SIA New Member Profile: Ambient AI

New Security Industry Association (SIA) member Ambient AI provides an artificial intelligence-powered platform that allows organizations to achieve simplified, automated security that identifies threats and addresses them in real time. The global company has offices in San Jose, California, and Bengaluru, India.

SIA spoke with Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and co-founder of Ambient AI, about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

Shikhar Shrestha: I founded Ambient AI in 2017 on two principles: an unwavering belief in the potential of AI over the next 5-10 years and an unwavering passion for solving a meaningful problem. My co-founder, Vikesh, and I were active participants in the deep learning revolution at Stanford University a decade ago – our belief in the potential of AI was a result of building and witnessing the very first AI systems that achieved superhuman performance on image recognition. Separately, when I was younger, I was robbed at gunpoint in front of a security camera. Although no one was harmed, it was a harrowing experience. Since then, I’ve had a visceral understanding of the emotional and physical impact of an incident like that. We founded Ambient AI to challenge this status quo. We envision a world where people look at security cameras with assurance, not skepticism. Our mission is to prevent every security incident possible – and this begins with making security operations proactive.

Physical security practitioners around the world want to be proactive. They work tirelessly to keep people, places and assets safe, but it continues to be challenging. How do you prevent incidents when you have hundreds of cameras to monitor and your tools generate thousands of false alerts every single day? We build products and services that enable security practitioners to run a proactive, automated and efficient security operation. We do this with a state-of-the-art AI system that detects 150+ suspicious behaviors, eliminates false alarm noise by over 90%, and makes investigations 10 times faster. Today, our platform secures a wide range of customers across multiple verticals – from Fortune 100 enterprises with a sophisticated security operation to organizations that want an uncompromising security posture without a dedicated security operations center (SOC).

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings or your company unique?

SS: Ambient AI is a software platform that retrofits into our customers’ existing security infrastructure and enables a proactive and autonomous security operation. We offer three products within the overarching platform:

1. Threat Detection and Response: This product analyzes camera feeds in real time to proactively detect over 150 suspicious behaviors, perform threat assessments and initiate automated responses. We have the largest threat signature library in the industry – from pre-incident behaviors such as suspicious loitering to people brandishing weapons, fence jumps, person falling down and many more.
2. Signals Intelligence: This product eliminates over 90% of false alarms from your access control system. Our patented correlation technology analyzes access alarms and camera feeds together to automatically dismiss false alarms and escalate real perimeter intrusion events.
3. Forensics: This product makes case investigations 10 times more efficient with natural language search across recorded video. Forensics enables operators to search video events, people or vehicle attributes, objects and interactions instantly over hundreds of thousands of cameras.

What is something we might not know about your company – or something new you are doing in security?

SS: From the very beginning, Ambient AI has been built on the conviction that scene context is not just important but critical for threat detection in videos. For instance, is a person carrying a knife suspicious? It may not be suspicious in a kitchen, but it is most certainly suspicious in a lobby. Cleaning crews and patrol guards at night are not suspicious, but a masked individual with a crowbar next to your car is most certainly suspicious. This is why we pioneered the idea of contextual scene understanding, which has been deeply embedded in our product from day one.

A few months ago, we launched Ambient Intelligence – it is the next generation of our intelligence platform and massively expands the scope of contextual scene understanding in videos. With Ambient Intelligence, we understand scene context at a depth that was simply impossible as recently as a year ago. This new state-of-the-art update makes our product a highly effective agentic companion to security operators. Ambient Intelligence extracts much deeper context from the scene, generates a summary of the event, performs an automatic threat assessment of the event and executes an automated response relevant to the situation. We’re excited to bring this next generation of SOC automation to the industry.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

SS: Membership in the Security Industry Association provides us a unique opportunity to engage with and learn from industry leaders, technology partners and standards organizations in the physical security domain.

We look forward to forging strong partnerships within the security community, contributing to collective innovation and helping raise the bar for advanced AI solutions in physical security.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.