez predicts, “Agentic AI tools will be able to power a security operator’s entire workflow, enabling them to focus on their highest-value work: artificial intelligence is already redefining what it means to secure the physical world. Tools to date have been focused primarily on speeding up investigations and, while that is incredibly valuable, it’s really just the start of what AI can do.”
With models growing more capable and intuitive, security practices will move into a proactive phase that spots and thwarts incidents before they escalate. In 2026, natural language interfaces should make detailed searches conversational. Predictive analytics will pick up anomalies and launch deterrence tactics automatically when needed. Alert systems could self-adjust thresholds based on historical patterns, reducing false alarms and boosting responsiveness. Freed from repetitive analysis, security professionals can concentrate on strategic tasks that build safer buildings, campuses and communities around the world.
Alvarez adds, “The rise of AI-generated video will force organizations to verify what’s real. As generative AI models grow more sophisticated, distinguishing authentic security footage from fabricated clips will become increasingly difficult – and increasingly important.”
Deepfakes that once took hours to produce can now appear in minutes, making it easy to present convincing but false evidence. This development will affect teams relying on video to guide insurance processes, workplace inquiries and law enforcement reviews. Alvarez expects that verification tools—capable of detecting altered or synthetic recordings—and related protocols will become standard in enterprise security.
Some enterprises are piloting watermark techniques or cryptographic signatures at the source, while others are working with vendors to embed forensic markers directly into each frame. Training end users on these validation processes will help analysts, legal teams and incident responders spot compromised material before it influences critical judgments.
