Louise Bou Rached, Regional Director META at Milestone Systems, discusses the growing role of AI, crowd management and open platforms across the region for security.
Artificial intelligence is changing how organisations approach security across the Gulf, moving the focus from simply monitoring incidents to identifying risks, automating routine processes and helping operators make faster decisions.
Speaking to TechPulse Media at the Milestone Solution Summit in Dubai, Louise Bou Rached, Regional Director at Milestone Systems, said the region continues to be an important growth market. She said the wider META region has recorded double-digit growth and that their company is increasingly focusing on areas such as smart and safe cities.
Milestone recently opened its regional office and experience centre in Saudi Arabia, adding to its established presence in the UAE. Louise said the centres allow customers and partners to experience the technology and explore how it can be applied to different operational requirements.
From alerts to smarter decisions
For Louise, one of the biggest changes taking place in the security sector is the growing use of AI to automate processes that traditionally require significant operator involvement.
For enterprise organisations, this includes evaluating alarms, reducing alert fatigue and filtering information so operators can focus on higher-priority risks.
“The main drive from enterprise organisations and private companies has been more into how to automate their processes,” Louise said.
She also highlighted crowd management as an important use case in the region, particularly in Dubai, where major events regularly bring large numbers of people together.
AI can help security teams understand crowd movement, identify unusual activity and support preventative action before a situation develops further.
With smart edge analytics running closer to where data is generated, Bou Rached said organisations can increasingly move from reacting to incidents towards identifying potential abnormalities earlier and prevent accidents more efficiently.
Building security around an open platform
As organisations deploy more cameras, access control systems, IoT sensors and other connected technologies, integrating those systems is becoming increasingly important.
Bou Rached said Milestone’s open platform gives customers and partners the flexibility to build their security environment around their own requirements and add new technologies without having to rebuild their entire infrastructure.
The approach is particularly relevant as security systems increasingly bring together different sources of data rather than relying solely on video.
“Our customers and our partners can tailor their platform based on their needs,” she said.
Responsible use of AI
The growing use of AI in surveillance also raises questions around privacy, cybersecurity and the way data is collected and used.
Louise said Milestone approaches these issues through what she described as a “responsible by design” philosophy, with cybersecurity built into its products and development processes.
She pointed to security built into the company’s products as well as hardening guidelines designed to strengthen protection across deployments.
She also highlighted Milestone’s work with NVIDIA on Project Hafnia, which focuses on the use of ethically sourced data in AI development.
For the GCC, where investment in smart cities, major infrastructure and large-scale events continues to grow, the direction is increasingly clear: security technology is moving beyond recording and monitoring towards systems that can help organisations understand what is happening, identify potential risks and act faster.
