It wasn’t the first year artificial intelligence (AI) was at the forefront of presentations and booth handouts at ISC West, a major annual security conference in the U.S., but the conversation seemed to have shifted in 2025—there was a little less skepticism and a bit more curiosity about the technology among attendees.
Every year, security professionals gather at ISC West in Las Vegas to share insights and discuss emerging trends shaping the future of corporate security. At the event, held March 31 to April 4, Dataminr joined nearly 29,000 attendees and over 750 exhibitors to explore the latest developments and technologies.
A number of presentations focused on themes of modernizing the global security operations center (GSOC) or the use of AI, and on occasion both themes were featured in the same presentation. AI was also a feature that consistently showed up in the products and solutions nominated for the Security Industry Association (SIA) 2025 New Products and Solutions Awards.
Meanwhile, our conversations with security professionals revealed that they were enthusiastic about AI’s ability to augment and support the work their teams are doing, such as modernizing workflows, improving productivity, and proactively identifying and addressing security threats.
While it’s impossible to capture everything from ISC West 2025 in a single blog post, here we’ve highlighted four trends and themes that stood out at the conference.
Takeaway No. 1: The Arrival of AI Agents
Instead of attempting to impress the audience with their existing AI capabilities, exhibitors and speakers placed greater focus on how AI can improve workflows and enhance daily operations for security teams. Often, this came in the form of AI agents and copilots, which were notable across a range of product segments—from cameras and access control to identity management and security operations.
In our conversations about the Dataminr product roadmap with customers and attendees, there was significant interest in our Agentic AI innovation roadmap, as well as exploring the use of AI agents to enable a deeper understanding of rapidly evolving situations by autonomously identifying and retrieving relevant information, and generating actionable assessments of an event in real time. These agents work continuously and collaboratively, interpreting emerging developments and delivering necessary context for confident decision-making.
Takeaway No. 2: Improving Travel Security
Security teams have long experienced several challenges in supporting business travelers with only country-level or city-level alerts and infrequent updates during fast-evolving events. Solving these challenges by providing hyperlocal real-time alerts, along with continuous updates as situations unfold, is at the core of Dataminr’s travel security solution and was the focus of our panel session, “Leveraging AI to Reimagine Travel Risk Management,” that we held alongside our partner Healix.
Dataminr’s CSO Rob Crowley and VP of Product Hugh Farquhar took the stage alongside Healix International CEO James Henderson and discussed:
- The evolution of the travel security industry over the past two decades and the shift from reactive to proactive strategies that focus on duty of care obligations
- The importance of hyperlocal real-time alerts, continuous updates, accurate and up-to-date location, and traveler data in facilitating an effective incident response
- The growing priority for executive protection while traveling due to the public availability of itineraries, more targeted threats, and blurred personal-professional boundaries
Takeaway No. 3: Enhancing Executive Threat Detection
In addition to facing increased threats while traveling, many security teams have to contend with increasing online threats to their executives and other high-profile individuals associated with their organizations. While there are threat detection tools that surface text-based threats and viral posts from major social media platforms, security teams need solutions that address an existing gap: an online world that is increasingly made up of images and videos.
Dataminr’s ability to identify threats embedded in images and video, in addition to text-based threats and risks, drew significant interest from many attendees. Through our application of computer vision and optical character recognition AI models, corporate security customers are able to uncover blind spots and augment their executive protection threat intelligence programs.
Takeaway No. 4: Cyber-Physical Convergence
On the first day of ISC West, the keynote presentation focused on cybersecurity, and several other talks during the rest of the conference were also dedicated to cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity and Connected IoT hub in the exhibition hall had expanded its footprint compared to the previous year. These are just some of the signs that the topic of cyber-physical security convergence, which often came up in our conversations with other attendees, continues to gain traction.
As cyber incidents and attacks continue to cause disruptions in the physical world, security teams are looking to identify solutions that support both disciplines. It was exciting to see a high level of interest in Dataminr’s expertise in threat detection across both domains.
Looking Ahead
Beyond the key takeaways listed above, there were a number of other challenges and themes discussed during ISC West 2025. Overall, it was apparent that AI and other technology solutions are being designed to specifically solve those challenges and support corporate security teams’ ability to navigate an increasingly chaotic, complex, and connected world.
In the coming months and years, AI will continue to play a greater role in supporting corporate security teams and modernizing the GSOC. At the same time, we expect to see organizations place an emphasis on:
- Prioritizing practical AI solutions that directly address organizational challenges, improve workflows, and reduce costs
- Adopting hyperlocal and real-time intelligence that provides critical context to help security teams keep their people, operations, and assets safe
- Exploring partnerships and solutions that provide simplified, consolidated, and cohesive operational workflows
At Dataminr, we’ll be at the forefront of this evolution.
