Inside Milestone’s Bet on Artificial Intelligence: Data as the New Oil

LAS VEGAS — Milestone Systems is rebuilding for the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Security Sales & Integration attended the company’s inaugural Milestone Xperience Days event in North America in early June, where two of the company’s leaders expounded in detail on their vision: vice president of Americas Tim Palmquist and chief technology officer Andrew Burnett.

Their messages converged to form a compelling synthesis: Milestone wants to modernize its platform, keep humans at the center of automation and turn retained video into long-term value, all while leaning into an open partner network that’s refreshingly different from the “we should own it all” mentality we sometimes see in the tech space.

Milestone is certainly not a new name — its heritage stretches back 28 years. What’s different now is the architecture underneath the products and the conviction that video data — once routinely discarded — has become one of the industry’s most valuable assets.

A Modular, Containerized Foundation

Burnett begins by discussing the platform’s direction, framing each architectural decision as one made with customer value firmly in mind.

“We have, of course, onstage today talked about the fact that it’s going to have a Linux underpinning,” he explains of the company’s plans for a future-proof video management platform built for the AI era. “Our research tells us and shows us that if you want to be building software for analytics and AI use cases, which has formed a lot of what we talked about, there really is only one choice there.

“So, it’s a technology choice, but ultimately it’s to deliver value for customers at the end of it. XProtect is still a phenomenal product. But if we are going to answer those future use cases, we realize that, underneath the hood, we’re going to have to do something different. And that’s why we’ve made those choices,” says Burnett.

Meanwhile, Palmquist addresses Milestone Systems’ modernization roadmap from the commercial side. He frames the platform investments as moves that any technology company serious about securing long-term relevance will have to make.

Physical AI as a Human Story

Later in our conversation, Burnett contextualizes Milestone’s bold advance into physical AI — the centerpiece topic of the MXD’s second day — as a continuation of a human-centered philosophy that seems rooted in Milestone’s operating values.

“I don’t think that’s just a security story, he begins. “I think that’s a human story at its heart. And so, the physical AI part is ensuring that we are solving real-world problems.”

Palmquist reinforces the same principle, examining the topic from the go-to-market side. He describes that human-first framing shapes how Milestone expects partners and channel members to carry forward its solutions.

Smarter Alerts, Not More Alarms

During the first day of MXD, numerous speakers discussed the challenges that false alarms pose. They erode operator trust and, worse yet, they can bury the events that actually matter and that require immediate intervention. Palmquist points to alert overload as a core problem that AI-driven prioritization can solve.

The fix, according to Palmquist, isn’t a bigger rules engine; instead, it’s a system that learns what matters and that reports back in a way that underlines the severity.

“We think, as the new tool systems evolve and get smarter, that we’ll be able to solve this problem of prioritization,” he explains. “I think we’ll get past this concept of specific alarms [and instead prioritize] alerting on what matters the most.”

Palmquist continues, “I even think that, over time, we’ll start to challenge the notion of what a user interface looks like, or even the relevance of a user interface.” This, he says, is “…because the technology that we have today can return information to us in ways that are not necessarily structured in the user interfaces that we build into our software.”

Palmquist grants, perhaps, that that may be a future state.

“But I think that’s where we’re going, and I think that’s how we’ll address this topic,” he adds. “So, not everything’s been fixed yet, but I think the future looks really encouraging.”

That vision, Palmquist says, boils down to this: Capture everything and understand what matters most. “I think the AI toolset will help facilitate that and help, at the same time, discard what doesn’t matter,” he predicts.

Data as the New Oil

Both Palmquist and Burnett repeatedly underline a shared conviction: Retained video data has long-term strategic value that the physical security industry has barely begun to tap. Burnett connects that theme directly to Milestone’s AI development work, arguing that access to quality data is central to building systems that will stay accurate and useful over time.

“One of the key issues in our industry is training data,” he observes. “I think that’s why Hafnia is so exciting. The idea that, if you train on too narrow a data set and it loses context, then you are going to end up with solutions that drift and are not brought back to the center.”

Indeed, Burnett reports that training as a service is where the initial idea for Hafnia arose.

“And that’s why we want to work with end customers who are sitting on this enormous amount of valuable data that ultimately gets deleted after 30, 60 [or] 90 days and make it work for them,” he says. “In the Hafnia model, data is compliantly acquired and fully anonymized, ensuring it’s handled responsibly from the outset.

“In return, partners gain more powerful and accurate solutions trained on broader data sets – with privacy, regulatory compliance and transparency built in as foundational requirements, not afterthoughts. And hopefully, they can use that data to train for other use cases and help other businesses or communities to do that,” says Burnett.

Looking from the commercial side, Palmquist calls the strategy a doubling-down on the value of stored video, and he frames it as an opportunity that reaches well beyond the security industry.

“We’re really doubling down on this notion that data is in fact the new oil,” he declares. “It’s time to extract it, refine it and see what the commercial logic can be.”

Doubling down on the point, Palmquist says that the stores of data that we in the physical security industry have casually thrown away are now more valuable than ever.

“They’re valuable to companies like Milestone that have been in the security industry, but they’re [also] valuable to a lot of other companies that are starting to look at investing in the security industry,” he declares. “Because piles of data like this…they don’t just lay around everywhere.

“And I think the sky is the limit for what we can do — the value proposition that can come out of that — [and] the solutions that will make customers’ lives much, much better,” says Palmquist.

Open by Design

Milestone’s longstanding open-platform approach has been central to the company’s identity for nearly three decades. Both Palmquist and Burnett describe this posture as a genuine competitive advantage, with Palmquist parrying an SSI question about potential competitive territoriality by saying third-party innovation and advancement is a positive, not a threat.

“There’s definitely some complementary tech that does things probably better than we do,” he acknowledges, adding, “and I think that’s great! That’s exactly what should be true in this market.”

For his part, Burnett draws an unambiguous distinction between what Milestone delivers and what its vast partner ecosystem is positioned to deliver.

“I think we’re taking a very clear stance that safety and security is still our absolute bread and butter,” he emphasizes. “We need to be amazing at that, and we need to raise the bar for all customers.”

Burnett adds, “There are all these other AI use cases that we will never be able to build for, but there is already a rich ecosystem out there that can solve for that. So, I think it’s just being really clear on who owns what in that ecosystem. And that is part of the uniqueness of having an open platform.”

There’ll be some overlap, he acknowledges, and that overlap is OK.

“But hopefully,” Burnett adds, “the other benefit is there’ll be far faster and far better innovation that comes out of it.”

The North America Push

Later in the interview, Palmquist highlights Milestone’s strategy in the North American market, describing this region as a priority for the company and as the primary proving ground for Milestone’s go-to-market evolution. He points to a push toward a unified organization — one unifying brand, one comprehensive portfolio, one Milestone — as the near-term objective for the channel.

For a company 28 years into its run, Milestone positioned itself during MXD as a market leader not pivoting but rather embracing an intentional evolution. The company’s platform investments, its partner strategy and its organizational emphasis on responsible AI all point in the same direction: Milestone is building the foundation that it believes the physical security industry’s next era will require.

The post Inside Milestone’s Bet on Artificial Intelligence: Data as the New Oil appeared first on Security Sales & Integration.

from Security Sales & Integration https://www.securitysales.com/news/inside-milestone-bet-artificial-intelligence-data-new-oil/619346/
via CCTV