India‘s video surveillance industry is set to shift from mass data collection to intelligence-led security operations in 2026 as artificial intelligence becomes a default feature and systems grow more capable of understanding context, Videonetics managing director and vice chairman Naresh B. Wadhwa said.
“As we transition into 2026, the video surveillance industry is experiencing a transformative shift that goes far beyond incremental technological upgrades,” Wadhwa said. He said organisations were moving “from an era of overwhelming data collection to one of genuine, actionable intelligence”.
Wadhwa, a technology industry veteran who previously led Cisco Systems in India and the SAARC region and later ran Arista Networks’ Asia Pacific and Japan business said AI agents would increasingly combine related information across multiple video systems to create “collective intelligence” rather than siloed feeds, a shift he described as a change in how surveillance architectures work.
He also said advanced multimodal AI would improve situational understanding, helping security teams distinguish genuine threats from normal behaviour and reducing false alarms that can overwhelm operations.
According to Wadhwa, AI and machine learning are moving from premium add-ons to standard elements of modern surveillance systems, with semantic and natural-language search expected to change how operators retrieve footage by enabling conversational queries rather than manual reviews.
Video surveillance as a service accelerating adoption of subscription-based deployments
He said business models were also changing, with video surveillance as a service accelerating adoption of subscription-based deployments over capital-heavy hardware purchases, allowing organisations to scale infrastructure in line with need.
Wadhwa said deeper integration with IoT sensors and ultra-low-latency 5G connectivity would expand mobile-first applications across distributed sites, while edge AI and hybrid architectures combining edge, cloud and on-premise systems would take centre stage.
Edge-first intelligence can cut latency and bandwidth costs and support data privacy, while hybrid designs help balance performance, resilience and compliance, he said.
“The year ahead won’t simply bring incremental improvements,” Wadhwa said. “We’re entering an era where video surveillance systems genuinely understand context, operate with intelligence and integrate seamlessly into comprehensive security ecosystems.”
