AWS Summit Washington, DC 2025 | Kirk Cameron, CentralSquare Technologies

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Kirk Cameron

CTO

CentralSquare Technologies

Inside the AI shift in government: 11 perspectives on public sector ops transformation

Public sector transformation is entering a critical phase, driven by the rise of agentic AI and digital labor that doesn’t just automate, it adapts. But the biggest obstacle isn’t the technology. It’s the systems, silos and culture built for a slower, pre-AI world.TheCUBE’s John Furrier discusses public sector transformation.What’s really holding back progress in the public sector isn’t a lack of innovation — it’s the difficulty of adoption. From aging infrastructure to deeply rooted bureaucracies, systemic inertia remains the biggest obstacle. Meanwhile, AI is rapidly reshaping the role of government, raising the stakes for timely transformation, according to theCUBE’s John Furrier

play_circle_outline CentralSquare Technologies: public safety and public administration software solutions.

play_circle_outline Enhancing Public Safety through Generative and Agentic AI in Cloud-Based Synergy for Efficiency and Officer Safety

play_circle_outline Market adoption of new technologies: overcoming budget constraints, moving to the cloud for agility.

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Kirk Cameron, CentralSquare Technologies

Kirk Cameron

CTO CentralSquare Technologies

Kirk Cameron, chief technology officer of CentralSquare Technologies, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Scott Hebner during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event to explore how AI is reshaping public safety and local government administration. The discussion focuses on practical applications of AI and cloud technologies that enhance service delivery without requiring major infrastructure overhauls.

Cameron shares how CentralSquare Technologies leverages AI to streamline workflows, improve resource allocation and support officer safety. The discussion hi... Read more

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What are the main categories that the business falls roughly into? add

What is the vision for how AI can be implemented in local law enforcement to improve efficiency and effectiveness? add

The question could be: What is the value proposition of the managed service on AWS, and how does it empower organizations to serve their communities across public administration and public safety? add

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Kirk Cameron, CentralSquare Technologies

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>> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE. We are here on the ground floor, on the show floor of AWS DC Summit, formally AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Scott Hebner with theCUBE which is my co-host. Kirk Cameron is here, CTO of CentralSquare Technologies. Kirk, we just had a great rip before you came up. We could get it back on camera. Thank you for joining us.

Kirk Cameron

>> My pleasure. Really happy to be here guys.

>> I love that pre-chat before we came on camera. A lot of action going on with what you guys do. But first, explain what CentralSquare does. You guys can set the table. There's a lot of things going on. There's the shiny toy, which is the real time, and you've got a lot of technology in the back office. Explain what you guys do.

Kirk Cameron

>> Sure. The business really falls roughly into two pieces. About two-thirds of our business is very, very focused in the public safety space and in that area, everything from 911 systems, computer aided dispatch, records management software, jail management, all of those kinds of things that you would think of as providing services to local law enforcement entities. About one-third of the business is what we call public administration. So that's the kind of things going on in town hall. Everything from building permits, enterprise asset management, utility billing, property taxes and all of that kind of stuff. A little less glamorous but absolutely vital to local governments serving their communities.

>> What I love about what you do is boring is the new cool. And with AI, stuff that was boring is actually ready for AI because workflows and data processes that are kind of well-formed, they could be mundane but critical. AI just comes in and eats right up a breakfast, lunch and dinner and just makes innovation out of it. Share your vision for how you see the AI coming in because the IT budgets aren't the same as JP Morgan Chase. They got a $10 billion IT budget. Local IT is not that high on the money list.

Kirk Cameron

>> It's not. And so what's really amazing is the way cloud and AI come together and that's what really allows us to bring a lot of value to our customers because with the cloud infrastructure that's in place, our customers won't have to worry about making capital outlays in their IT infrastructure that they would need to make to go do AI. Now we can bring that AI capability in and agentic AI is really the future of what we see happening and things with local law enforcement. So now a routine traffic stop, running a plate, finding out what's going on, looking for trends, looking for patterns, collecting all of that data, analyzing it and putting a wealth of information right at an officer's fingertips really does help support officer safety.

Scott Hebner

>> So how are you viewing particularly in the space that you're serving the difference between generative AI, which we've been obsessed on for the last couple of years now we're rapidly moving on agentic. It's sort of like move from making predictions and analyzing information, automating simple tasks, repeatable tasks to the agents that are going to help you make judgments and solve goals. I would imagine that would have a big impact.

Kirk Cameron

>> It will. So one of the great ways generative AI made some officer efficiencies for us are things just like police reports.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> That's a fairly mundane task. An officer sitting at a keyboard, cranking out text, it takes a long time to write and write well. And generative AI can really reduce that burden on an officer so they can go really focus on policing. Where agentic AI can really come in is now that is the system making decisions and working for the customer. So imagine you're a 911 dispatcher and suddenly you get a call coming in, suddenly there's background noise. AI can help filter out the background noise. AI can actually analyze the voice for tone and for stress and for those kinds of things, and then help prioritize those kinds of calls and help a dispatcher make some of those judgments.

Scott Hebner

>> Right.

Kirk Cameron

>> Now the system is working for the end user, not the end user working for the system.

>> That's a key theme. We were talking about it before we came on camera about how the cloud has flipped the value proposition, not only the value creation but the value extraction side of it, because now you have the users or the customers or the people who are using the application, whether it's a 911 call or making sure the permits for the new construction get approved. No matter where they are, they feel like they're empowered to have some agency.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. The capabilities are stunning. You take a look at now we have many multi-agency things. AI is really going to start facilitating multi-agency deployments where you can have a jurisdiction that's served by multiple different agencies and now we can choose what the right way to respond to that is based upon what's there. If it's an area where there's a fire that's going on and which different agencies have which kind of capabilities, because sometimes you'll hear the three alarm, four alarm fire, there's calls for neighboring assistance. And now agentic AI can do things like going and seeing what's available in those other areas and making a request for support from another community.

>> Talk about how hard that was just go back a decade because we're seeing in public sector everyone had their swim lane or their budgets or their legal process and mechanisms. Now you're talking about sharing data, being real time. That has been a transformational journey.

Kirk Cameron

>> It has.

>> How does that work? Is it working and how does that play out because now you've got jurisdictional challenges?

Kirk Cameron

>> It's an area where there has been progress and there's still a long way to go. The easiest way for it to happen is when you have a number of agencies that are all using the same software. That's a little easier because everybody plays nice together. It gets a little bit more complicated if they're using software from multiple different vendors. Because just imagine, the analogy I would draw it's like scheduling a meeting. It's really easy for you and I to schedule a meeting when it's two of us.

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> If there's 10 people and we're trying to schedule a meeting, it's a little bit harder. Well, if you've got 10 different systems all trying to exchange data-

>> I got Zoom and you think you're on my Teams, it's not going to work.

Kirk Cameron

>> Exactly. But what we're starting to see now is not just having AI features in your products, but what also is making a difference is I'm using AI technology when I build my products and that allows me to start doing capabilities that before-

>> 10 times faster....

Kirk Cameron

>> would've been very, very difficult. So you can use things like AI-

>> Like there was a tooling or integration-

Kirk Cameron

>> Yeah. Wiring two APIs together.

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> AI can do that for us.

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> And I don't have to go write that code myself. Right? That is a stunning capability. So it really will help bring those systems together from multiple different vendors because we all do care about what we do. That's one of the things that's unique about this space is we do what we do because we care about the people we do it for. And those agencies don't compete with each other. Two neighboring police departments don't compete with each other. And so as vendors, what we have to do is recognize that, yes, we might both be competing for market share, but we really want to collaborate and deliver a solution that works for both of our customers and that's why we did-

>> So integration is super important.

Kirk Cameron

>> Absolutely.

>> And so AI really helps there cost-wise and speed.

Kirk Cameron

>> And speed. And little things like, I say a little thing, it's a huge thing. Data. It's where data is amazing. It can take a look at different data structures and realize that this data in system A and this data in system B, they really can be commingled to show some value to a user because it can derive on that knowledge.

Scott Hebner

>> So let me ask you on the promise of agentic AI is, besides the workflow part, is more and more autonomous agents. That comes with a big trust factor that has to be built, right?

Kirk Cameron

>> Yes.

Scott Hebner

>> So where do you see the maturities of that in terms of the public safety, in particular, because that's like mission-critical decisions that are being made? Where do you envision more and more autonomy coming to life here?

Kirk Cameron

>> Full autonomy's going to take a while, I'll tell you, and in my own personal opinion. So I think where we are very much in the public safety space, in particular. On the public admin side, there might have a little bit more flexibility. We're not dealing with life and death there, but with public safety side where we're dealing with life and death, trust but verify is really what we're talking about at this point in time. Yes. So what we really can do is put more information in front of a human so they can make a decision, but they're making the decision with facts that they're getting that they might get faster and they might get more completely, but they're making the decision. We'll leave time to figure out when anything would go beyond that.

Scott Hebner

>> Let me ask you about your go-to-market and how you view the market because you've done a hundred plus discussions with different types of vendors out there that are selling solutions, particularly in AI. There seems to be an evolution here from where they used to target IT spend within a customer, or in your case, a government agency, where they're now targeting labor spend, which is like four or five times larger bucket. As you guys sell and as you engage with the different agencies, do they view it as digital labor or will they as agentic AI kind kicks into place here versus just a IT tool?

Kirk Cameron

>> I think they view it as a force multiplier. And what I'm getting at there is the two things they care about a lot is officers being able to focus on the safety aspect of what they're doing and not on the administrative aspect of what they're doing. So there's officer productivity and there's officer safety. Two super important concepts there. You want to make sure that law enforcement always has the most up-to-date information that they can have that gives them full context of what kind of situation they're walking into so that they can be prepared for that. So those two things allow officers to spend more time on their core responsibilities, and that's really where they get the force multiplier. We're not seeing folks who are looking to say, "Let's go reduce our human capital spend-

Scott Hebner

>> Or give them superpowers....

Kirk Cameron

>> about doing things like that."

>> They're not there yet. They're not there yet. They're there to make the product better, the officers. Their job, the service. They want operating leverage for that service.

Kirk Cameron

>> Absolutely.

>> So let me ask you a question. When you guys go to your company, what's the pitch? Is it mainly as a total system? Do you offer platform? Can you share how you guys do business and how the product's consumed and deployed?

Kirk Cameron

>> Sure. Well, you're talking to the technology guy so I don't do the sales pitch twice off the sales guys.

>> I don't mean the pitch-pitch, but the value proposition.

Kirk Cameron

>> Well, what it really is, it's about empowering them to serve their communities. That's what it's really about. And I mean that across both public administration and public safety.

>> It's a managed service on AWS.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yes. On AWS.

>> So I'm buying a service and I can do back office workflow on paper.

Kirk Cameron

>> Absolutely. All of it. All of it.

>> And it's your software?

Kirk Cameron

>> It's our software. Absolutely. Now we do use a number of Amazon services to enable that software. And part of what the whole push with AI and the cloud really now is, is the value is rather than being on-prem, right now we show how we can deliver software to them much more rapidly. So if you look at the old school sell, people were buying hardware and they have to keep it for five years. You don't want to do that.

>> Okay. Since you're a CTO, we'll go on the weeds a little bit.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yeah.

>> So I love S3 tables.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yes.

>> Metadata's becoming a huge value. So I just wrote a post yesterday on Iceberg because Databricks Summit is this week. Snowflake was last week. So the whole theory is put everything into a data lake, but there's no backbone in the lake. So we're starting to see Iceberg become kind of like that table format. Do you see that becoming an enabler? So what data formats, is there a vision that you guys see because you have access to a ton of data, real-time data on calls, predictive data you can send to officers back office process, which is the business side of it. What's the view of the data semantic layer, all these hot buzzwords that are out there?

Kirk Cameron

>> Well, it's an area where it's really, really changing things. So where it starts from is one of the things talked about that I'm so excited about the cloud and AI helping us is giving value to our customers faster. Oftentimes it would take them 18 months to get a system live. You know what the long pole in the tent is? It's converting their data from some old legacy system, trying to normalize it and rationalize it into very structured relational tables. That's going away. We don't need to do that anymore. We don't need to do that data conversion. We want to take that into things like a data lake and S3 buckets. There we can access it with all of these different tools and technologies and leverage AI data visualization techniques to go look at and aggregate and summarize that data. And now you can go live on a system in 30 days rather than 18 months.

>> This is where the AI is awesome because all that heavy lifting and time, slogging through it. It's expensive, time-consuming. It's hard to find people to do it.

Scott Hebner

>> And it's error-prone and the automation is great. And then once you get that, you get that semantic layer, then you start to build knowledge graphs and things of that nature, then that's what's going to explode the ability to build new AI capabilities and agents quicker because they understand the context and meaning and relationship of all these data entities. So it's just like an accelerating catalyst, right?

Kirk Cameron

>> Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> The more you do.

>> So what's the drivers on adoption? You guys did a survey. There's a gap in this. Where are we in the market? Obviously these early adopters, you probably got those.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yep.

>> They're not waking up every day thinking about, "Hey, what's my transformation strategy? Or maybe they are." But they god, it's a very day-to-day tactical business that you're serving.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yes.

>> What's the gap? Where are you guys? How are you getting the fast followers on board? How do you get the main market?

Kirk Cameron

>> Yeah. There's a couple of different ways that you do it. Part of it is everyone's subject to budget cycles and folks are very leery of large capital outlays. So one of the ways that we've started to see that gap get closed is we're now at the point in time where folks aren't as afraid of the cloud as they used to be. There used to be a lot of fear, very much in the public safety space. Public administration made a move to the cloud a little earlier, public safety a little later. But now that they're feeling like it's safe to go there, they might've bought a system years ago, two years ago. Well, they can't replace that yet. But now we're looking at those capital outlays and there are things you can do. One of the great things with Amazon is they'll buy that hardware. And so now we can move those customers to the cloud so they're ready to go to the cloud mentally. Financially, we're getting them to go to the cloud. We've made additions to the software to make it much more cost-effective to go to the cloud. We took a customer, large customer in Georgia. They went from an on-prem solution. They said they wanted to go to the cloud. They got there because they had a ransomware event. They were very wanting to move quickly because maintaining that on-prem IT infrastructure and making it secure is expensive. They went from an on-prem solution to in the cloud and live in less than 30 days.

>> Wow.

Kirk Cameron

>> Because they were invested in moving quickly because we can only move so fast.

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> Right?

>> They set the pace.

Kirk Cameron

>> They set the pace, but we had an environment ready for them in hours. To do an on-prem install would take weeks, but now we can do it in hours because of the elasticity of the cloud. Moved all of the data, got them live in 30 days. And so now they're talking to their neighbors about it. So the two big things that's causing folks to make that jump-

>> Yeah. Wear them out, fixing....

Kirk Cameron

>> is bad old hardware and ransomware. Those two things drive a bunch of-

>> And AI is a lot of magic. And AI too, when they start to see the benefits. Okay. That was, I thought was hard. It was easy. Then we get AI, I got a feel that the AI computer vision wave is super hot, body cams, two other things. I mean, document management. I mean, PDFs are like... There's a zillion solutions out there that just ingest paper.

Scott Hebner

>> Robotics.

>> Robotics,

Scott Hebner

>> The video we saw today.

>> Yeah. Robotics shooting a machine gun.

Kirk Cameron

>> And drones and drone footage.

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> I mean all kinds of stuff.

>> So it's becoming a technical, it's always been technical. Policing has always been technical, public safety's been technical. Now it's like digital native technical. How aware and how fluent are the agencies? I'd imagine that the users are ready for any weapon or tool at their disposal, but where's the process in your mind and where are the progression? Where are they?

Kirk Cameron

>> It is very uneven, right? What you will see is in areas where we have folks who are a little bit younger, they are often a little bit... They grew up in the era of cell phones and they grew up with Snapchat and filters and all of those kinds of things, and they just see that they want more and more and more new technology. But you'll also see some of the folks who've been around for a while are now like, "I want something new and I want something different and my budgets are already expended and I need those kinds of efficiencies." And so you will see that it takes folks who are willing to be a little bit more progressive and you'll see the folks who are like, "I'm not doing this. I've got five years left."

Scott Hebner

>> So when they're-

Kirk Cameron

>> And you're running into both types.

Scott Hebner

>> When they're adopting these new technologies and willing to experiment, what's the role of the data privacy and regulations play in all this? I mean security is security-

Kirk Cameron

>> Security....

Scott Hebner

>> but also regulatory.

Kirk Cameron

>> Some of it goes back to the whole trust but verify thing, which you need to be careful with, and it really does come in when you're looking at that data analysis. You have to make sure you're consuming it responsibly. You need to have some guard rails around the way you're consuming the data that comes out of AI. Hallucinations are real and they happen.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah.

Kirk Cameron

>> Now you do everything you can to prevent those kinds of things, but it really is true that you could start misusing that data if you don't have those guard rails. So you have to make sure you've got a trusted partner that has the right kind of long-term vision for the space and that they're not going to misuse that data and start dispatching folks to places where they shouldn't be for reasons they shouldn't be there.

>> Kirk, we really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. You've been helping organizations scale up and transform. Thanks for coming on and spending the time. I guess my final question is what do you think of the show so far? And this moment in time we're living in almost feels historic. There's a lot of buzz, but there's also a lot of excitement and we're starting to see confidence with the AI scale. What's your thoughts?

Kirk Cameron

>> Oh, it's a great event. I came out a day early and went to an executive summit yesterday with some other chief product and technology officers talking about AI uses in general. And folks from the PGA were there and they don't follow us on the same rules that we follow. So it was interesting to see what their use cases were to then see how we could apply them. So far today, I thought that the keynote this morning was awesome, and I've already learned a few things that I want to bring back home about some other technologies we want to adopt, help further lower our costs so that we can, again, lower our costs to our customers and help push further adoption to the market.

>> So a lot of sharing going on, trust network being built.

Kirk Cameron

>> Yes.

>> Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here. Love the commentary. Appreciate it.

Kirk Cameron

>> Well, thanks for having me. It was a great time.

>> All right. Kirk is on theCUBE here. Again, bringing critical technology, the critical services, whether it's public safety, infrastructure administration, the societal impact to AI and public sector is significant. Obviously the commercialization is just a strong. Multimodal AI is going to change the world. Of course, we're doing our part here at theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Thank you guys.