Retail Security in 2025: Key Tech Integration Insights

The retail security landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years, driven by sophisticated organized retail crime, emerging technologies and innovative collaboration models. SIA’s recent Vertical Insights Retail Security Symposium brought together industry experts, technology providers and law enforcement to discuss how the sector is adapting to these challenges. Here are some of the top technology-related takeaways:

The Core Challenge: Doing More With Less

A recurring theme throughout the symposium was the retail industry’s mandate to “do more with less,” as Grant Cowan, vice president of sales, Central Region at Salient Systems, emphasized. This challenge encompasses multiple priorities that retailers must balance simultaneously:

• Employee and customer safety
• Loss prevention and shrink reduction
• Maintaining a frictionless customer experience

Violence and aggression toward retail staff have become pressing concerns, with retailers reporting increasing incidents between customers or bad actors and their staff. This reality has shifted security priorities beyond traditional loss prevention toward comprehensive safety programs.

The Shift to Intelligence-Driven Security

The post-COVID era has fundamentally transformed retail security strategies. The focus has shifted from simply recording and reviewing video to adopting intelligence-driven security that enables rapid extraction of data, real-time collaboration and information sharing across locations and with law enforcement.

Steve Francis, senior national account manager at Pavion, noted that security investments increasingly require demonstrable return on investment, pushing organizations to select solutions that address both security needs and business operations. There’s been a significant shift toward implementing systems that solve security problems while also moving the business forward.

Technology Integration: Breaking Down Silos

One of the symposium’s most important discussions centered on integrating disparate security technologies into cohesive ecosystems. Traditionally, the retail security space relied on siloed, one-off solutions for specific problems, creating challenges for integrators trying to make multiple systems work together.

The solution lies in open platforms that can aggregate data from multiple sources:

• Video management systems
• Point-of-sale integrations
• RFID and EAS systems
• License plate readers (LPRs)
• Access control systems
• Analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms

Cowan emphasized that video becomes far more powerful when unified with analytics and other systems, which allows it to support investigations, operational insights and staff training and policy development. Integrating different technologies, especially AI and analytics, allows retailers to review incidents more quickly, using analytics to find exactly what they’re looking for rather than manually reviewing extensive footage.

Video as the Foundation

In public retail environments without traditional access control or identity verification during business hours, video surveillance carries an outsized burden. The emphasis on video systems is only growing in the retail space, and industry professionals believe video is king, with current capabilities representing just the tip of the iceberg.

Modern video applications extend far beyond security:

• Heat mapping and queue management
• Customer traffic patterns
• Employee compliance monitoring
• Service performance analysis
• Operational analytics

Video plays a key role in gathering data as far as possible from the door of a facility, through LPR and vehicle detection in parking lots, and cataloging data through facial recognition or object identification as people approach the store.

AI and Analytics: Practical Applications

While AI dominates technology conversations, practitioners emphasized the importance of understanding what these term actually means in practice. Many customers need to be slowed down to clarify what exactly is being discussed, as the term AI is frequently used broadly, when the practical application often involves analytics built on AI models.

Current AI and analytics applications in retail security include:

• Camera-based analytics (cost effective, using ONVIF-compliant cameras)
• Cloud-based or specialty analytics for specific use cases
• Server-based systems that pull metadata across multiple cameras

The operational data obtained from camera systems—including heat mapping, queue management, service performance and employee compliance—will become increasingly prevalent, with the key being to evolve outputs into digestible formats for leadership and executives.

Looking Forward

The future of retail security lies in continued integration and automation. AI-driven automations will enable cameras to generate alerts for abnormalities such as large groups gathering at store entrances or vehicles making abnormal turns at intersections, providing pre-indicators of problems and enabling immediate interdiction away from stores.

Key trends to watch include:

• Automated camera pass-offs between fields of view
• Enhanced drone and robotics applications
• Deeper integration between retail systems and law enforcement platforms
• Expanded use of AI for pattern recognition and predictive alerting
• Greater standardization in data sharing protocols

Conclusion

The retail security sector is at an inflection point where technology capabilities, collaborative frameworks and practical necessity are converging. Success requires breaking down traditional silos—both technological and organizational—to create integrated ecosystems that protect people, prevent loss and maintain the open, welcoming environments upon which retail depends.

Want even more on this topic? You can watch the full symposium here or check out the SIA Retail Security Advisory Board page.

In creating this blog, content from the Vertical Insights Retail Security Symposium was summarized using multiple large language models and reviewed by human editors.