Digital Content Editor, Eve Goode sat down with Mark Michaelides, CEO of Antare discusses how AI is changing body-worn camera.
Can you explain how Antare’s body-worn camera solution works?
Traditional body-worn cameras are designed to record events that can later be reviewed by a human being.
Antare takes a different approach.
The camera records the whole shift, and the platform reviews every hour of video and audio automatically as it is captured.
The goal is not simply to collect more footage, but to make that footage immediately useful.
The Antare platform automatically identifies significant events, transcribes conversations, categorises interactions, and highlights key moments, which it then reports via the Antare Console.
Rather than security or operations teams needing to spend hours working through video archives, Antare instead delivers a structured report of a staff member’s shift that includes any incidents that occurred.
One of our customers, a security firm on the south coast of England, used to spend around four hours reviewing a shift. It now takes him five or six minutes.
Organisations gain quicker access to the information they need, while managers can focus on decision-making rather than footage administration.
In an environment where both time and resources are limited, the ability to find and understand relevant information quickly is what matters.
How could products like Antare’s body-worn camera solution change the way organisations approach the safety and protection of frontline staff?
One of the major challenges with body-worn cameras is that they currently rely on human intervention.
Employees are expected to switch on their recording device at precisely the moment that an incident occurs or a situation begins to escalate.
In reality frontline workers often operate in highly stressful environments.
When someone is dealing with aggression, abuse, conflict or a rapidly unfolding incident, their attention should be focused on the people and circumstances in front of them, not on whether they have pressed the correct button on their body-worn camera.
By removing that dependency on manual activation, Antare helps reduce the risk of critical incidents going unrecorded.
Workers can concentrate on performing their role (and if necessary protecting themselves), while the technology takes responsibility for capturing all relevant information as it happens.
More broadly, the Antare solution represents a shift in how organisations should think about workforce protection.
Body-worn cameras have traditionally been viewed as tools for evidence collection and compliance.
But increasingly they’re also now part of a wider duty-of-care strategy that provides reassurance to employees and which also gives organisations greater confidence that they can effectively support frontline teams when incidents take place.
What role does AI play in turning a body-worn camera from a recording device into a more proactive safety tool?
Most organisations record far more video and audio than their security or operations teams could ever review.
As a result, valuable information is often overlooked simply because there’s not enough time or human resources available to analyse everything that has been captured.
AI changes that equation by reviewing information consistently and at scale.
Rather than relying entirely on manual processes, Antare automatically examines captured footage, identifies relevant events and provides the context needed to analyse and understand them quickly.
Importantly, AI is not replacing human judgement and decisions. Instead, it enables teams to focus their attention where it matters most.
It reviews everything, surfaces what is relevant, and hands the decision to a person.
That takes hours of administration out of every week.
The result is a system that helps organisations and staff members respond more quickly and efficiently, make better informed decisions and maximise the value of the information they are already collecting.
Why is now the right time for this kind of technology, and why do you see AI-powered worker protection as the next step in the physical security industry?
There are two main trends driving demand for intelligent worker-protection technologies.
The first is the persistent high level of abuse, aggression and violence directed towards frontline workers in a range of sectors, including retail, hospitality, public transport and healthcare.
The British Retail Consortium reported that shopworkers last year experienced around 1600 incidents of violence and abuse every day, highlighting the scale of the challenge facing employers.
Organisations and employers are under growing pressure to protect their staff and to provide clear evidence when abuse occurs.
Body-worn cameras have already demonstrated value as both a deterrent and a reliable record of events.
However, organisations now want more than just a device that records video footage.
The second trend is the increasing complexity of modern security challenges.
Businesses today collect enormous volumes of data through cameras, sensors and other digital systems.
But they struggle to extract meaningful value from this data.
The challenge is understanding it quickly enough to take effective action.
Advances in AI are now making this understanding possible at scale.
Rather than creating extra work, AI can automatically review information, identify what matters and help organisations prioritise their resources more effectively.
The security industry has spent years focused on capturing incidents.
The next phase is understanding operations.
We believe this shift will define the next phase of physical security and workforce protection.
Other than responding to individual incidents, how could AI help organisations identify wider patterns and risks that may be affecting their workforce?
Individual incidents only provide a snapshot of what is happening across an organisation.
The bigger opportunity lies in connecting information from multiple incidents, locations, teams and time periods to identify patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
A single incident may not reveal very much on its own, but when dozens or hundreds (even thousands) of interactions are analysed together, broader trends begin to emerge.
AI lets organisations identify recurring procedural issues, common operational challenges and emerging risks that may not be visible through traditional reporting processes.
It can highlight the need for further staff training for particular scenarios, identify locations that experience disproportionate levels of incidents or reveal vulnerabilities that quietly increase risk over time.
In this way organisations move beyond simply responding to isolated events.
They instead gain a broader, more in-depth understanding of what is happening across their entire operations.
For decision-makers who are responsible for security, risk and workforce safety, this granular visibility is valuable because it supports more informed decision-making and enables preventative action before problems become more serious.
Looking ahead, how do you see AI and intelligent body-worn technology changing the way organisations protect their people over the next five years?
Over the next five years, I expect intelligent body-worn technology to become increasingly common across a much broader range of frontline roles.
Body-worn cameras have previously been most closely associated with law enforcement, physical security and working in high-risk environments.
As organisations place greater emphasis on employee wellbeing, duty of care and accountability, we expect adoption to expand into a wider range of customer-facing and public-facing sectors.
The expectations placed on employers are expanding.
Organisations are increasingly judged on how well they protect their staff, how safe they make the working environment, and how they respond when incidents happen.
Technology is playing a central role in helping them meet those expectations.
As AI capabilities continue to mature, body-worn technology will become more important as an everyday operational tool rather than as a device used after something has gone wrong.
The organisations that achieve the best outcomes will be those that can use frontline insights to improve safety, strengthen decision-making and build greater resilience across their operations.
Ultimately, intelligent worker protection should now be a cornerstone of how modern organisations support their people, manage risk and deliver safer outcomes.
Mark Michaelides is CEO of Antare, where he leads the company’s strategy, growth and customer-focused innovation. He has extensive experience scaling businesses across a range of sectors including fintech and subscription-based hardware models. Before joining Antare, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at Molo, the UK digital mortgage lender and held investment banking roles at Goldman Sachs and UBS. Mark is an expert in commercial strategy, organisational leadership, business development and fundraising.