Local governments around the country are in the midst of a debate around privacy and security as their contracts with surveillance provider Flock Safety face scrutiny.

But for all the hand-wringing in the public sector, the private world of commercial real estate is brimming with a growing menu of artificial intelligence-driven video surveillance solutions.

A mature ecosystem of vendors already exists in the private world that has for decades offered surveillance solutions and is now growing increasingly powerful as tech advances.

The firms have made their customers’ ownership of their data a key selling point to combat growing pushback against the integrated surveillance networks that are being built and deployed. 

“Most of our customers are private entities. They're not police departments, and so they keep the data for themselves,” said Steve Van Till, CEO of Brivo, an integrated security solutions provider with 78,000 customers in more than 80 countries. “Private video surveillance is a very different geography than public sharing of video surveillance.”

Still, large clients with distributed real estate frequently turn their security systems into an integrated network that allows for a human or an AI agent to analyze what is happening across an entire portfolio, not just on one screen. Gyms, healthcare and fast food are prime target business verticals for surveillance firms, Van Till said.

“When we think of an ideal customer profile, we're thinking of large, geographically distributed organizations,” he said. 

The AI video surveillance industry, which includes but isn’t limited to the kinds of systems these companies operate, reached $6.3B in 2025 and is expected to explode to nearly $27B by 2034, according to market research.

Flock has specifically faced scrutiny for allegedly enabling immigration officials to track individuals for arrest, a claim the company denies. Flock says it doesn’t cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but its customers — which include hundreds of municipal governments around the country — can opt to work with federal law enforcement. 

Flock didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

The tech has also attracted unwanted attention after several cases in which members of law enforcement were caught using the systems to track former romantic partners. Those unauthorized uses have often led to criminal charges against the officers.

For all the focus on Flock’s business with local governments, it is just as active in commercial spaces. Flock launched in 2017 with a focus on homeowners associations and later grew to draw municipal clients, but it has more recently pushed into the private sector, said Marcelo Ballve, the head of research at Sacra, a corporate intelligence firm that researches and analyzes pre-initial public offering companies. 

“Even more recently, they've said that 50% of their new revenue is coming from enterprises and businesses, meaning corporate customers,” he said.

Today, there are roughly 140,000 Flock license plate reader cameras deployed around the country, according to Deflock, a privacy advocacy group. Despite the critics, Flock continues to attract capital, and its private shares are widely traded, which Ballve said signaled that at least early investors and insiders believe the controversy will be short-lived.

“This seems like a PR crisis concentrated on their law enforcement deployments. Their fastest-growing book of business now is enterprises and businesses,” Ballve said. 

Simon Property Group, the largest mall REIT in the country, is a customer, according to open-source data from Deflock. Simon didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Home Depot, another customer, said in a statement to Bisnow that it has had security cameras in place for years and only uses them, along with products like automated license plate readers, “as a security measure to prevent theft and protect the safety of our customers.” Flock cameras are only in its parking lot, the company said. 

Lowe’s, which has also faced backlash for its use of Flock, didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Brivo and its competitors have custom solutions across almost every real estate segment, selling to multifamily firms, industrial clients, retailers, restaurants, hotels and more. Its clients include Whole Foods, Greystar, Dollar Tree, Prada and other global brands, according to its website. 

The specific uses of the cameras and their systems vary widely, from detecting when someone brandishes a weapon to identifying improper disposal of mattresses when apartment tenants are moving out.

Verkada, a California-based surveillance company with more than 30,000 global customers, has integrated AI widely into its suite of solutions. It started with the advanced computer vision used across the industry for years and has since moved into AI, with the firm deploying more than 100 AI-related features for its client base in just the last year, a spokesperson said.

For all the focus on the AI deployment, Verkada and firms like it still have a human somewhere in the loop, typically doing a final verification of suspicious activity and then, when necessary, engaging with the person through a microphone to intercede before a crime or other incident can occur. 

The firms say the results are a remarkable success. Solutions from Cloudastructure, another California-based vendor, have a 98% deterrence rate and a 10-second response rate for 90% of actual incidents, said the company’s chief revenue officer, Nile Coates.

Like Verkada, Cloudastructure uses AI to scan cameras for certain types of activity that, when detected, are verified by a person who can activate a microphone to address the suspicious individual or escalate the situation to authorities. All incidents are addressed within 30 seconds. 

“Not only are we stopping some of the crimes that were happening in certain facilities, but we're actually making those places of business or residence safer for the people that are there,” Coates said.

Cloudastructure has a solution that lets customers type in the object they are looking for and return results, similar to a Google image search, Coates said. 

The tech has been deployed to track who isn’t wearing proper safety equipment on construction sites, along with traditional security monitoring. The goal is to follow a property through its life cycle, Coates said. 

“We're basically taking it from the time that ground is broken to the time that tenants are moving in, whether it's an apartment or businesses in general,” he said. 

AI integrations are just half of the rapid evolution happening in video surveillance, with cross-system unification the other dominant theme. 

Customers can track individuals and vehicles across multiple cameras in real time or over multiple days, using AI to scan through hundreds of hours of video footage to pull out the relevant data. 

The interconnectivity has a multiplying effect on the surveillance capabilities of the tools, and the size and extent of those networks are what have faced scrutiny. 

With that new scrutiny on the industry, vendors have made data ownership a selling point. Verkada said in an email it “does not operate a data-sharing network” and that each customer owns its own camera and the data inside it. 

All of Brivo’s client data is “contained inside of the account ownership scope,” Van Till said. A customer that owns 300 fast-food restaurants can connect all of those associated cameras, license plate readers and other technology, but that data isn’t cross-populated with other clients.

“That has real-time uses, but it also is useful for people doing forensics so that they can actually track the movement of a person through multiple rooms, multiple cameras, indoors, outdoors, that sort of thing — it's really made investigations a lot easier,” Van Till said.

Cloudastructure similarly said that all of its client data was self-contained.

“We don’t merge it out. We don’t share it with anybody unless we’ve been given permission by the client,” Coates said. 

The segmentation of customer data has long been a piece of Cloudastructure policy, but it has only recently become a major talking and selling point, Coates said. Part of that is driven by the advances in technology — AI has supercharged tracking capabilities across multiple cameras or locations, for example — but also by the high-profile attention Flock Safety is attracting. 

“Until a couple months ago, it wasn’t that important,” he said. “Once contracts started being pulled away from vendors around the sharing of that data or the compiling of the data to make a decision based on things that they shouldn’t have been able to make decisions on, it’s becoming more important.”