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From the editor's desk: Can it be October already?

Andrew Seldon, Editor.

Welcome to the final SMART Handbook of the year. In this issue, we focus on residential estate security, from the fence to the gate and beyond. We also review our Durban SMART Estate Security Conference, which took place earlier this year, and there is one more to come. In October of this year, we will return to the Indaba in Fourways, Johannesburg, for the year’s final conference. Find all the details at www.resc.co.za.

Of course, we are not finished for the year just yet. We still have our SMART Security Business Directory, which is in the process of being finalised, and following that, our final issue for the year will be Issue 6.

Products that stood out in 2025

In Issue 6, one of the features we will focus on is the hardware and software products, as well as solutions that stood out over the course of the year. Whether they were new launches or significantly upgraded from previous versions. Feel free to email us your thoughts on what made a difference in the industry this year – including AI.

We also take a look at the trends expected in 2026 in the security and risk sector, both globally and internationally. While we should (and will) examine the impact AI is having in security and beyond, we are hesitant to proclaim the end of the world just yet. Numerous reports are emerging that describe the negative impact AI is having on the workplace. From lower productivity due to checking AI for factual errors, to extra work being created by people forced to use AI (or slacking off, thinking AI can do the work for them), which their colleagues cringe at because it lacks value and they need to put in extra time to fix it, or they pass it up the ladder to be someone else’s problem.

Personally, the biggest issue I have with AI is its lack of context. It has improved dramatically over time, but there are still occasions when it simply doesn’t ‘get it’, which is understandable. Although context and facts can’t really be expected from systems trained on data from the Internet. AIs with specific functions and focus areas, on the other hand, are more likely to get it right, but the question remains as to whether they can be left to their own devices without human oversight.

In a remote monitoring scenario, having AI dismiss 80% of false alarms is great (I know vendors claim 90% or more), but the issue in security is that you can miss a false alarm and tag it as real, whereas you can’t afford to dismiss a real alarm. I guess that’s much like the software world, where ‘terms and conditions’ absolve the developers from any responsibility if something goes wrong. The T&Cs; might be a good subject for an article or presentation. SMART Security Solutions will focus on AI and AI agents early in the new year.

In the meantime, I hope the handbook is useful to all our readers and their AIs. Feel free to send any comments or criticisms to andrew@technews.co.za.

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