Motorola Solutions Highlights AI-Powered Public Safety Growth at Conference

Motorola Solutions NYSE: MSI is seeing continued strength in state and local public-safety budgets and good traction on the federal side, according to Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Mahesh Saptharishi.

Speaking with Piper Sandler’s Jim Fish, Saptharishi said the company’s public-safety products are generally viewed as essential purchases rather than discretionary spending. “Everything that we provide is a need to have more than a nice to have,” he said, adding that this gives Motorola Solutions prioritization within customer budget frameworks.

Saptharishi said Motorola Solutions has been applying machine learning and artificial intelligence for years, including through Avigilon, the video-security business it acquired. The company’s approach has been to build AI capabilities directly into core workflows rather than offer them as separate tools, he said. For example, the company’s VESTA NXT 911 platform includes native AI features for real-time transcription, language translation, form completion and incident summaries. Those summaries can be sent to APX NEXT devices used by responders in the field, according to Saptharishi.

He said all 911 orders received during the past few quarters included the company’s AI capabilities. Customers have selected the “assist” tier, the highest tier of the offering, contributing to higher average selling prices across the company’s workflow applications, he said.

Motorola Solutions is also combining audio and video data to help officers create more complete incident narratives. Saptharishi said body-worn cameras may not capture conversations heard through an officer’s radio earpiece. By integrating body-camera audio, land mobile radio audio and relevant 911 call audio, the company aims to help agencies generate more accurate reports and identify gaps in incident timelines.

The company is in the early stages of refreshing public-safety communications infrastructure with its D-Series platform. Saptharishi said the updated core virtualizes capabilities that previously relied on dedicated hardware, potentially reducing the required physical footprint by 80% and energy costs by as much as 90%. At the base-station level, the D-Series introduces sectorized antennas designed to tailor coverage to customer requirements instead of broadcasting uniformly in all directions. Saptharishi said the combination could improve customers’ total cost of ownership. He cited St. Louis as a recent substantial D-Series win and said the pipeline is strong, while noting that infrastructure refreshes will occur over an extended period because customers replace systems gradually. Such infrastructure agreements can span multiple years or, in some cases, decades, he said.

Addressing whether cellular networks could eventually replace land mobile radio, or LMR, Saptharishi said public-safety agencies prioritize coverage and resilience. He said cellular networks can face coverage limitations in basements, urban canyons and other difficult locations, while a failure at a cell tower can interrupt communications for users relying on that site. By comparison, he said, LMR networks are private and dedicated to a specific public-safety customer. If a network or site fails, radios can still communicate at the site level or directly between devices through a direct mode feature.