We’re All Human, but do we have to be?
“We’re all human” or “you’re only human” are phrases excusing our human limitations when aspiring to achieve a goal.
“There are too many things to focus on, I can’t see them all.”
“Don’t worry, you are only human.”
These phrases highlight the limitations most of us face in our daily work with ever-growing demands. But with rapid advancements in AI, is the phrase “only human” still accurate? AI is currently progressing at an astonishing speed extending our human abilities—or even replacing them altogether.
The Challenge in Security Operations
I’ve worked in physical security for more than 15 years. The truth is, humans are extremely inefficient at monitoring video. In many projects, I’ve helped design control rooms with hundreds of cameras but only small teams of operators. The numbers reveal the challenge:
- One person can effectively monitor 4–8 video feeds during an 8-hour shift.
- Four operators can cover only 32 feeds at once.
Add bathroom breaks, sick days, and low-efficiency periods, and the gap becomes even bigger.
Augmented Humans
The first step toward improving this was adding AI-assisted monitoring. AI could detect certain events and provide situational awareness, reducing the number of streams humans had to actively watch.
This helped, but it didn’t solve scalability:
- Large event volumes still bottlenecked at human capacity.
- The same human limitations—breaks, fatigue, and absences—remained.
What Do Operators Actually Do?
In most cases, operators:
- Identify an issue.
- Make a decision.
- Trigger an action (e.g., call a guard, notify authorities, or activate a system).
But with turnover rates of 100–400% among U.S. security staff, this “decision-making” has largely become following a playbook: “If you see X, then do Y.”
In reality, operators are functioning as organic rules engines.
Removing the Human
So why keep the human in the loop?
With current LLM and VLM technologies, AI can already:
- Understand full video context.
- Manage hundreds or thousands of feeds simultaneously.
- Apply the same playbooks consistently, without breaks, fatigue, or turnover.
AI learns once, applies decisions at scale, and doesn’t need retraining.
Of course, AI won’t replace the roaming guard—at least not yet. It can deter intruders with lights or voiceboxes but can’t physically remove someone. Still, with robotics advancing quickly, that gap is closing.
For remote monitoring operators, however, AI is already more: Reliable, Scalable, Cost-effective than traditional staff.
“It’s Only AI”
So perhaps the phrase shifts to “It’s only AI.”
Unlike humans, AI’s limitations can be improved over time. Humans remain bound by biology, but AI can continuously evolve.
For businesses, AI security operators are already delivering more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective protection—without the labor challenges of traditional teams.
Odin Cloud has built the first 100% digital security workers, and early adopters are already seeing strong results.