Since its inception, Secom AWARE has been turning heads and transforming security and business solutions nationwide. Now, thanks to a budding partnership with a burgeoning technology, they’re going even further, faster, and with unprecedented precision.
Anava—an agentic AI platform that transforms live video into actionable intelligence—is part of the programming model that allows the nation’s leading security partner to not only safeguard personnel, property, and assets, but to also singlehandedly solve virtually any business need you could conceivably have.
Compliance concerns with OSHA? No problem. Inventory issues? They’ve got you covered. Laboratory management? Yes, that too. The capabilities, the possibilities—are endless.
For its part, Anava is powered by many components, most notably its creator: inventor and CEO Ryan Wager, who developed it to make the world a safer place for his daughters (and the product’s namesakes), Ana and Ava.
The partnership between Anava and America’s trusted security partner, Secom, is game changing. And it’s already making waves.
“It’s simply unparalleled,” Secom president Mike Toomey says of the company’s new agentic platform.
Secom AWARE leverages Anava’s advanced AI integration to deliver cloud-based controls, surveillance, and extensive video analytics to proactively prevent theft and intrusion, while ensuring threats are deterred and a faster, more efficient response is secured. But it’s so much more than security. As a managed service, real-time, human-in-the-loop monitoring is delivered at a massive scale, sifting through hundreds of thousands of data points and singling out only what matters, eliminating false positives and untold waste.
“From security to Business Intelligence and Operational Efficiency applications, we deliver agentic safeguards and solutions that far exceed anything our competitors provide,” Toomey says. “It may sound bold, but we stand by it.”
The Road to Revolutionizing Security
Secom’s Vice President of Operations Travis Griffin had been searching for a collaborator since the company had begun noticing some unmistakable writing on industry walls.
“The need for intrusion detection systems was kind of going away due to the political climate pressures and different things,” Griffin says.
Police departments were being defunded, he notes. false alarms were running rampant, and many districts had decided to stop responding to unverified alarms.
“We were thinking, ‘Where are we going to go? Things are changing so quickly.’ And that’s when we began building the idea for Secom AWARE.”
The security leader had cameras equipped with cutting-edge analytics, but with a bit more thought, effort, and intelligence, they could do so much more than simply generate random alerts.
Griffin began searching for a collaborator who could develop applications for Secom’s AXIS Cameras, allowing them to integrate with access control and facial recognition systems, reducing the need for burdensome credentialing.
After a few fits and starts with overseas vendors, his AXIS rep introduced him to a computer and analytics company, through which he eventually met Wager.
For his part, Wager spent more than two decades in the tech building business, toiling in cybersecurity, developing applications for the AXIS Camera Application Platform (ACAP), and exploring cloud‑based Multi‑Modal AI.
“I was building apps, doing facial recognition and technology, and figuring out what these AXIS cameras could do,” he says. “Then my daughter was born in August of 2021, just before ChatGPT started to take off. AI was beginning to take hold. I remember looking at this little girl, thinking, ‘OK, what is it that I can do, now? My strength no longer means anything, and the world is soon going to be controlled by technology smarter than we are.’”
“I needed to figure out a way to invent something that would get me a seat at the future table, so I could actually push policy and guide technology toward a safe landing.”
The light bulb went off. The facial recognition apps he’d developed could serve as the architecture of what would eventually become Anava. The key would be filtering out noise and delivering true analytical benefits and actionable data.
“Instead of getting thousands of human alerts, users would get one alert of the guy jumping over their fence,” he says. “Because that’s the one that matters, and the others are just people walking their dogs.”
Wager set to work on a prototype. His new “neural pathway” would integrate with security cameras or any IoT device, allowing them to see, hear, and speak. It would directly interface with intelligence supporting an API, from Gemini to OpenAI, to answer literally any question about literally anything an equipped camera had seen. The result? The ability to detect, monitor, and deter contextually, all from one single app.
Syncing Up with Secom
“We hit it off,” Griffin says regarding early collaboration with Anava and Wager.
Wager agrees. Even today, he says, “I talk to Travis more than I do my own mom.”
While both seasoned vets in their fields, however, they had begun to hit a wall with their facial recognition efforts and were looking into pursuing new ideas.
“I think Ryan kind of saw it as a challenge,” Griffin laughs. “A couple of weeks later he comes back, like, ‘Hey, I have this thing I’ve been playing with – I think you might like it.”
“Like” was a drastic understatement.
For 3-4 months, Griffin and Wager worked on the ACAP, the former picking it apart from a security standpoint, the latter re-tooling and reinforcing its programming.
“Literally everything we were throwing at this thing, it was getting right,” Griffin recalls. “But not only was it getting it right; it was getting it right with such a high degree of accuracy… It was kind of one of those moments where you go, ‘Well, I wonder what else it could do.’”
Six months later, Griffin was standing in Las Vegas with the Anava team for the rollout of their new product. A partnership was born.
“Secom wasn’t only Anava’s first integrator and reseller, but they were our first managed service provider,” Wager says. “Here was someone who would become an expert with us and then be able to deploy this service themselves… monitoring it, tweaking it, and getting reports and data out of it.”
The Great Unknown
Wager gets the “doom and gloom” surrounding the topic of AI; the dystopic rhetoric, the concerns shared by fellow CEOs. After all, fearful headlines sell subscriptions. But for his part, he sees a very utopic outcome, perhaps not unlike what he saw in his daughter’s face when the idea for Anava began to percolate.
“I really think we’re at the genesis of what spurred cybersecurity’s growth back in the early 2000s,” he says. “You had a decade or so of the Internet being pervasive and everyone getting used to it, and suddenly, we could log the data that was happening and actually trust it. Then we started seeing technology that could sort through that data get created.”
Wager believes we have reached that fateful point with AI today.
“We’re no longer just being told that there’s an object out there. We’re able to get detailed, accurate, contextually aware, and repeatable information about what’s happening around us—and that information is being logged into Google Cloud, which is the most capable analytics layer in the history of mankind.”
It’s the evolution of cyber outside of the network, he says—outside of the computer, and into the physical world.
And—it’s fair.
“Here, we have something that doesn’t have a political ideology,” he says. “It doesn’t go home at night and get tired, or get into an altercation, or allow bias to impact its decisions—like thinking, ‘That person just committed a crime’ or ‘That person did something wrong.’”
Griffin says it was Wager’s sheer enthusiasm paired with his commitment to safety and oversight that made him the right man for the project.
“You need to be a little bit of a tech nerd to do what we do and stay excited by it after 20 years,” he says. “And we also both aligned early on regarding the guardrails. One of my sticking points was, ‘This will never make a decision that rules EMS out. It’s never going to call the police. It’s never going to call the fire department. It’s never going to have that power. There’s never going to be a scenario in which anything is allowed to be done, carte blanche. That gets into dangerous waters very quickly and feeds into everyone’s fears. And Ryan completely agreed with me on that. We’ve been very staunch regarding what this tech is going to be allowed to do.”
“It’s all about understanding,” he continues. “People just need perspective. This kind of tech is fairly unknown right now, and as human beings, that’s our biggest ingrained fear. It’s why we’re still afraid of the dark. Tech has become the new dark. But as soon as we shine a little bit of light on it and explain how things work, it’s usually pretty easy to bring things around.”
What the Future Holds
While Secom AWARE and Anava have been turning the security industry on its head, additional applications, particularly in Business Intelligence and Operational Efficiency (BIOE), are particularly intriguing.
In business, Wager notes, we’re accustomed to receiving hundreds of thousands of alerts every night. Most are erroneous, and what few vital messages exist are often missed in lieu of sorting through the noise.
Thanks to agentic AI, an operator can be tasked with other, more important jobs and simply receive one single alert.
“The system has already been told, ‘Here’s all the noise, here’s the signal, I want to know when these five things happen, and ONLY these five things,’” Wager explains.
“Now, when that notification happens, a human can actually jump up and do their job instead of sitting there all night, searching through a haystack for a needle.”
OSHA compliance, inventory management, employee authentication – the sky is the limit, Griffin says.
“The way to think about it, is if you can put a query into Google and get an answer, we can write code for the camera to look for that same thing in the same way,” Griffin explains. “Thanks to the neural net that Anava allows us access to, we can tap into the wealth of human knowledge on the Internet.”
So far, he says, there hasn’t been much, if anything, that the tech has been unable to identify.
“Even those things that cause us to kind of scratch our heads and say, ‘OK, well how would we do that?’ They either take just a little bit of creative thinking or they lead us down a new path. We know the technology is capable, but it becomes a matter of, ‘How do we connect those dots?’”
He puts it another way: the AI is as inexperienced as it will ever be today, and it’s only getting smarter by the second.
As far as the future of Secom AWARE, Griffin says he’s most looking forward to “the thing I haven’t thought of yet.” In other words, what problems will Secom AWARE be able to solve next?
“I’m a very pragmatic person. And I was reserved, at first,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ but I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. What were we going to hit that this tech wouldn’t be able to handle? I’m a year into it now, and it’s never not worked. It’s won me over.”
Thanks to the partnership between Secom and Anava, businesses, government agencies, and organizations nationwide have won, too. With advanced analytics, instant alerts, and so much more, Secom AWARE is truly leveraging tomorrow’s technology for today’s concerns.