Video surveillance systems are evolving from passive recording to cloud-native AI-powered systems that provide risk detection, notification, and real-time information for facilities managers.
The cloud and artificial intelligence are essential to this transformation, enabling remote access, ongoing updates, custom searches, and business-specific reports.
These new capabilities create both opportunity and tension. While AI cloud-based systems greatly improve safety and security, they also raise concerns around privacy and data governance. Who can forget the outcry following the airing of the Amazon Ring commercial during this year’s Super Bowl?
For facility security leaders, this new era in video surveillance means both increased visibility and accountability.
Brivo’s 2026 Trends in Video Surveillance report identifies the forces reshaping how facilities approach security, risk management, and operational intelligence in the AI era. At the core of each is the rapid adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and AI, enabling systems that are more scalable, accessible, adaptable, and integrated than ever before.
Here are the seven trends defined in the report, and what they mean for facility security.
Trend 1: Cloud-Based AI Is Now the Default
The real value of modern video systems comes from what happens after the footage is captured. Processing in the cloud allows AI models to draw on large language models (LLMs) and vast datasets and improve continuously, using the cameras already in place.
This creates a compounding effect. As more data flows in, both real-world and synthetic, the system gets better at recognizing patterns, flagging risks, and surfacing useful insights. This continuous fine-tuning, based on real-world use, benefits every customer, not just one deployment.
Trend 2: From Complex On-Premises Systems to Enterprise Cloud Platforms
Facilities are moving from complex on-premises systems to cloud platforms that offer the efficiency and adaptability required for modern security.
Cloud video infrastructure enables scalable, secure video access across a building, throughout a complex, between regions, or worldwide. These systems support deep integrations via APIs and common data interchange formats. For video management system (VMS) users, that means a single platform can encompass not just video, but access control, event management, and incident response, providing simpler oversight and faster responses.
Manual rollouts and shutdowns due to maintenance windows are no longer necessary. Instead, cloud-native systems receive security patches, interface upgrades, and feature improvements continuously.
Trend 3: Regulation as a Foundational Reality
The rapid pace of change in regulatory requirements, mandated by international, federal, and state lawmakers, necessitates a flexible, cloud-native infrastructure, providing verifiable, time-stamped audit logs, a core strength of a true cloud-based VMS.
Cloud-first systems can instantly implement upgraded policies, regardless of how many sites are affected, to reflect new requirements at the group, site, or global level.
Facilities can also benefit from recorded video demonstrating compliance with relevant standards, such as the availability of exit doors and fire escapes and proper elevator operation.
Trend 4: Ensuring Privacy and PII Protection
Protecting personally identifiable information (PII) and maintaining clear control over data access are now baseline requirements.
Cloud-native platforms provide advanced cybersecurity, encryption, robust audit trails and access controls, and global compliance capabilities that exceed what most organizations can maintain locally. They can also prove accountability in the event of a breach.
While local storage may provide adequate security, cloud storage goes further, enabling it to be readily monitored, logged, and audited. Locally stored data, including video, can be more easily copied and distributed in unencrypted form, making transmission difficult to audit.
The legal and ethical landscape, particularly with new state laws in the U.S. and evolving requirements in the EU, demands accountability and control that is best delivered via the cloud.
Trend 5: Reactive Incident Response to Active Readiness
Schools, municipalities, and businesses are shifting from reactive review to proactive risk detection, integrating AI-driven alerts, first-responder collaboration, and automated system-wide actions.
Cloud-based AI video surveillance helps prevent dangerous conditions from escalating.
It identifies risks such as unattended children; abandoned luggage, backpacks, or shopping bags; slippery spills; or sudden increases in crowding. Information gathered and shared from cameras increases situational awareness for firefighters, police, or medical technicians, so they aren’t entering a scene blind.
Integrating video with access control and event management enables automated responses the instant a threat is detected, such as initiating a lockdown or triggering a safety protocol.
Trend 6: Gun Detection as a Critical Feature
The conversation around gun detection is shifting. It’s no longer focused on possibility but on responsibility.
Public venues, schools, workplaces, and multifamily residences require fast, accurate gun detection. AI-based visual gun detection enables proactive identification with existing cameras, alerting relevant personnel before a weapon is fired. Using cloud-native AI processing, gun detection information is instantly and transparently updated as new data becomes available.
Trend 7: Parking as an Operational Asset
Parking areas are complex environments prone to collisions, theft, and unauthorized access, often with poor lines of sight. Depending on their location, it may be difficult to patrol in person and may not be easily covered by conventional video surveillance, which requires power and network bandwidth.
Video-backed intelligence enables understanding of how the space is used, where bottlenecks occur, and how to improve both safety and efficiency. It offers real-time visibility into parking lot capacity and usage, showing usage patterns over time to manage the parking experience. With this level of visibility, parking areas become manageable and an operational asset.
Modern video surveillance is now a central operational layer for every type of facility.
The question for leaders is no longer whether video or AI is necessary, but whether their platform is flexible enough for what comes next.
Dean Drako is CEO of security solutions provider Brivo.