How Zaladium and S.E.A.L Solutions Scaled Smart with Watchful
Client: Zaladium Analytics & S.E.A.L Solutions
One of the things that often surprises business owners is that security threats don't necessarily come from where you'd expect. Business owners typically invest in guards and cameras to protect their assets and reduce financial loss. Yet in traditional security, the most costly losses often come not from crime itself, but something entirely unexpected: false alarms, or, as they're called in the industry, mis-detections.
In the security industry, which today relies largely on agents monitoring arrays of cameras, every feed an agent has to monitor is an opportunity for a mistake, and every time a team is sent to a false threat, it's time and money wasted. Worse, if your security provider goes to the wrong event, they could be missing the real thing.
It's not an easy problem to solve, but that's exactly what Kiwi startup Watchful was born to do. Their Alarm Reduction solution with AI assistant Quill aims to cut down false alerts for property security providers, saving commercial landlords both money and risk.
Needle in a high-tech haystack
"The job of a remote video operator is really tough. They are typically sitting at a desk, staring at multiple monitors for 12 hour long, overnight shifts, sifting through CCTV footage that is often 90+ percent false alerts. It's mind-numbing. But it really doesn't have to be that way."
— Brett Thompson, Success Manager at Watchful
Watchful's software helps sort and filter the enormous amount of information security contractors and their staff are exposed to on the job, enabling them to zero in on actual threats from thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of potential false positives.
Founded in New Zealand in 2022 by Joshua Parsons, Watchful has grown quickly and established itself as an innovative player both at home and abroad, particularly in the United States. And it's in Houston, Texas, where Watchful has found one of its most productive partnerships, with security company Zaladium Analytics.
Securing scale
Zaladium Analytics
Security solutions and monitoring teams
S.E.A.L Solutions
Security teams, armed response, and K9 units
"We have our own suite of contracted armed officers to respond to events, which almost no one else does. Even the large guard companies haven't managed to integrate their camera subsidiaries with their officer subsidiaries, whereas we're fully integrated with our camera operators sitting side by side with the officer dispatchers."
— Benjamin Hatfield, President of Zaladium Analytics
It's this tight, innovative approach that has seen both Zaladium and S.E.A.L Solutions grow rapidly over the last ten years. But with scale comes the same challenges that beset any security company: dealing with a multitude of potential problems, clearing irrelevant alerts, and responding to the real ones.
A smarter approach to security
Benjamin started his career in tech, and he brought a tech startup approach to Zaladium. "We started on a shoestring budget, so we built our own tech stack. As we grew, we realized the stack was not going to scale without significant investment and additional expertise which we didn't have," Benjamin explains.
Zaladium had options; they could hire someone new, seek out a contractor to build something for them, or find a provider who already had a best-in-class stack and was aligned with their nimble, tech-informed approach. They decided to try for the third option, by shopping around at the security industry's largest trade show, ISC West.
Zaladium started with a simple pilot project, and went live across their full portfolio of sites in the fall of 2024.
Staying alert on the job
Security providers typically deal with the huge amount of information they must process while remotely monitoring your property's camera feeds by having an automated system create particular "alerts." Someone getting out of a car, someone entering or leaving a building, someone walking about, all can trigger alerts in a typical system. But these alerts can very quickly stack up, overwhelming operators.
"If you're looking at a parking lot, then you're watching a whole bunch of people arriving, getting out of cars, going into businesses, coming back, leaving. 99 percent of that is not a problem. If a vehicle drives through the parking lot in front of camera 2, camera 2 promptly sends five different alerts for the same car. Then it drives in front of camera 3 which sends 4 more alerts."
— Benjamin Hatfield
Multiply this by the activity in a typical parking lot, even during quiet times, and you can quickly begin to see how operators can become overwhelmed. This is where Watchful first proved its incredible value to the Zaladium team.
"One of the things Watchful does well is aggregating multiple alerts into a single alert," Benjamin says.
"So, an operator can handle one click, one resolution for what's effectively one incident. Watchful understands that those cameras are on the same site and helps us aggregate them together so that instead of 7 alerts, we just click one time."
The results have been nothing short of staggering. Zaladium's alert load has dropped roughly 85 percent since they went live with the Watchful integration. This was not, Benjamin stresses, a play to allow them to cut staff, in fact, it's the opposite. It enabled them to scale.
"Since we've gone live with Watchful, we've added another 15 percent to our business. But we're not at any point where we need to add people, and we won't be for a while. We've taken the night staff that used to be spending all their time handling the same alert over and over again, which leads to a lot of human error, and put them to work dealing with real alerts."
— Benjamin Hatfield
AI: Augmented Intelligence
The second crucial component that allowed Zaladium to scale their operations was that Watchful's software has its own built-in AI, which crucially is very simple to operate. Similar to other chat-based AI systems, Watchful's Quill allows users to instruct it via text, and it can make recommendations to operators based on how other operators have trained it.
"We found that for the most part the recommendations made by the watchful AI are really good. So we've been piloting that for a while now and we'll be expanding it to more and more sites. We feel that's another scaling opportunity for us. If the computer is handling the easy alerts for us, that means more human brain power is available to handle the harder ones."
— Benjamin Hatfield
In fact, Benjamin says they've freed up so much time that the staff are able to start training Watchful, further refining its intelligence and the quality of its results.
Seamless Integration
One of the key reasons that Zaladium were interested in Watchful was that they could quickly adapt the technology to customer needs, a flexibility that ultimately benefits property owners who need tailored solutions for their sites.
"It's been a good fit. We talked to some of the larger providers, but if we told them what we think they should do with their software, they'd just laugh. But Josh and the team at Watchful listened to what we had to say, and when it made sense for the wider deployment, they made those changes we needed."
— Brett Thompson
Zero Downtime Migration
"It took roughly five days to convert about 300 locations and a few thousand cameras over."
— Benjamin Hatfield
Easy Integration
"The actual piece of making the cameras talk to Watchful turned out to be much easier than any of us anticipated."
— Benjamin Hatfield
Game theory
Another factor making the switchover easier is that Watchful allows operators to monitor and clear alerts using video game controllers. It might seem like a small innovation, but it's a huge help in keeping operators engaged and responsive while watching over commercial properties.
"Some of my staff are quite young and they're gamers and they love being able to use a gaming controller to operate. It makes them even quicker. They don't need a keyboard and a mouse to pick something. They can zoom around using their gaming controller much faster. That's an innovation we haven't seen in anyone else's portal."
— Benjamin Hatfield
The fact is, gamers are simply faster, Benjamin says. "I suppose gamers are used to seeing something happen quickly in front of their eyes that they have to respond to: like a guy with a sword is coming in from the left, and they need to get their shield up." Turns out, those razor reflexes are easily transferred to the security arena.
Smart partnership, real results
"Watchful allowed us to scale at zero capital cost, and at a very reasonable operational cost that is more than worth what we pay. It's a platform we can sit on for the indefinite future. Even if we triple in size, it will still handle the load."
— Benjamin Hatfield, President, Zaladium
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