‍Paul Butera:

So Ethan, Gordon, Nick, Rick, Sean, thanks all for joining today. We are going to walk through some slides and we'll introduce you to LBT and who we are and what we do, and hopefully get you updated on some of the top security trends that we're seeing out in the market. Maybe here's some of your suggestions or your concerns, your issues, and we'll take it from there. So without further ado, let me introduce the team to you here. My name is Paul, but I'm one of the strategic account reps here with LBT in the Northeast. We've got Eric McVay with us as well. Eric is in the Midwest, along with I believe Peter Boyle who is maybe driving right now. Michael Sade is with us. Michael's our head of product, and Matt Kelly is our senior Vice President of Business and market Development. And so they'll be chiming in throughout the presentation today and I do want to keep this interactive. So if there's any questions along the way, you've all been sort of un-muted and can speak at will. So by all means, please do that by being here. You have been automatically entered into a contest to win a solo stove, so we will have a random drawing at the end of this and the winner will be notified by email by me most likely.

And our next slide, Michael, so we're going to start with Michael taking over, kind of walk you guys through who LVT is a brief overview, where we got our start, where we are today, what we're seeing in the industry, and we want to keep you guys involved. So please feel free to ask questions whether in the chat or just chime in and we'll take it from there. So Michael,

Michael Saadeh:

Thanks Paul. Hello everyone. Good to be with you. Michael Sade here in headquarters of LVT here in Utah where we design, develop, manufacture all of our products. So thinking about LVT, obviously we want to get right into thinking about the overall big trends that we see within the physical security space, but just a quick intro for anyone that's not as familiar with LVT, we're mostly known for our mobile security units, those solar panels on wheels with a beam with a bunch of cameras on top that you might see at a local retailer. Now obviously we have 15,000 of these across the US and a variety of market verticals and use cases, but essentially LVT is known for having a very reliable, very secure end-to-end solution with its own software stack that's housed up in the cloud with a video management software as well as an alert management software all developed in-house while still being an open platform enabling via an open API to tie into all of those existing software stacks that you've already developed.

Now, the products that we have generally are very, very focused on bringing intelligence at the edge. There's a lot of things that we do from an orchestration and deterrence capability built into the unit that essentially minimizes a lot of the human intervention that's needed When it comes to the management of a lot of the security cameras that are out there, generally we're focused on having a end-to-end solution via a subscription model that helps our customers get away from that upfront investment in terms of the expenditure when deploying a new security stack. So I'll leave it there in terms of who LVT is and I figure it's time to get right into top 10 trends within physical security. And with that I'm going to be going along with Matt Kelly, our SVP of Business and Market Development, giving you some commentary things that we're seeing out there in terms of the conversations that we've had with customers and industry leaders and generally where we see things going as we get into 2025.

Now, just to give you an overview in terms of what we're going to be talking through today, there's generally four themes data where we're thinking about the openness of platforms, the ability to have data sharing and data interchanges between a lot of these separate security investments on the compute side in terms of a lot of the sophistication that we see in terms of the use of ai, but also where it's deployed, whether at the edge or up in the cloud. From a funding perspective, we really see a whole new focus around ROI as well as some shifting in terms of the size of budgets, but also the allocations of those budgets. And then the last piece is really around workflow, where we see just incredible efficiencies and effectiveness in terms of the way that the technology is being used to make sure that we can really have amazing private public partnerships in terms of a lot of the alerts and calls for service that are being used that a lot of that real time response as well as the post incident investigation can be done that much faster.

So lots and lots of really exciting things going on within the physical security space. Now I know we have a relatively small forum today, so I'd love to hear from you what is the top trend that you're hearing and you're seeing within the physical security space. And let's use just the q and a or the chat to be able to share that. We'd love to hear from you and we'll come to that at the end of the top 10 after we talk through each of those, we'd love to hear what you're seeing. So without further ado, let's get right into the top 10. First off, let's get into the data theme. So one of the biggest things that we're seeing is the integration of platforms is becoming a key buying criteria. Generally what we're hearing is that just saying that two things are integrated with each other is no longer good enough, we actually see customers saying, well, tell me about the quality of that integration. Tell me about the latency integration. Tell me about the depth and the breadth of that integration. And when we talk to chief security officers, we're hearing that their top request is really eliminating those data silos. So Matt, help me understand what are you seeing out in the market on this one?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think it really, a lot of it is around how you aggregate that data to make decisions and how that workflow looks. You actually called out something yesterday in a conversation you and I were having about instead of ai, it's really ia, right? The intelligent automation of workflows and to the extent you can get your system to talk to one another, which is it's really going to make your business much more efficient, but then it could reduce your vendor base and tech stack, but you really want to be selective in the vendors that you're partnering with to ensure that they have alignment on what you're trying to do organizationally, what your strategy is and can they meet those needs as it relates to integrations.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing the same thing, Matt, and even in 2024, we've seen some traditionally closed platforms actually start to open up in terms of really seeing that that's a strategic plan towards really making sure that they're going to be able to be a solid ecosystem partner. So yeah, obviously an exciting one. Moving on to number two, thinking about data sharing. Now this one you can kind of think about two different ways, whether it's public private partnerships in general where you have private entities that are really trying to build a better relationship with local law enforcement, improve the response time and the level of support that they're receiving there. Or from a private to private partnership where you see a lot of organized crime that occurs where oftentimes multiple private entities are having crime occur from the same groups. And the reality is that there's some level of building those investigations and those evidence case managements specifically around being able to collaborate with some of the data that one private entity has and another private entity have where you see that collaboration that if you rewind three, five years ago, that was something that you would never see.

Matt, what are you seeing on this one?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, and I'll start from the bottom up. That private to private partnership is really important. If we think about on a regional basis, the bad actors that you have, common people that are coming to your sites and doing harm to either as your people or your assets. So it's not a zero sum game that if you can stop it, it's going to stop across the community. They'll just come right back. So sharing information from a trending standpoint, what are you seeing, observing, building partnerships across your people and the community that you serve is really important to then go to the public private aspect of it is to giving really a holistic view as to what's happening, not at just the specific site level, but giving them all of that information on the law enforcement side to say, this is what's happening in the community. These are the people who are perpetrating these crimes against your community that you're servicing and this is how we can better partner.

Because to the point that you kind of made on the public and private side, local law enforcement wants to know that they are not the first call anytime something happens. They want to know that you're doing your part as the owner of that location to harden the target, to mitigate any sort of activity that would require law enforcement to come on site because they're inundated with phone calls. They are oftentimes strapped from a resource standpoint and are operating at less than a hundred percent capacity at virtually all times. So they want to know that the community is doing their part to try to stop the activity and they're not relying on local law enforcement solely to respond.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, I'm with you. It's a big one. Lots and lots of growth there. Let's move on. Thinking about compute, we're kind of getting a little bit more into the technology piece of it, but thinking about hybrid cloud, we generally are starting to see a lot more broader adoption. Traditionally, we saw a lot of pure play vendors where it was either everything was on-prem or everything was up in the cloud, and generally I think we're starting to see that a lot of the buyers out there are seeing the drawbacks on going all in on either side and essentially saying, Hey, there's certain things that it makes sense to do at the edge, whether it's within the camera or they're on site, and then there's certain things that you really have to do up in the cloud to where you can have that additional intelligence layer. And so we just continue to see a lot of that evolution now that obviously helps around network consumption, that helps in terms of the analytics that are able to be run as well as the storage of that video. Matt, tell me more about what you're seeing on this.

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think the combination of the hybrid approach really is where the industry is going. It does a lot of different things. One, it makes it cheaper to implement solution because it's not necessary to have this huge tech stack on-prem, have a bunch of servers, all the maintenance that comes along with that. So if you can have that hybrid and cloud approach that allows you to have multiple different filters, maybe you have an analytic that's run on a camera, a analytic that's run on the edge processor, and then for final actioning you can send it out to the cloud. So it allows you to not have as much of an investment on the infrastructure side of the house, gives you the ability to run those advanced analytics without requiring all of those, the infrastructure, infrastructure that's required.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, yeah. I'm with you, Matt. Yeah, because change and iteration at the edge is costly and time consuming change in iteration up in the cloud is relatively rapid. And so we will continue to see a lot of the iteration and innovation where already have the additional on-prem investment. Then you can layer on additional intelligence in the cloud, relatively straightforward oftentimes by way of a subscription. So exciting things going on there. Thinking about number four, we think back to about 10 years ago thinking about computer vision AI where the false alert rate was incredibly high. I mean you would see sometimes false alert rates well in excess of 50%, sometimes up to 90%. Things have flipped. I mean absolutely to where now we're seeing the false alert rates have not only gone down, but now there's more breadth and depth in terms of what you're able to detect. Before it was just glorified motion detection thinking about objects. Now it's thinking more about behaviors that we're seeing, and then the idea is that that will continue to evolve into intent. I mean, what is about to happen based on what we see in this given situation? And so lots and lots of exciting things going on here. Matt, what are you seeing?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I really think it comes down to creating actionable events to be able to take action on and drive your business decisions. And to your point, false alerts that oftentimes requires manual intervention, and so it becomes white noise, it becomes terribly inefficient because you have to allocate warm bodies to go and triage the events in real time, and it's expensive to do that. So using AI to really make that haystack much smaller when you're looking for the needle is what I'm really excited about from a computer vision standpoint. And then the abilities to stack multiple different types of algorithms on top of one another allows you a lot more flexibility and the ability to have more jobs to be done with a smaller vendor base because you have a lot of the ability to change and be flexible in real time. Going back to your previous slide of as the environment changes to deploy remotely new algorithms and new AI feature set is really important.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, yeah, that's a big one. And it's one thing to have increasing performance on the AI side, but also it's really important to think about the AI strategies that we see in a lot of the buyers out there. And generally there's just a heck of a lot more sophistication. We see that each company, once they get to a certain side, they're telling their own AI story to their investors and to Wall Street as well. Even if they might not really come across as a technology first company, they all are wanting to tell their own AI story. And so even in some large customers, you see development of in-house AI models where maybe this is the first time that they've been developing some of their own technology, but it's just an incredible thing where they're starting to take of what that might look like as they move out into the future.

And the other thing is they're getting more and more advanced in terms of how they think about data. Oftentimes we hear about data as the new oil, and the reality is if we see that that's true, which we do, essentially we're going to start seeing limitations in terms of how and where that training data can be used. And so it's really, really important to be cognizant that that data oftentimes will either not be able to be used for training of large third party models or must be constrained only to that specific customer. And so we kind of see a little bit more knowledge in terms of how to really dominate that strategy. Thinking back to some of the open platforms like Chat GPT where there was some conversation about how they had looked at some behind paywall content out there. Essentially the reality is that we're seeing a lot of these models, more than 50% of the value of them is really around the data itself. And so we see a lot more thoughtfulness in terms of how and where that data is being used.

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think more going to more of the custom bespoke AI models that are being built in-house, it's easier to get done internally for some companies because it is custom to that business and it immediately meets the needs. So it could potentially reduce cycle time and speed to market. So you're getting it out in the field and out in the wild at a faster rate to be more effective sooner. So it increases the enterprise value of developing those in-house resources to be able to get those models out the door, which is a compelling story to Wall Street as well.

Michael Saadeh:

Absolutely. Let's move on from the compute side into the theme around funding. Now. The first one up here is really around that increasing discipline in terms of how we measure and prove ROI generally, we see that there's a lot of desire around automating and merging these reporting datas all together, rather than having 10 different security investments all create their own reports or trying to bring it all together, help us to better understand what that total cost of ownership, what that total impact is to the overall business. Not only to think about things in terms of, Hey, what is really performing versus not, where should I continue to accelerate my investments? Where should I actually decelerate some of my investments? And then also we see a lot of thought around research studies that are out there to where there's some thought of understanding what are those best practices, what's working for some of the other players out there in industry that have similar needs and challenges to their business. So Matt, tell me more about what you're seeing here. I would love if you could touch on Access taskforce as well.

Matt Kelley:

Well, on the first bullet point I really think is it's really hard to tell a compelling story if you're trying to pull large data sets from disparate systems and stitch those together to be able to tell a compelling story so that you can get further investments or increase the rate at which you're deploying certain strategies. So having data structure that's common among your vendor base so that you can quickly stitch those different data sets together is really important. And then on the access taskforce side, we partnered with retailers in two small communities like Alabama and Paducah, Kentucky that had no units out there at all and said, Hey, what is it going to be an impact to the community? What is the impact to local law enforcement? What is the overall impact to crime? And what's interesting about those two cities is that if you look at that on a per capita basis, those are in the top 10% across the nation in terms of crimes against people and crimes against property.

And so when we deployed units 50 or so units across those two communities for six months, we went and measured with LPRC to say, what is the impact? And we found that we reduced property crimes by 40%. We reduced calls for service by 10% because we were making an impact in the problem areas. It freed up the time for local law enforcement to actually police the community at large. And what leveraging independent academic research does, it gives you proof points to go back to your leadership to be able to prove that certain solutions work. And it's not a sales pitch. It's not somebody from the actual company that's aggregating this data, doing the analysis and going out into the community to collect feedback. It's an unbiased third party, and it could accelerate your adoption of new technologies that really can move needle for your company.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, that's awesome. Matt. Hey, I know you have some exciting things ahead on the Access task force side. Can you kind of tell us a little bit more about what's coming there in terms of next research studies as we get into 2025?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, we're going into Detroit. We've already deployed 25 or so units in the first wave and then three months time or so, so around late January, early February, we're going to deploy around 50 more units and we are focused solely on retail in the first version of Access SA Force, and we're going to go across more different use cases. So I think about high density housing, port authorities, public spaces like parks and things like that outside of retail, maybe some rail yards, things like that to see how we impact it. Detroit obviously is a much more complex diverse community in terms of what type of crime, what the behaviors are, what's actually happening in the area. Then Opelika and Paducah, which are small cities of less than 35,000 people. So we're really excited about that. If you guys have any interest in do that, reach out to your sales team and we will get you started and get you looped into participating in Access Taskforce too,

Webinar Guest:

Matt. Awesome.

Matt Kelley:

Yes, sir.

Webinar Guest:

Matt, that last story about Alabama, who was your client there? The police?

Matt Kelley:

No, we just gave the units out there for free, so it wasn't a paid pilot or anything like that. We just deployed the units. We worked with multiple retailers in the area and we worked with local law enforcement and the mayor's office.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, I love that in terms of the partnership from the private entities that are there, but also the public entities and it was really an incredible story. Obviously the Detroit side, like you say, lots more complexity there. So exciting to see the results that are proofed out there as we get into next year. So moving on to number seven, thinking about the total budgets that we see, but also the budget allocation. Generally, we're seeing a lot of focus around technology powered solution overall market analysis of physical security spend shows that technology is still only about 15% share of wallet. Most of it really is focused around security guards, monitoring operators, integration from an installation and maintenance perspective. And generally we see that there's just a lot of efficiency both in the real time side but also the post-incident side to where it's not tech or staff, it's just leveraging tech more intertwined as a force multiplier for the human powered staff that we have within the security posture for these sites. So Matt, what are you seeing on this one?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, and I had mentioned intelligent automation and to the extent you can drive efficiencies to the business and make your workforce more effective, that's really where AI is doing is filtering out some of the white noise, making it easier to pinpoint the actual activity that they need to go make an impact on in the environment in real time and then post-incident, being able to go back historically and search for that event or incident or common themes is really important to your point of it's not going to eliminate the workforce, but maybe you can do more with less because you've got AI that's going to be, or technologies just in general, that's going to make your workforce much more intelligent. It's going to give you them better, more actionable data, and it's going to allow them to do their jobs much better.

Michael Saadeh:

Awesome. Thanks Matt. Let's dive into our fourth theme year around workflow. Now, one of the highlights here is we really think that there's a big year ahead when it comes to DFR or drone as a first responder. Now, traditionally that's been something that might be in the trunk of a law enforcement officer where they need to pull over and launch it based on a given request or a given alert, but now we see a lot of emergence, the announcement of a lot of these dock based drones where just in a matter of seconds, an alert can be triggering to get a drone launched out to a specific set of coordinates to go track after a specific bogey. Now essentially the incredible thing here is that this shows a transition away from the requirement to have a trained drone pilot on site, and we see that the vendors that are specialized within the drone space really have an increasing level of sophistication when it comes to navigating the regulatory hurdles that we typically see from the federal government with those beyond visual line of sight or B-V-L-O-S approvals.

So we see that things are going to start moving very, very quickly here. Think of it as several rooftops in a given area might have a drone that could be launched based on a certain trigger to where we actually hear about these negative response times. Now, what that buzzword means is there's actually going to be eyes on site by way of a drone before a human police officer could possibly get on site to where we can bring in that additional context, that additional understanding, possibly even being playing some level of messaging over the speaker to be able to start taking control of that situation before we have an officer on site. Now, obviously that leads to better outcomes that also increasing the level of safety that we would see with the police officer that would be responding on site. Matt, your thoughts?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think that to the point from a safety standpoint, giving them situational awareness as to what's actually happening in real time gets them better prepared, lets them know what's happening, what situation they're walking into, because it's a lot of the trepidation with law enforcement is I don't know what I'm walking into, so it could be a life-threatening situation. It could also be an instance where it's a prioritization exercise, right? I've got multiple different calls, how do I prioritize one or the other? Using drone as a first responder allows them to validate what's happening in real time to say, yes, I need to respond to this. No, I don't need to respond. I can respond later. Or it could be let's build a new process around how to respond to it remotely. So I think there's a lot of benefits to having drones as first responders and having eyes in the sky to give you situational awareness.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, yeah, it's so exciting because we're seeing that both on the public sector but also the private sector. Obviously initially on closed sites, you're not going to see it on the corner store or the local big box retailer flying around immediately. It's more on those closed sites and so on, but obviously a lot of growth there, a lot of dedicated companies in that specific space with really, really great great solutions. To move on to number nine here, and this is one that we've seen over the years, but there just continues to be that wider use of video verification. False alerts are the enemy of efficiency, right? There's a lot of these sensors that need to have some level of video verification. We cannot dispatch a response specifically because a sensor has triggered. Now, whether it's a fence sensor, a door sensor and so on, we need to be able to have eyes on that and ideally by way of a video camera that can be viewed remotely to make sure that we're super efficient and effective in terms of how we're actually dispatching a human out there. Because generally you see that it's hard to actually action on it without that video verification oftentimes done by a security operation center operator, and we even coming back to that public private partnership, we oftentimes see that law enforcement is saying, Hey, I need to know that there was video verification done on this specific alert before I'm going to go respond to it just because there's so many false alerts that come from a lot of security systems. What do you see in that?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think that's an important point that it becomes a little bit of boy who cried wolf and law enforcement because of the challenges they have from a resourcing standpoint oftentimes won't even respond because you can't validate what's happening. So I think that's really where the video verification comes in, and if there is an event, going back to one of the points I made earlier, they want to know that the intelligence you're giving them is actual true, so it has to be validated. But then also if you get too many false alerts, sure law enforcement isn't going to respond, but also you're going to start to get fined in certain municipalities, right? If they're coming to your locations over and over and over again and it's not an event that they would need to respond to, oftentimes you'll start getting fines for that.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, great insight. So last one, so we're wrapping up our top 10 here is really that dramatic increase in terms of the efficiency we see with security operation center operators. It's incredible when Gartner is predicting out to 2028 thinking that about 15% of those decisions within organizations are going to be made autonomously by the buzzword ag agentic ai, it is just really, really incredible because when we think back just a handful of years ago, the level of efficiency in terms of the ratio of cameras to operators was relatively small, 10 to one, 20 to one 30 to one, it was relatively low. And then things have now moved more towards alert based response where we're now in the low hundreds, so call it 101, 200 to one, sometimes a little bit higher. We're starting to see that are taking that even higher now. I haven't seen anything at a thousand to one yet, but definitely higher than the 200 to one benchmark that we see a lot of operations at, and there's just a lot of that offloading and automating of those repetitive tasks for those operators to be that much more efficient and effective with what they have.

Now, obviously performance will continue to increase, responsiveness will continue to increase, and so a lot of exciting things going on there in terms of what's actually going to be happening in terms of those security operation centers, just really being able to deliver a lot more value with the resources that they already have and a lot of technology helping to support that.

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think that's right. Michael and Sox are terribly expensive to stand up if you don't have one already. So there was a shift in the industry over the last few years. Pre Covid SOX became very popular. People were trying to stand them up, and then once Covid and civil unrest hit, kind of put a pause on that, and now you're seeing the industry start to get back into, Hey, I need a soc. These are reasons, and in my conversations with customers, I'm challenging them on what does the process look like? How are you ensuring that they're as efficient as possible? What tools and resources do they have? Do they understand from an enablement standpoint what the job to be done is? And to the extent you can automate a lot of those tasks for them and make it really easy and efficient, that's going going to be more successful and ensure that the investment the organization is making returns that investment.

Michael Saadeh:

Excellent. Thanks, Matt. So I'd like to pull in Paul here, see if anything came in over Chad and q and a, but we'd love to hear from you if you haven't already dropped something in. What's your top trend for 2025? Was it one of the 10 that we just talked through? Was there something else that you're possibly seeing? We'd love to round table just a bit using the message functions here just to hear in terms of what you're seeing from your vantage point. So Paul,

Paul Butera:

Yeah, so we'll give the folks a chance to type some of their thoughts into here, but what I can tell you, and again, I'm in the New York, New Jersey metro area. I know Eric is out in the Cincinnati area, Peter's in Chicago, so we've got folks all over the place. What I'm hearing a lot in the northeast is a heavy lean into it and technology added to their security space. So it's not just a standard camera or a guard, but it's how can we integrate AI and I guess more detailed analytics into their security program. That's one of the things that we're focusing on a lot for the coming year. We do hear a lot about comparisons with guard spend, whether it's armed or unarmed compared to an LVT unit, and there's a tremendous amount of savings there as well. We have a business unit within LVT that does what we call a B business value assessment.

You can think of that as something as like you'd get from say, McKenzie or ENY, where they come in and do a study for you. We don't charge for that. That's part of our, our offering. But we'll sit down with your thought leaders, your shareholders, stakeholders, and understand what their concerns are, what their spend is, what they're seeing as issues today in the business, and we'll build out a full ROI document that helps you understand where we fit into that picture. And it's a really valuable tool and it's something we do for free. So if there's any interest, please take advantage of that. With that said, Eric, anything you want to share with what you're seeing in the field in the Midwest region?

Eric McVey:

Yeah, so I think what I'm seeing from our customers is what I just highlighted from you is we're looking at a lot of guard spend, right? That's what I'm seeing. And then more than guard spend are a lot of unique areas working with a lot of industrial companies around guarding things like generators or sterile sites. So it's not your typical, excuse me, it's not your typical just, Hey, we're going to put this up in a parking lot, right? So we're taking on the new unique sites for these industrial companies.

Paul Butera:

Looks like Alexander raised his hand question.

Webinar Guest:

Yes. Hi, good morning. It's my time, California, it's 10 34 and good afternoon as well. Hello. I'm fairly new to LVT and I have a question with regards to integration capabilities, will there be some type of merger between license plate readers and the camera systems because of just for tracking purposes, just in case there is a theft that occurs or some type of action, will they be able to scan the parking lot and see who was there and then be to relay that information to the authorities? Yeah,

Michael Saadeh:

That's a great question, Alexander. Generally, we are an open a I open platform. And so in the sense that whether there's LPR data that's coming from another third party vendor or from LVT, the idea is that you can surface that within your preferred single pane of glass. Like we launched our fuss realtime crime center integration a handful of months ago, and we see some of our customers surfacing their LBT video there as well as their third party LPR to where they have that single pane of glass to view all of those pieces together. And so yeah, it's a great thing that we're very, very focused on in terms of bringing all these assets together and obviously a lot of exciting things to come. They can be a great thing to deep dive and possibly take offline to better understand generally what we're doing around those integrations and that open platform capability. Generally, the way that we view it is that there's always going to be some prebuilt integrations that we're going to offer, but then also we have the ability to build custom integrations. Say you have a proprietary tool or a unique use case. We also support the ability to have that unique API integration that's specific to your use case. Now, we've seen some of our customers both in the public sector and the private sector, both develop against our open API, and so we really see a lot of steam starting to pick up there.

Paul Butera:

Thank Michael. I'm sorry, Alexander, were you done?

Webinar Guest:

Yes, I was just saying thank you for that response. Great. Appreciate,

Paul Butera:

Thank you. I see Corey has a hand raised here. Corey might still be on mute. Can you hear me okay? Oh, there he is. Corey, you had a question?

Webinar Guest:

Yes, good afternoon. Up here in New York, I'm in the private sector at a security for a real estate company, and I like this. You spoke about drones, the uses of drones. How does that blend into the models that you all have with LVT?

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, thanks Corey. Yeah, great question. Yeah, we've already seen some of our customers start to build out LVT plus drone integrations. Now, LVT does not offer drones itself, but obviously we're building that situational awareness and context of what's going on on those given sites and then being able to hand over that intelligence in terms of where that detection zone was fired off over to a drone to be able to respond. Now, the thing is, is we see drones as providing value in a few different ways. First off is that there's a deterrence effect in the sense that when a criminal sees a drone immediately pop up over their head, they know that something is being watched, they know that they're on borrowed time. Now, the second piece is that we're actually going to be able to gather better evidence than we would from a fixed or a mobile surveillance camera.

Now that that unit can go ahead and get right there on site, and then of course we can continue. The third piece is really around auto tracking. Continue to follow them to make sure that as we have a human based response that we're going to be able to coordinate. Now, one of the things that we hear from some customers is saying the most important thing they're trying to understand is, does that criminal have a firearm? Does that criminal have the ability to incite additional violence? Because if so, it totally changes the level of response that they might actually want to have where they're unarmed guard, they're not going to send them into there. They might wait for a armed law enforcement officer to be able to get there on site. And so it's really just increasing that situational context. But Matt, help me understand. Do you have anything else to add on Corey's question?

Paul Butera:

I think you're on mute, Matt. I,

Matt Kelley:

No, I think that we've pretty much covered kind of the situational awareness that drones as first responders do, and I think that you've seen law enforcement kind of move to that motion, and you've seen in the DD and fed space, retail is kind of lagging in that regard. And it is probably more around regulatory things and freeing up not having to have the FA regulations that you don't have to have a drone pilot within site or even have an untethered drones. Unmanned drones, I think is what's going to accelerate adoption in the retail space or even just in general in the public sector or private sector.

Paul Butera:

Yeah. Michael Gordon Bowers typed the question a few minutes ago asking if we're up and running with Thrones and if we're ready to lease them to customers. I know that we're not yet, but you want to elaborate a bit on that timeline?

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, yeah. So like I was talking about with our open API, we are starting to see that some of our customers are building out their own bespoke integrations. Now, that is something that is not offered within our prebuilt integration capability, but it's something that we already do see some traction towards. And obviously with drones now becoming that much more prevalent from a beyond visual line of sight perspective and with dock based drones, it's definitely an area of interest for our customers in terms of where they're desiring our product to go.

Paul Butera:

Anything else from the field?

Webinar Guest:

Yes. Yes.

Paul Butera:

Fire away,

Webinar Guest:

Gordon. I'm former Delaware State Police, former hostage negotiator. I was often deployed with the sort team to go out to these situations. If we are not up and running, by we, I mean LVT, if you're not up and running with the drones, I think it would behoove us to get to these agencies, have a cover letter, let 'em know what our thinking is, because I can bet you they're thinking it. How do we get ourselves some drones? Now their second question to themselves would be, how do we get American made drones and stay away from these Chinese made drones? Those are the kind of things that I think law enforcement would be very interested to have for the obvious reasons that were already stated in this meeting.

Michael Saadeh:

Yeah, that's a great call out, Gordon. Yeah, we definitely see a lot of focus around us manufacturer, US design of products. Obviously the NDAA or federal legislation and regulation around the use of cameras from China is starting to tighten up. We see that over the next few years that things will start to become even more restrictive. But Gordon, I think the most important thing around drones as it gets pitched and socialized is really understanding what are the things that are going to be looking for alerts and detections that we might want to drive a drone response. Now, that could be a license plate recognition hit that could be a gunshot detection, that could be a specific alert that a video camera has. And then what is that software workflow? Because oftentimes there's some level of a human in the loop to authorize the dispatch of a drone to then get that drone on site so we can get that better understanding to help to keep officers as safe as we possibly can. And I think the most important thing that we're seeing is that to really get that drone buy-in and drone funding is really thinking across the entire stack, including both the drone, the workflow, but also the situational awareness and context to make sure that we're deploying drones for the right reasons at the right time.

Webinar Guest:

I think it would look like you have, let's just use state police, Delaware State Police for instance. I can see you having sold them or leased to them six units to per county. There're being teams that are on call. There's a lot of situations where they can be used. So I envision teams that are on call being sent to that location and then deploying their drone before troopers are allowed up to doorsteps. And that being the same thing for smaller townships. Absolutely. Yeah, fully agree. I would love to have that conversation with DSP and say, look, this is what's coming, and I'll let you know when we're ready. No doubt in my mind they're thinking about those things.

Michael Saadeh:

Excellent. Yeah, great call out. Thank you, Gordon. Yep.

Paul Butera:

And Gordon, to that point, national Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, we have cameras that are made by axis that are NDA compliant as well as others hike vision. So most of our customers do ask about that, and that's something that we're equipped with on both sides of the fence.

Webinar Guest:

When I first got with you guys, it was one of the things I loved being able to say was that these things were made here.

Paul Butera:

Yep.

Michael Saadeh:

Excellent, Paul. So any other things that we should address before we move on to q and a?

Paul Butera:

Yeah, I think we hit all the topics that I was looking to touch on. If there's anything else out in the field, bring it in, otherwise we can move on.

Michael Saadeh:

Great. Okay. Well let's go to final q and a. I know we're almost to wrap up here, but just wanted to open it up to the forum. Any final comments, questions about what we covered today? Would love to be able to address that before we get to wrap up.

Webinar Guest:

When you guys, I've got Tanger outlets in mind here, and I know Tanger is pretty big organization. They're also in Maryland, but not just in Delaware. And they might even be in different states, but I know they have a lot of organized shoplifting groups that come in and when you read who's gotten arrested, they're often from out of state. Who is your customer there? The Tanger or all these stores have to rally together and say, we need security here.

Michael Saadeh:

Great question, Gordon. Hey Matt, do you want to take the first crack at this one? Yeah,

Matt Kelley:

I think it is Tanger Outlet probably because you're paying in, the tenants are paying into a cam, right? So a collective pool of this should be allocated to servicing the customer. So Tanger is would be the initial customer, but we also have instances where individual retailers within that location wants to have their own security posture right there in front of the store and dictate how and when that's used. So we've seen a combination of multiple different strategies, but in the specific instance that you called out Gordon, it would be Tanger reaching out to us work partnering with them. But we have seen it in instances in strip malls where a retailer will reach out and wanting deploy units right in front that first parking spot in front of their location.

Webinar Guest:

Roger that. Good question.

Michael Saadeh:

Okay. Paul, any other questions that came in?

Paul Butera:

Let's see, one more. Yeah, so Ethan Tiff is asking if we can see a point where the software from the drone manufacturers will be baked into our build.

Michael Saadeh:

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So Ethan, my thought there is that we still do see some level of human in the loop. Now obviously there can be a intelligent handover in terms of, hey, a detection that's been made over here based around this context. And essentially throw that up to a human to be able to say, Hey, this is stimulus, this is the response, click approve, let's go. And so we still do see that level of human involvement. Now oftentimes that's done with a software user interface with a live operator that is working those specific alerts that are raised. And so I wouldn't say that we'll see direct integrations in terms of technology driving technology without some level of human loop. Eventually things will get there, but I think in the short term, there's going to be some level of workflow software that's required to connect the two. And obviously there's a lot of intelligence trying to make that handover as solid as possible in terms of understanding, Hey, what was the detection round? Was it a human, was it a vehicle? Give me the description of that human or that vehicle to make sure that I go track the specific bogey that is most relevant to that alert. And so we'll continue to see that evolve over time. But to start with, we'll still see that workflow as kind of bridging the gap between the two.

Paul Butera:

Good question. And Gordon, to your point earlier, we do have customers that are factory outlet. I won't name the names, but they're factory outlet customers. And in that situation it is for instance, like a Tanger who would make that call as opposed to the individual stores. So just a little color to that question.

Webinar Guest:

Okay,

Michael Saadeh:

Excellent. Well, Paul, should we move over to wrap up?

Paul Butera:

Sure, yeah. Okay, great. So guys, I just want to point this out. If you are or are not familiar with the Security Industry Association, SIA, they just put out their latest study on the largest, they're calling mega Trends for 2025 around security. We are a member of the SIA. And if you see the URL here, if you go to security industry.org, you can download that study for free. There's no charge, there's no commitments. It's super informative and I think you might find it interesting. So we encourage you to take advantage of that. And on that note, we will do a random drawing this afternoon and we will notify one of you lucky guys who has won the solo stove. And if there's any questions, you've got our contact information, please reach out. We're here 24 7 pretty much.

‍Michael Saadeh:

Excellent. Thank you so

‍Paul Butera:

Much.

Matt Kelley:

Thanks guys.

Paul Butera:

Cool, Matt, thanks for everyone. Thanks guys.

‍Matt Kelley:

Thank you.