Unbundling the Future of Video and Voice Intelligence

July 24, 2025

Edge Signal — Generating actionable insights for better business • edgesignal.ai

Across industries like retail, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and public infrastructure, organizations have valuable video infrastructure that often remains underutilized. These security camera systems were designed for surveillance, not for optimization or prediction. With advancements in AI models, existing video infrastructure can now provide real-time operational intelligence across departments, supporting functions like customer experience to worker safety, all without replacing hardware.

The scale is massive! In global retail alone, over 30 million commercial sites are already equipped with on-premises video camera systems. This shift represents a transition from passive monitoring to large-scale active optimization.

The Timing of Unbundling: Why Now Matters

Unbundling has repeatedly reshaped the trajectory of markets, separating hardware from software systems. This shift enables faster innovation, specialization, and broader adaptability. This is seen in software that now works across vendors, advancing faster than hardware and unlocking vertical specific solutions and outperform competitors.

A classic example is Apple who bundled services such as a music, video, GPS, and messaging into the smartphone. Now, as new technologies emerge, some are being unbundled into specialized tools such as Spotify for music services, Netflix for video/TV, Waze for real time traffic routing, and WhatsApp for messaging.

In the video market, today’s timing is favorable for two reasons. First, AI capabilities significantly advance every day. What once required large teams and dedicated Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can now be accomplished by lightweight models running on small AI devices, at lower costs and without forklift upgrades. Second, vertical adaptation is finally achievable. AI eliminates generic analytics, making it possible to detect loitering in retail, unsafe behavior in manufacturing, or customer frustration at a hotel check-in desk, all using the same modular software logic tailored to each use case.

The Limits of the Current Model

Most on-prem video systems still focus on compliance and incident review, offering limited analytics and poor integration with business operations. While camera vendors have introduced AI features, their solutions tend to lack vertical depth, evolve slowly, and cater to high-cost, large-scale deployments. The result leaves businesses with options that are either too inflexible or prohibitively expensive.

AI Overlay: Software-Driven, Hardware-Agnostic, Vertically Focused

The path forward is to decouple intelligence from physical video infrastructure. These solutions provide insights from video streams in real time, detecting patterns and anomalies, and identifying operational issues. Because they run locally, video footage does not need to be transferred elsewhere, which helps address privacy concerns, reduce latency, and minimize bandwidth demands.

Unbundling enables:

  • Modularity: Select AI analytics independent of the camera vendor, with the flexibility to tailor by use cases or departments.
  • Speed: Access the latest AI capabilities through ongoing software updates, without relying on new hardware cycles or device replacements.
  • Scalability: Enable new analytics features through licensing, without replacing existing cameras or infrastructure.
  • Specialization: Leverage vertical-specific solutions tailored to specific industries, moving beyond generic, one-size-fits-all systems.
  • Cost Efficiency: Reduce manual effort and staffing overhead by replacing passive dashboards with proactive insights, significantly improving ROI.

This approach significantly lowers costs by using affordable, remotely managed edge devices instead of expensive hardware upgrades. This makes projects become viable at scale for a wide range of organizations, from retailers to global logistics providers. Since the AI layer is decoupled, it creates room for partnerships with camera vendors rather than competition.

Bundling of Vision, Voice and Context

While unbundling creates the opportunities explained above, bundling of intelligence will make the impact even bigger, for example, by adding voice to video analytics. Voice adds sentiment and compliance detection that video alone can’t capture, revealing whether an interaction was calm, frustrated, or potentially problematic. This shifts the system from passive monitoring to active listening.

When combined with external data such as weather conditions, CRM feeds, nearby events, and scheduling calendars, the system becomes context aware. For example, a workplace safety system that knows the shift schedule can flag anomalies more quickly. This bundling of vision, voice, and context transforms video into a practical tool for managers and operators in real time.

From Dashboards to Proactive Agents

Traditional video systems rely on dashboards that require interpretation and time which service staff often lack. AI agents shift this by highlighting key insights, real-time alerts with reasoning, providing proactive explanations, recommending actions, and continuously improving over time.

Edge Signal integrates with relevant data sources to generate proactive insights that improve day-to-day operations and reduce the need for constant dashboard monitoring or reliance on control rooms. While dashboards remain useful for long term reporting, real-time AI agents are becoming essential for timely and informed decision making. Edge Signal’s platform also delivers user dashboards with KPIs and alerting, role-based access for security and managers, and compliance and privacy controls. This can be deployed across any Linux-based hardware stack. This shift moves from hardware vendors to software platforms, from security departments to broader organizations, and from reactive review to real-time insights. Unbundling video infrastructure is the starting point that leads to the bundling of vision, voice, and context into intelligent systems. Edge Signal’s modular, scalable, and vertically smart platform powers that transition, enabling organizations to unlock greater value from existing systems.

If you would like to explore how Edge Signal can transform your organization with intelligent video and voice insights, contact us!