MONTREAL — Leaders are rethinking their approach to physical security in an era where the connected customer is becoming the norm, Genetec vice president of global marketing Andrew Elvish told about two dozen global media members during the two-day 2026 Global Press Summit at the company’s headquarters.
Genetec’s 2026 State of Physical Security Report, which the company debuted in 2021 and this year had 7,300 respondents from across the globe, points to the changing dynamics in the security industry and a “transformation for good” regarding how leaders are rethinking physical security deployments.
“This is an era of disruption and opportunity,” says Elvish. “The mindset of how we discuss physical security in the past five years has completely changed.”
Still, though, there’s what Elvish calls “a big divide” when it comes to the priorities of IT pros and their physical security counterparts and that divide continues to cause friction when it comes to technology deployments of any size.
“Physical security still sees cybersecurity as someone else’s problem,” he says. The good news, says Elvish, is business leaders are increasingly “approaching security as a core technology.”
“That’s where the convergence of IT and security becomes very evident,” he says.
Genetec president, CEO and founder and 2025 SSI Industry Hall of Famer Pierre Racz is sometimes amazed with how people deploy his company’s products.
“Customers come up with ways of using our products and features that we never could have imagined,” he says, noting it’s important for security manufacturers and others in the technology space to “try to guess the dilemma people are trying to answers with three clicks or less.”
Racz is proud of Genetec’s open architecture approach and touts the company’s mission in three areas – economic, professional and philosophical – as a key to its success over the decades.
“Mission binds strategy, tactics and logic,” he says.
Genetec’s Michel Chalouhi and Convergint’s Joe Young discuss the company’s partnership at the Genetec Global Press Summit in Montreal. (Photo by Emerald/Security Sales & Integration)
Why Genetec Values Its Global Security Partners
About 60 percent of Genetec’s respondents for its 2026 report are running unified or integrated systems and about the same amount want new features in their security deployments, says Elvish.
“We’re starting to see integrators and consultants approach at the executive level, like end users already do,” he says. “The most important question is, ‘What do you want to do for your business?’ Everything else is secondary.”
One surprising response, says Elvish, was seeing 45 percent of survey respondents say artificial intelligence and large-language models will be a priority in 2026, up from 21 percent of respondents in 2025. The good news, he says, is almost three-quarters (73 percent) of respondents prioritize long-term viability in their physical security vendors.
“The strongest partners protect your investments and shape what’s next,” says Elvish.
Genetec has about 2,500 integrators as channel partners, says vice president of global sales Michel Chalouhi.
Christian Morin, Genetec’s vice president of product engineering and chief security officer, echoes Elvish’s thoughts, noting integrators should not lead their conversations with particular products or cookie-cutter solutions.
“It’s not about cloud, on-prem or hybrid,” he says. “It’s about asking the question as to what the customer is trying to achieve.”
Genetec founder Pierre Racz (photo by Emerald/Security Sales & Integration)
The Growth of AI in Security Deployments
Elvish urged “some circumspection” as far as the apparent spike in the interest in AI in Genetec’s 2026 report and Morin agreed.
“There’s a lot of hype around AI, primarily fueled by the development of the technology,” he says. “We take a more grounded approach to it.”
Mathieu Chevalier, principal security architect manager for Genetec, notes “AI shows a lot of promise, but it comes with a lot of risk.
“Responsible AI needs alignment, security and safety,” he says, noting indirect prompt injection, a process by which an AI model consumes, processes and acts upon maliciously crafted instructions hidden in external data, is “a prime threat” for video management systems that are using AI.
Joe Young, vice president of global partner development and strategic alliances for Convergint, sees AI as an area where there needs to be much more clarification.
“I feel bad for customers,” he says, noting the global integrator has about 11,000 employees in almost 230 locations. “They want to know how these capabilities translate into outcomes. They want a ‘phone experience,’ a system that works together.”
Convergint uses a third-party risk management process to vet new products before deploying them in the field on a wide scale, says Young, which typically means the company avoids the embarrassment of not living up to the promises it makes to customers. The company occasionally must push back on manufacturers when it comes to the way they market their new offerings, saying the capabilities they promise aren’t always embedded in them.
Racz prefers the acronym IA, short for “intelligent automation,” over AI in just about every case. Executives should be fired, he says, if they create technology that provides factually wrong answers that lead to damages, with the harm ranging from monetary and material to reputation, wastes of time or unnecessary stress and aggravation.
“People may want AI, but they need truth,” pointing to Warren Buffett’s famous words that he invests solely in what people need rather than what they want. “Information isn’t truth. We are in the business of truth.”
