How Agentic AI Enhances Human-AI Collaboration

‍SUMMARY: 

• Agentic AI can analyze, detect, and act in real time, allowing for immediate responses based on intelligent reasoning.
• Human-AI collaboration allows increased efficiency and effectiveness with humans focusing on strategic thinking and agentic AI taking over mundane tasks. 
• Agentic automation in physical security increases efficiency, improves awareness, allows for proactive intervention, and accelerates investigations.

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The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a classic tale that offers valuable insight into human nature. 

In the story, a shepherd boy gets bored, sounds the alarm that a wolf has come, and then laughs when everyone comes running. He sounds another false alarm the next day, and again laughs when everyone comes running. By the third day, no one comes when they hear the alarm because they already came running twice, and there’s a very good chance the shepherd boy is just trying to mess with everyone again. But this time the wolf was real and the sheep all die. Ouch.

While the moral of the story—always be honest so people believe you when it counts—is important, there’s another important lesson buried in there: Alert fatigue is real, and it’s really hard to muster the proper personnel when there’s every chance this is just another false alarm.

Motion detection was seen as a game-changer when it was first released. Instead of relying on people to stare at video monitors for hours on end, it notified people whenever movement occurred. But those movement notifications weren’t limited to just the actions of people—swaying tree branches and even passing headlights could be enough to trigger an endless barrage of alerts.

Advanced detection capabilities changed the game again with the ability to differentiate between moving objects like wind-blown paper bags, animals, and people. Even with the filtered alarms, however, the alert notifications can pile up. Humans can only respond to so many at once, and eventually their responses become delayed, which leads to all the sheep being eaten before the village knows what happened.

Fortunately, thanks to all the recent leaps and bounds in technology, the solution to alert fatigue—and to significantly stronger security all around—has arrived: Agentic AI.

Immune to fatigue, boredom, and distraction, agentic AI is a form of artificial intelligence with the ability to detect, to discern, and to act on findings, triggering protocols and informing human personnel as actually needed. 

Agentic AI has capabilities and capacities humans will never have—but the reverse is also true. Working together, agentic AI and people can level up security in a big way, playing on each other’s strengths and creating an enhanced culture of safety, efficiency, and accuracy.

What is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI is artificial intelligence capable of analyzing, detecting, and acting when it determines the situation calls for it. While several forms of AI have specialized in analysis and detection, it’s the action that really sets agentic AI apart. Agentic automation allows the AI to essentially function as an employee—albeit an employee with an insane attention span and the ability to process massive amounts of data.

Agentic AI builds on a combination of several types of AI models, including machine learning, large language models, natural language processing, visual language models, and generative AI. 

It’s the recent rise of generative AI platforms that has really shone a light on AI applications in public settings. Generative AI, which can create custom audio, text, and images based on requests, has many uses, but, like most forms of AI, it responds to direct prompts and commands instead of determining its own actions. 

Agentic AI, on the other hand, analyzes situations and comes up with appropriate reactions within the parameters set up for it. This ability to make intelligent decisions and act on them is what makes all the difference. 

The Evolution of Human-AI Collaboration

One of the original goals of AI development was full autonomy with no humans needed. As development went on, however, those responsible for AI’s creation realized that AI works better when paired with humans. (Interestingly, the effectiveness of the partnership can depend on both personality types and processes.)

AI can do things humans can’t do (such as instant data processing, consistency, and big-picture pattern recognition), but humans can do things AI can’t do (including creativity, strategic thinking, and moral reasoning). When both play to their strengths, the results are often better than either party could achieve alone. 

This combination is proving more and more vital in the business world as integrating agentic process automation is giving companies a competitive advantage. The blend of AI agent skills and people skills allows for increased speed, optimized resource allocation, and more efficient operations all around.

4 Key Benefits of The Agentic AI Partnership in Physical Security

With the addition of agentic AI, security efforts are no longer dictated by limited human resources. Since AI learns and grows with human feedback and more data, it continues to improve over time. 

Here are four key benefits of human-AI collaboration in physical security:

1. Increased Efficiency and Productivity

One of the most obvious applications for agentic automation is when it comes to mundane, time-consuming tasks. Where humans burn out quickly when it comes to attention spans, AI has no limit in that area, watching 100% of camera feeds 100% of the time. 

Allowing AI agents to take over when it comes to simple, mundane tasks frees up human personnel to focus on more complex and interpersonal issues. By allowing the agentic AI system and the people in the equation to focus on what they do best, security operations run more efficiently and effectively.

2. Improved Awareness and Decision-Making

Because it’s attuned to so many components at once and can analyze those components in real time, agentic AI can give greater situational awareness for just about any security issue. In addition, it can also provide deeper analysis of present situations, leading to more informed recommendations and decision-making. 

Agentic AI’s ability to base its actions and recommendations on big-picture needs and real-time analysis allows for optimized resource allocation, even in stressful situations. This helps security personnel to better understand where and how they can make the biggest impact.

3. Proactive Intervention

Surveillance cameras have historically been a reactive solution—after all, their primary function was to record evidence to help catch the perpetrator later. But, thanks to ever-advancing software, they’ve been shifting more and more to the proactive side of things. Remote video monitoring and advanced detection features started the shift, but even those were really only speeding up the reactions.

Agentic AI, equipped with a backlog of historical data and advanced pattern recognition, can learn to recognize the behaviors before the incidents. It can use this information to flag suspicious behaviors in real time, proactively initiating protocols before situations escalate into actual problems. Agentic AI can trigger custom audio warnings, activate targeted spotlights, and send specific warnings to the appropriate people.  

From there, human personnel can tune into the situation via remote monitoring, taking additional action as needed.

4. Accelerated Investigations 

In order for visible security measures to serve as an effective deterrent, would-be criminals have to see the measure, get that it’s there to catch them, and fear the repercussions of being caught. (The Loss Prevention Research Council dubs this the See-Get-Fear model.)

Unfortunately, the “fear” aspect of that model is sometimes lacking because criminals know that prosecution is expensive and time-consuming—making it much easier for them to escape without consequences. Agentic AI has the ability to change the game on the prosecution front, automatically packaging evidence and tagging relevant information and footage to significantly accelerate investigations. This tool lowers the cost (in both time and money) of prosecution, resulting in accountability increasing as more cases are tried. 

LVT now offers agentic AI solutions in conjunction with its mobile security units. If you’re interested in adding agentic automation to your security lineup, contact LVT to request a demo today.