LAS VEGAS — Tim Palmquist opened Milestone XPerience Days USA 2026 with a deceptively simple proposition borrowed from data scientist Clive Humby: “Data is the new oil, but only if refined.”
For a room packed with integrators, end users, consultants, technology partners and press members (including yours truly), that line set up the central argument of his keynote. The physical security industry, Palmquist contends, is sitting on mountains of data it has long ignored, and the tools to extract value from it have finally arrived.
“At Milestone, we believe that we now live in the visual intelligence era,” says Palmquist, vice president, Americas, at Milestone Systems. It’s a claim he repeated throughout the talk, and it’s one that he frames less as marketing than as a reading of where the market is already headed.
A Parallel Business Model, Not a Disruption
Palmquist’s framing is worth pausing on because it sidesteps the usual disruption narrative. He defines the industry’s baseline in just a few words: safety, security and liability management. Those functions aren’t going anywhere.
What’s emerging, he argues, is a parallel business model that expands what’s possible without unseating the table stakes.
“A parallel business model lets us expand in a completely new way,” says Palmquist. “Take on new opportunities within an industry that’s always been a certain way.”
The opportunity, in his telling, is the data that has always been there: footage organizations have reviewed maybe 1% of the time, then promptly deleted every 30, 60 or 90 days.
The Humby analogy comes into sharper focus here. Oil sat under the earth while business models operated above it, Palmquist notes, until extraction and refinement made it a commercial game-changer. He believes the same inflection point has now come to physical security.
“Suddenly, because of the invention of new tools that are very powerful, the data that we have otherwise taken for granted…suddenly has more value,” says Palmquist.
It’s a confident reframe and one that lands differently depending on where you sit. For security dealers, installers and integrators wondering how to grow accounts, it gestures at a new revenue category. For end users, it reframes stored video from a liability to a resource.
Four Forces Converging
Palmquist built his opening talk around four forces that he says are converging to make the visual intelligence era real. The first is artificial intelligence itself.
“AI is transforming how video data, or data in general, is used,” says Palmquist, pointing to the broader market and personal experience as evidence that powerful tools are evolving fast.
Applied to the data security operations already collect, he argues, those tools open value that didn’t previously exist.
The second is pace. Innovation is accelerating faster than ever, Palmquist says, acknowledging with some humor that the same statement will be true next year. He reaches for autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas and reusable rockets as proof that breakneck change isn’t hyperbole. The third is architecture.
“Edge-to-cloud is the new architectural reality,” says Palmquist, dismissing the old orthodoxy that air-gapped systems would never touch the cloud.
The point isn’t that cloud wins outright; it’s that customers now have architectural freedom to deploy across sites based on complexity and size.
The fourth force is the one that gives the keynote its ethical center: trust and responsibility. As tool sets grow more powerful and the data largely concerns human beings, Palmquist argues, guardrails become essential to every deployment.
“Technology should always be set up to serve humanity, and never the other way around,” he says. Coming from a vendor in a year saturated with AI promises, the line reads as a deliberate signal rather than a throwaway.
One Milestone, Multiple Solution Sets
From the market thesis, Palmquist pivots to the company. The strategic message is consolidation under a single brand.
“We believe that the platform that is simple and flexible is the way to win,” he says, describing a setup in which edge devices capture all forms of data, AI surfaces what matters most and customers add or retire technology at the speed of the market.
That platform, he explains, occupies three complementary tiers under a unified Milestone brand. On-prem and hybrid solutions run through XProtect VMS, the enterprise-class software for which Milestone is known, and which it now augments with hybrid capability.
Video analytics and AI run through BriefCam and Project Hafnia. Cloud-delivered offerings run through Arcules VSaaS, with more roadmap elements taking advantage of the new architecture.
Palmquist positions this expansion as continuity, not reinvention.
“We are the same company we have always been for 28 years,” he says.
The throughline is partnership. Milestone’s DNA, he argues, is to be an open-platform company intentionally built to work with third parties, many of them exhibiting in the foyer.
“One company cannot deliver the innovation that any end customer needs at the speed of their business,” says Palmquist.
That open-platform claim is backed by scale. Palmquist cites a 28-year-old business, for thousands of enterprise installations, more than 3,000 technology integrations and a partner ecosystem exceeding 1,000 members.
He also flags App Center, which he says lets technology partners and end customers add innovation to the Milestone product set themselves. The pitch to the channel is that the open model, not any single vendor’s roadmap, is what keeps solutions relevant as innovation accelerates.
Capture Everything, Understand What Matters
The keynote closes on the 2026 tagline that doubles as Milestone’s product philosophy.
“Capture everything,” says Palmquist, returning to the mountains of data, “but the most important thing is understanding what matters most.”
Here, he adopts a predictive posture. Looking back at footage is fine, he says, and understanding the present is fine, but the real prize is predicting the future: knowing how to muster resources or where to deploy people based on intelligence drawn from data.
“We’re entering an era now where the tech is evolving to be so good, we think we’ll start getting intelligence in areas that we haven’t yet thought to request,” says Palmquist.
We’ll all find out whether the industry will move as quickly as Palmquist suggests and he concedes security does tend to move more slowly than other sectors. But the argument he laid out is compelling and, for an opening keynote, unusually disciplined.
The data has always been there. The tools have arrived. The brand is unified. And the guardrails, at least rhetorically, come first.
“The age of visual intelligence is here,” says Palmquist. “It’s happening now.”
For about 450 security stakeholders in the room, Milestone Xperience Days were pitched as a chance to debate exactly that.
