Summary: At ISC West 2026, Verkada took a creative approach to demonstrating their cloud-based, AI-first security platform by rebuilding the Louvre museum in their booth and inviting attendees to solve a crown jewel heist using Verkada’s own technology. Part 1 of our coverage walks through that experience and the core capabilities it demonstrated, including AI-powered freeform video search, unified timeline investigation, facial and appearance recognition, face-based access control, and alarm integration. This post breaks down how each feature works and what it means for real-world security operations.
Trade show booths tend to blend together after a few hours on the floor. Product displays, demo stations, slide decks running on loop. Verkada took a different approach at ISC West 2026. They rebuilt the Louvre museum from the ground up inside their booth and invited attendees to solve a crown jewel heist using their own security platform.
It was one of the more memorable booth experiences at the show, and more importantly, it put Verkada’s core technology through a real investigative workflow in a way that a standard product demonstration simply cannot replicate. Here is what the experience revealed about their platform and what it means for organizations thinking about their security strategy.
What Verkada Builds
Verkada is a cloud-based, AI-first security platform. Their product line covers cameras, access control, alarms, and environmental sensors, all unified under a single software platform called Verkada Command. Command is accessible from any browser, laptop, or mobile device, which means operators and administrators have full visibility into their environment from anywhere without needing to be on-premises or connected to a dedicated workstation.
The platform is built around the idea that AI should reduce the workload on security teams rather than add to it, surfacing only the events and alerts that actually require attention while filtering out the noise that leads to alert fatigue.
The Louvre Experience: A Real Investigative Workflow
The premise of the booth demo was straightforward. The crown jewels had been stolen. Attendees stepped into the role of a security investigator and used Verkada’s tools to identify the suspect and recover the license plate needed for a police arrest.
The investigation unfolded through a series of Verkada features working together in sequence, and the flow of it illustrated something that is hard to convey in a standard product demo: how these tools work as a connected system rather than a collection of individual features.
Step one was visitor check-in. Upon entering the booth, attendees registered through Verkada Guest, Verkada’s visitor management system. A badge photo was taken during check-in, and that photo became a biometric credential tied to the visitor’s identity for the rest of the experience. Within minutes, face unlock was active and the visitor’s face functioned as an access control credential anywhere in the booth.
Step two was AI-powered video search. The investigation began with three pieces of information: the date of the theft, the location of the crime, and an eyewitness description of the suspect as someone dressed like a janitor. In a traditional system, an operator would scrub through hours of recorded footage from multiple cameras to find the relevant moment. With Verkada, the investigator typed a plain English search directly into the platform: janitor at crown jewel display on March 11th. The system returned the correct footage immediately.
That freeform search capability is one of the more practically significant features Verkada demonstrated. It removes the technical barrier between an investigator and the footage they need, making the system accessible to anyone regardless of their familiarity with the platform.
Step three was Unified Timeline. The suspect was wearing a mask, which meant facial recognition alone was not going to be enough to track him through the building. By clicking directly on the person in the footage, Verkada’s Unified Timeline feature stitched together every camera sighting of that individual into a single chronological view using both facial recognition and appearance recognition. Even with the mask obscuring his face, the system tracked the suspect using the visual characteristics of his clothing and build.
Following that timeline, the investigation traced the suspect from the crown jewel exhibit, down the staircase, and out of the building to his getaway vehicle, where a PTZ camera operating in sentry mode automatically tracked and zoomed in on the subject without a live operator directing it. The final frame captured the license plate.
The full investigation, from search to license plate, took minutes rather than hours.
Step four was access control and alarm integration. To return the recovered crown jewels to the display case, the alarm system first had to be disarmed. Because the visitor’s face had been enrolled as a credential during check-in, a simple face scan at the reader disarmed the system and granted access. To re-arm it afterward, a double badge tap on the reader locked it back down. The interaction demonstrated how Verkada’s access control and alarm systems communicate directly with each other, eliminating the need to manage them as separate platforms.
What This Means Beyond the Demo
The Louvre experience was designed to be engaging, but the underlying capabilities it demonstrated map directly to real-world security operations. AI-powered freeform search, appearance-based tracking, automated PTZ response, and integrated alarm and access control are not demo-only features. They are the tools that determine how quickly a security team can respond to and investigate an actual incident.
For organizations currently relying on systems that require manual footage review, separate platforms for video and access control, or alert-heavy setups that create operator fatigue, Verkada’s platform represents a meaningfully different approach to how those problems get solved.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we continue our Verkada booth tour through the AI gallery and explore how their platform is being applied to safety, operations, and business intelligence well beyond traditional security use cases.
Want to learn more about what Verkada could look like in your environment? Contact the NCS team to schedule a consultation and we can walk through the platform and what it would mean for your specific needs.
Learn more about Verkada and their full platform at verkada.com.
