Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the movie by now, you likely know that the “twist” in the 1999 movie “The Sixth Sense” was that the psychologist played by Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. He just didn’t know it.

Which makes me think of a question for the security industry: Are silos dead, too?

In this month’s cover story, “State of the Market: Security’s ‘Sixth Sense’ Drives Intrusion & Smart Home, managing editor Bri Wilson explores the growing demand for updated systems that integrate AI-driven proactive security with convenient lifestyle solutions.

“People desperately want to remain informed about what’s going on,” Wilson writes, quoting dealer Samuel Korff of JM Resources: “We’ve historically had five senses as humans, but I think there is a sixth sense that everyone has, which is wanting to be in the know.”

Wilson continues, “End users don’t want siloed platforms. They want to know what’s going on in their properties at all times — from an intrusion standpoint, but also spanning thermostat, light and shading control, cameras and more. Customers want these systems to talk to each other, and they want these capabilities integrated into one platform.”

This demand for interoperability is not just visible in smart homes; this same shift is happening across enterprise security environments. The integration push at the enterprise level is happening both because of the capabilities brought about by AI and because more companies are trying to do more with less, increase their ROI and, most importantly, gain insights into their business that systems like access control are perfectly placed to provide.

This demand for interoperability is not just visible in smart homes; this same shift is happening across enterprise security environments.

In my feature, “Beyond the Buzzwords: What Security Integration Really Looks Like Today, I explore some of the biggest buzzwords in the industry and how they relate to integration. One I hear constantly at trade shows and conferences is “one pane of glass,” which is sort of the enterprise equivalent of the smart home hub.

In the article, Bret Holbrook of dormakaba North America says, “Customers are increasingly looking for solutions that deliver a unified, seamless experience across their environment. The ability to bring systems together into a more connected ecosystem, often described as a ‘single pane of glass,’ helps reduce complexity. … At the same time, many organizations are still working with legacy systems, which can make the integration more complex,” he says. “Without interoperability, systems can become siloed, creating operational inefficiencies and increasing risk.”

For as long as I have been writing about access control — and it is a long time — I have been hearing about the siloed and proprietary nature of access control and how hard it is to get two access control systems to talk to each other. So one of the things that really caught my attention when researching this article was the emergence of new approaches that that may finally help overcome this last barrier to interoperability. On the AI front, there is the recent emergence of AI Agent-friendly APIs that can allow security integrators to write integrations not possible before.

And on the manufacturing front, companies such as AMAG Technology are now partnering on access-to-access integrations that would have been difficult, or impossible, only a few short years ago.

All of which leads me to wonder whether, like the character in the movie, siloed systems may already be on their way out. The question is, has the security industry realized it yet?