theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI & Retail Trailblazers | Brandon Davito, Verkada

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Brandon Davito

SVP product

Verkada

play_circle_outline AI is transforming retail experiences for consumers and businesses simultaneously.

play_circle_outline Transforming Security: Verkada’s Evolution from Physical Protection to Enhancing Retail Performance Metrics and Operational Efficiency

play_circle_outline Importance of integrating sensors and cameras in retail locations for actionable data.

play_circle_outline Emphasis on using AI to reduce operational risks and enhance employee safety.

play_circle_outline Verkada's commitment to delivering comprehensive solutions for large enterprise clients.

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Brandon Davito, Verkada

Brandon Davito

SVP product Verkada

In this interview from theCUBE’s NYSE studio, Brandon Davito, senior vice president of product at Verkada, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the emerging concept of "physical AI" and how it is reshaping the retail landscape. Davito explains how Verkada is transforming traditional security infrastructure into a business-driving platform that goes beyond simple safety measures to unlock deep operational insights. The conversation highlights how leading retailers are leveraging computer vision and sensor fusion to understand customer flows, conversion rate... Read more

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What is the role of AI in transforming industries, particularly in relation to physical security and business operations? add

What role is AI playing in transforming the operations and business aspects of the retail industry, particularly in the context of physical security platforms like Verkada? add

What advancements are being utilized in retail locations to improve customer experience and operational efficiency? add

What are the benefits of using AI-powered systems in enhancing safety, security, and efficiency in retail environments? add

What is the focus or primary objective of Verkada as a security platform? add

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Brandon Davito, Verkada

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John Furrier

>> Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE's NYSE studio. This is our home on the East Coast. Of course, got our Palo Alto studio. This is our NRF coverage, our Retail AI Leaders series were kicking off in 2026, we started in 2025. And now, we're going to expand that because AI is impacting the experiences for consumers and businesses and retail all at the same time. Brandon Davito's here, SVP of Verkada products. You got the keys to the kingdom. Welcome to theCUBE here at our studio. Light day today with the market opening-

Brandon Davito

>> A little quiet, but excited. It's my first time here, so super excited to be here.

John Furrier

>> It's Retail Week in New York.

Brandon Davito

>> It's a great time to be in New York.

John Furrier

>> Retail obviously is an AI show now, everyone sees that, but what's really going on is the architecture of the network, the models are now coming into view in terms of value proposition for the businesses who want to serve the end user customer who are walking in, they want to do shopping, they're going to be online, they're going to be offline. You get the physical side of it. Physical AI is hot, right around the corner. We heard that at CES. So, AI is right at the crosshairs of data, agentic systems and physical.

Brandon Davito

>> For sure. And AI is really transforming this industry. So, Verkada is a physical security platform. We really came from keeping people in places safe. And what's been amazing is AI has taken us into much more operational and really business-driving aspects. And so, everything from understanding how customers come into the store, where they interact with products, how many folks are in the store and conversion rates, up to loss prevention and really thinking about how to give more data to frontline staff, AI is really transforming the game for frontline retailers.

John Furrier

>> I just wrote a post over the weekend, kind of a prep for NRF where this is an inflection point for the industry. And it sounds cliche to say that because every year it's like, "Oh, we're at an inflection point." But I think now more than ever, all the signals point to the same thing from supply chain to consumer experience and everything in between, business model opportunities, operational efficiencies, execution, and ultimately profit and experience with a customer when they're buying. 100%. Take us through what's going on at NRF this week. What are you seeing? What are some of the things that tie into that transformational inflection point?

Brandon Davito

>> Certainly, AI is the buzzword on the show floor and it's something that we're really seeing as being transformational. I was just up on stage with H&M and Read Hayes from the Loss Prevention Research Council, really talking about how they can use AI and data to be able to drive the bottom-line production and savings. And so, everything from understanding financial instruments and how retails and gift cards and returns are driving real bottom-line impact, up to how can they better merchandise and use cameras and visual sensing to understand who's in their store and where they should be merchandising products.

John Furrier

>> Brandon, one of the things I like about what you guys are doing is you said the physical side of it is big. Physical AI is the hottest next wave coming.

Brandon Davito

>> We think so.

John Furrier

>> Agents are here, obviously everyone sees that. I think there's no real debate about strategy. Make AI part of your business. Now, that's like a hand-waving statement. Translate that into execution because there's all kinds of physical aspects. There's one, the stores, they're physical. Brick and mortar is classic buzzword. You've got safety. You have all kinds of operational things-

Brandon Davito

>> I think warehousing, supply chain-

John Furrier

>> Connect the dos between physical and where digital's coming together.

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely. And let's go step by step. And so, I think in the retail locations themselves, we're seeing a combination of sensors, as well as cameras providing visual context. And that's everything from secret shoppers, so you can be able to survey more stores more frequently, down to customer flows and conversion rates. How many people walk by on the street, to how many people are in my store, to how many people are in queue and purchasing. Being able to understand those metrics and be able to run A/B experiments on that data and have real-world next-day results is a huge transformation for our customers. And then, you think about warehousing and being able to more effectively make sure that people are safe and being able to pull retail data for being able to pull the supply chain data of how much is in the warehouse, where it is, and being able to optimize those flows.

John Furrier

>> Explain secret shopper because I don't think people really know what that definition means. What does secret shopper mean?

Brandon Davito

>> Sure. So, secret shopper is basically a quality-assurance step. It's making sure that the store experience is as they expected. Is the merchandise where it's supposed to be? Are the greeters engaging? At the point-of-sale, are you trying to cross-sell and upsell? We've seen customers from bread, bakeries, to the largest gas station chain in Mexico using this as a way to be able to understand the impact at the retail floor and how they can be more effective.

John Furrier

>> So, secret shopper is basically the person that goes in or-

Brandon Davito

>> Pretends to be a regular shopper and is getting more information about what their experience was like and how they can prove these-

John Furrier

>> And Test the workflows. Does everything work? The plumbing working? Is the water flowing through the pipes?

Brandon Davito

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> All right. So, take us through some of the transitional issues. One of the things we've been saying for now is AI is going to be creating more dashboards, but most people don't want another dashboard.

Brandon Davito

>> 100%.

John Furrier

>> So, it's like, "Okay, I don't need another..." We've got analytics covered. AI and analytics are coming together. Machine learning's been around for a while with analytics. We've seen a lot of great value in dashboards. Talk about where gen AI and some of these real-time impacts...

Brandon Davito

>> Some of this is just even at the basic points where stores are closing and they're supposed to be open and staff is going out on break and they're closing the doors and retailers aren't actually able to transact. And so, being able to have real-time alerts when there's no movement or nobody has been seen for a particular period of time, those are the types of alerts where people can take real-time action, drive top-line impact, improve the business.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the business for you guys are in right now? What's some of the key things you're focused on? What are some of the macro trends and what are some of the micro things you're working on?

Brandon Davito

>> For sure. We've focused on three big areas. The first is moving into bigger enterprise. Large enterprises need to manage thousands of locations, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of users and devices across the globe. And so, being able to have visibility across all those sites, being able to manage it and tailor it for their operations is core. The second big push for us is thinking about how we can tie all these different sensors together into a common platform where you can have visibility across cameras and sensors for retail shops, for warehouses, even for schools, a range of different industries. The last piece is a big focus is AI. And we've been in AI since the beginning. The company really started going to market in 2017. Computer vision analytics is to where people and vehicle are and seen is core for the security use cases and incredibly important as we think about operations.

John Furrier

>> How do your customers engage with you guys? Because one of the things you've seen with a lot of locations is it's almost little startups within the startup. And one of the things that's coming out of the retail trends reports that we just published is that the small get more powerful because you can do more. And that's not like replacing employees. Actually, it's the other way around. It's making them more powerful. So, whether it's a boutique retail outlet or thousand locations, it's a small location or a medium-sized location, but it's part of a bigger thing.

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely. And this is where we see really the power coming to the frontline users. And so, when we talk about loss prevention, when we talk about retail efficiency, when we talk about conversion, that really is all about the team on the ground. And how do we give store managers? How do we give retail staff more information to do their job better? And that could be, Brandon just walked in, he's a VIP, he loves buying this jacket or that. Being able to give them information on the ground in real time so that they can better engage with customers is one of the pieces. But then we've coupled that with a tool where you can see across all of your locations and drive policy. So, things like litigation for slip and falls from a safety and potential risk mitigation standpoint, that is handled in corporate and the headquarters team should be able to see that across all of the locations.

John Furrier

>> How do you guys engage with customers? If I want to be a customer, what do I do?

Brandon Davito

>> Well, I think one of the biggest things you're touching on is how do you make sure that you're getting real value from technology? If you just slap a camera up, nobody looks at it and only if somebody calls after the fact, you don't get the same value as if there's real engagement, we're able to really change the operations. And so, I think the push, what we really are working closely with our largest retailers is how do you get value and how do you have more individuals get engaged with the product?

John Furrier

>> As the key product person in the company, you get the keys to the kingdom and you see the roadmap, you see the customer side, you see the market and you see the engineering side. What are you focused on? What's the key product areas? Is it computer vision to data? Is it data utilization? Is it data connections? What's the product roadmap?

Brandon Davito

>> I think AI really ties in there and how we feed into the rest of the enterprise stack. And so, how can we get better at detecting what's happening on the ground? How can we help tie that into the rest of the business systems and how can we help customers take action? And we really see that being across detection, configuration and policy management, and then all the way up to the business systems-

John Furrier

>> So, you guys are unified platform for the retail outlets, would that be a good way to describe it?

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely. And then, we can integrate with their point of sale systems, so we can start to understand trends, exceptions, if there's loss, if there's fraud, all that can be tied in. And then, paired with the visual context of what's actually happening on the ground because we think that's what matters most.

John Furrier

>> All right. Take me through a deployment. So, say I got low thousands of locations, I want to have cameras, maybe I have cameras, but say I don't. I want to buy cameras. Do you guys have, is it a box at the edge? Is it-

Brandon Davito

>> We have an end-to-end system. So, we actually build the camera itself. We design the firmware that runs on the device, we build the cloud software that manages it all. And so, you're replacing your old dumb cameras that you have to be onsite to be able to view and placing out with a smart camera that can see what's happening, is able to do everything from facial recognition to understanding the appearance of shoppers and where they go within the space. So, you're putting in a new device, you pair that with a bunch of other devices, access control, who can get into the building, when? Alarms to make sure that only the right people are there when they're supposed to be. Intercom systems, environmental sensors, so that the workplace is safe. All those things then are merged together, sensor fusion to be able to understand what's going on and then paired with the visual context. You can scale that easily across thousands of locations. Literally you plug in a POE cable and you're off and running.

John Furrier

>> You guys are like the eyes of retail. I mean, and if you think about it, the cameras are the key-

Brandon Davito

>> Without a doubt....

John Furrier

>> and then, you tie that into what data that's looking at so you make the cameras smarter.

Brandon Davito

>> Indeed.

John Furrier

>> So, take us through that. I mean, you're seeing a lot of success where software is being tied into the hardware. Obviously, you must have some tightly-coupled software system. Explain that.

Brandon Davito

>> Right. So, we build the firmware that's actually running and it's always constantly understanding who's in scene, where are they moving and how are they driving? What's really interesting for us is then being able to pare that down to individual transactions. So, show me what some of our retail customers want to know. Show me a return when there's only one person in scene. That means probably your associate is taking the money and putting it in his or her pocket. Those are the types of connections where you can pull data from point-of-sales systems and others and then pair it with visual queues.

John Furrier

>> Wow. When you get into some of the conversations you have with your customers, take me through some of the business conversations because one of the things we're seeing is it's a huge tech scene. I love the cameras, love the software integration, love the cloud play. I love the convergence of the AI, that's coming very, very fast, lots of services that are going to be enabled by that. But at the end of the day, there's a business to run. I got to make money, got to have a happy customer. What are some of the execution risks factors that you're seeing, that you guys are hearing, that you guys can align with? What are some of the business model... Can you take us through some of the operational side?

Brandon Davito

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when we have conversations with customers, everyone agrees that safety and security is a critical infrastructure. You got to buy it, you got to have systems up, but then how can you do more with it? And really how can you squeeze, especially in retail, it's all about efficiency. How can I squeeze more out of the investments that I'm making? And that's where AI powered systems just drive so much more value. And so, it's not just, "Hey, I can see slip and falls or I can go back and do investigation after the fact, but how can I think about organized retail crime, which is a major risk for the staff. How can I drive employee retention to help people feel safe? How can I understand loss and manage my environments better? How can I really drive conversion and think about different merchandising and how can I tie in new users onto the system?" And I think that those are pieces that are changes within the system. Historically, this was stuck in the back, stuck with IT or stuck with security, and now, it's really becoming at the fore and it's a C-level conversation.

John Furrier

>> And you mentioned IT. First thing that shows in my mind when I hear IT involves, slow. Talk about the speed aspect of why speed matters?

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Why speed wins?

Brandon Davito

>> Boy, being able to enact change at scale for retail is super hard. Think about thousands of locations, frontline staff that have a million different things to do. So, being able to lift and drop and upgrade systems quickly and having an easy system to be able to deploy, like ours, is a really big value. The other big push is you've got users across the business who may not be, at their core, IT people. And so, how do you make it easy for them to be able to get the data they need? And then, the last is integration. All these different systems, they don't talk to each other if they're not modern. If all the data actually lives on a server stuck in Poughkeepsie, it's really hard to be able to get that data out. And so, using the cloud as a simple way to be able to aggregate and infer is a huge driver.

John Furrier

>> Do you guys back-haul the data through the internet or do you guys have your own network? Take us through some of the net content.

Brandon Davito

>> Bandwidth in retail is a very precious commodity. You and I think about our homes, super easy to get... Many of these sites are working off very, very skinny pipes. And so, we're really careful about how much data we pull, it's just the metadata that's sent back to the cloud, but then all that can be piped into enterprise systems. We can also pull in point-of-sale data so you can start to correlate and understand across different systems.

John Furrier

>> Take me through your vision on AI at the edge, because one of the things we're going to be start seeing, I think, is AI factories in the edge, meaning it could be a NVIDIA box, small little box. They got the new GPU boxes at basically a mini AI factory. I mean, I would imagine that having model synthesis at the edge will be a huge enabler.

Brandon Davito

>> And we've been doing that for the last five years. So, our chipsets, they've got inference on-device. We can actually run facial recognition on-device. We can understand trajectories where people are moving. All that happens on the device. So, we're just sending the metadata back to the cloud and we're really careful on the bandwidth, but really pushing more of the intelligence to the edge allows us to instrument as well and take action. Devices can talk to each other, can have automated response without having a server or the cloud intervene.

John Furrier

>> It's interesting. One of the things that came out of AWS re:Invent conference, and this is going to be probably a theme at GTC for NVIDIA, is that the frontier models are very good.

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> But they got everything. I don't need to know every Princeton paper or academic paper. If I've got a use case on the edge, I might want to distill that model and have a model come to the edge. Now, bandwidth is going to be tight, it's always the case, managing the connectivity. So, I want to have the best intelligence at that spot in real time.

Brandon Davito

>> No doubt. And we've built purpose-built models for understanding people and vehicles, because that's the thing that people care about from cameras, but we're able actually to manage privacy much better by having those models delivered on the edge. And so, being able to understand only people who are on a list who may be of concern, are we able to track their biometrics and send to the cloud? And so, really being able to use those models as ways to unlock new business for our customers is a big value.

John Furrier

>> All right. Take me through a debate inside the company. You're in a room with all your product managers and engineers. You're using AI tools probably to get things done. What's the conversation like product-wise that you guys think about? Can you share inside the ropes of what's going on inside the company? Because I'm sure the debates are like, "We should do more of that. We got to do more of this." What is some of more of this and that? What are some of the things you're looking at to bring more value?

Brandon Davito

>> Yeah. Our big push is how do we make these systems more business impacting and really think about precision and recall? So, how accurate do these systems need to be to be able to drive real business value? And I think, in some cases, they need to be really spot on. In other cases, when we think about AI where it's really flexible, I want to be able to understand people walking dogs, doesn't matter as much, but when you're talking about personal protective equipment on a construction site, in a warehouse, it's mission-critical and those systems have to work incredibly well. And so, really balancing that, what is the right levels of precision-

John Furrier

>> And you hit all that with the cameras. You got supply chain all the way through point-of-sale.

Brandon Davito

>> 100%, and cross industry.

John Furrier

>> All right. Talk about the dynamic... One of the things I'm very fascinated with, and I've been watching this very carefully, Jensen Huang from NVIDIA said in DC at his last event, "Adoption's critical for AI because once you get adoption, you start getting into it-"

Brandon Davito

>> Well, and you get data and you can improve.

John Furrier

>> Take me through, because you guys have a nice use case because cameras are a very obvious solution because you can see things. And of course, there's a lot of data in there. We'll get that in a second. But take me through an example of a customer that they get engaged, they get the cameras and they go, "Oh, my God. This is really cool." And then, they start enabling new stuff there. What are some of those best practices or use cases where once they get going, the things start to click, they start integrating in other datasets. What is the progression of that kind of wow factor? And then, how does that translate into business?

Brandon Davito

>> Typically, we start out with safety and security use cases. I want to make sure that location X is safe if there's any break-ins. Now, we're seeing, in the retail context, retail operations is getting involved. I want to understand the impact of my marketing promotion. We've got a large retailer in Hawaii, I want to understand if the bikinis are located here or the flip-flops are located there. What's the impact when I'm doing promotions store-by-store, being able to pull that data together and then starting to engage other teams. And so, the retail operations folks, did my staff show up on time? Do I have the right staffing levels at certain times of day? Is it closed when it should be open? How do I get that information and be able to pull back? So, it's really hitting across all the different parts.

John Furrier

>> A lot of operationals.

Brandon Davito

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> So, the first low-hanging fruit is, "I got a problem. Theft, safety-"

Brandon Davito

>> "I got to keep people safe. I want the best cameras and here's the place to start," and then thinking about all the rest of the use cases.

John Furrier

>> And you guys feel good about bringing that customer through that journey end-to-end?

Brandon Davito

>> What we've seen is that over 77% of our customers are using multiple products. So, they typically start with cameras. Then, they get into alarms and access control, environmental sensors. They're delivering new ways for the CEO to be able to get into the doors using his mobile device. They're keeping their warehouses safe because if there's bad guys, there's deterrents that's talking down and telling the folks to get off the property.

John Furrier

>> So, a lot of aha moments, basically?

Brandon Davito

>> 100%.

John Furrier

>> What are some of those aha moments that you could share that you think are cool, that jump out for you, that you can share? You don't have to name names, but share a situation where they go, "Oh, wow. I had no idea this was going to happen."

Brandon Davito

>> Yeah. We've got a large retailer that sells and rents heavy equipment. They have big yards and they have teams. Frankly, folks are hopping over fences and taking gear or pretending to doing pickups in the middle of the night and very expensive property walks off the yard. We've built out an AI deterrent suite that will identify if people are on-site, start talking down in a very nice way. "Hey, sir, by the way, you shouldn't be here. It's 3:00 in the morning." And starts progressively, "You in the white shirt, you look like your trouble. I'm starting to call the cops," and people turn tail and run. And so, having that type of engagement is a really powerful tool.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, awesome. All right. Final question. NRF, obviously, always kicks off the year right after CES, like clockwork. What's the theme of the show so far? We're one day in. What's the vibe? What are some of the conversations in the hallways? What are, that you can share, that's not on the obvious agenda?

Brandon Davito

>> So, certainly, AI is the talk of the town, and a lot of the push is agentic AI. So, what are the bots and what are the experiences that we can drive? What's interesting is a lot of the retailers want to own those experiences. And so, thinking about how they can still personalize it, how they can deliver something that feels native to the brand, but is still something that drives efficiency, drives personalization and helps them drive conversion is huge.

John Furrier

>> Awesome. Well, thanks for coming in. Real appreciate you being part of our Retail Trailblazers. Put a plugin for the company where you guys are at, what are you looking to do? What do you optimize for? What's the focus?

Brandon Davito

>> Yeah. So, again, Verkada, it's a security platform for large enterprises. We have over 100 of the Fortune 500. We're driving into larger and larger enterprise with a suite of six different product lines that all tie together in a native way. So, if you're managing thousands of sites, you've got hundreds of thousands of users and you need to have a single pane of glass across all those, there's no better platform and the cloud is making us better and better.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I mean, and obviously with computer vision and AI, the obvious ones that everyone's always asking for, "Hey, I wish I had a solution for the theft. I wish I had a solution for the safety."

Brandon Davito

>> "I wish I had eyes across all my locations. I want to know what's the retail store experience look like," that's something we can deliver-

John Furrier

>> Eyes on retail. That sounds like a great series.

Brandon Davito

>> There we are.

John Furrier

>> Brandon, thanks for coming in. I really appreciate you.

Brandon Davito

>> Great talking.

John Furrier

>> Great stopping by. Appreciate it.

Brandon Davito

>> Thanks a lot.

John Furrier

>> All right. We're covering the retail leaders because retail is transforming... It's not just the consumer experience. It's the technical architecture that's going to bring in a whole nother era. Again, all the signs point to this as a transformative moment. This is a key piece where AI will come in from supply chain to the boardroom, everything in between. theCUBE's got you covered. Thanks for watching.