ISC West 2027: Telling Real AI Video Analytics From Relabelled

ISC West 2027 runs April 5–9, 2027 at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas — around 30,000 attendees and roughly 1,000 exhibitors, making it the largest converged security event in the United States. Confirm dates and registration with the organiser before booking.

It is also, by volume, the largest concentration of the word "AI" you will encounter in one building. Some of it is real. A good deal of it is motion detection with a new brochure. These are the questions that sort them, and they take about ninety seconds each at a stand.

1. "What does it do when it's uncertain?"

The single most revealing question on the floor. Every real system has an uncertainty band — cases it cannot confidently classify. What happens to those events tells you whether anyone has thought about operations.

Good answers describe a threshold, what falls below it, and what a human sees. Bad answers claim there is no uncertainty. A vendor who says their accuracy is 99-point-something and does not immediately volunteer what that was measured on, over what period, on what kind of site, is quoting a benchmark rather than a result.

2. "Does it run on my cameras?"

Hardware lock-in is the defining commercial question in this category. Several major platforms are vertically integrated — their analytics run on their cameras and nothing else. That is a legitimate design with real benefits, but it means replacing a working camera estate.

Ask which specific makes and models, not whether they "support third-party cameras." The general answer is almost always yes; the specific one is what matters, and it is where the conversation gets honest. We have written the alternatives out in detail, including where the vertically integrated platforms are genuinely the better buy.

3. "Show me a failure."

Ask to see a clip where the system got it wrong, and what they did about it. Vendors who have run real deployments have these and will show you one, usually with some enthusiasm — the failure modes are the interesting part of the work.

Vendors who have only run demos will change the subject. This question costs you nothing and is the fastest credibility filter on the floor.

4. "What happens with no power and no network?"

Almost every platform at ISC West assumes a building — power in the wall, a network drop, someone to install it. If your estate includes construction sites, remote yards, car parks without infrastructure, or anything temporary, this question eliminates a large fraction of the floor immediately.

Where it applies, follow up on where the analysis happens. A system that streams video to the cloud for processing is not viable on a cellular link — it will exhaust a data plan. The workable pattern is analysis at the edge, with only events and short clips travelling.

5. "What's the contract, and what do I own at the end?"

• Minimum term — three and five year agreements are common in this category
• Whether the hardware works with anything else afterwards
• Whether you can export your own footage and event history
• What per-camera pricing looks like at your real site count, not at the pilot

One structural note about the floor

ISC West is a converged show: video, access control, alarms, intrusion, and increasingly the integration between them. If you are evaluating analytics specifically, the useful distinction is between platform vendors selling the whole stack and analytics vendors that sit on top of what you have. Both are legitimate. They are not comparable on price, and comparing them on price is the most common mistake made in these aisles.