Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Allied Universal CIO Mark Mullison (Part 1)

Mark takes us through some interesting use cases in safety and security.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to Allied Universal.

Mark Mullison: I’m the Chief Information Officer for Allied Universal. Allied Universal is a security services firm that provides staffing and technology services that help to drive better safety and security outcomes for our clients.

We’re one of the world’s largest security companies and have been active for many years. We’ve seen tremendous growth both through organic as well as through acquisitions. We’re now in excess of $7 billion in annual revenue and have over 200,000 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Obviously, you have products across a large spectrum. Where in this spectrum do you have AI initiatives that are worth discussing in this context?

Mark Mullison: I have responsibility both for internal technology as well as client-facing technology innovation. We’re using AI in a number of different ways in both of those contexts.

One of the most interesting applications of AI is in our recently announced product Helios. Helios is a great product. We’re very excited to be bringing it to the market. We announced that about 90 days ago. There are two parts to the product.

There’s Helios Mobile Device, which we equip all of our security professionals with. This allows them to give and get intelligence as they go throughout their day providing service to our clients on their sites.

Then there’s Helios Portal, which allows our clients and our operations staff to understand, in real-time, what goes on and also gives some great visualization tools to go back in history and understand the patterns and how things have been evolving.

Those two things are interesting and exciting but where the AI comes in is as one of the key differentiators in the product. We understand all kinds of information about the weather, security professionals on-site, and what kind of business our client is in.

Then, we reason over that knowledge with algorithms in order to not only understand what is likely to happen but also what to do in order to drive a better outcome. This is a pretty exciting time for us and a pretty exciting use of that AI technology. It’s working great.

We just finished eight months in the study. We are seeing in excess of a 20% reduction in safety and security incidence. This is preventing crimes and accidents and keeping the people in businesses and the communities we serve safe.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Allied Universal CIO Mark Mullison
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