Regional leaders and global experts gathered in Dubai to demonstrate how open-platform video technology is driving smarter mobility, stronger safety, and greater cyber resilience in today’s cities.
Milestone Systems, a world leader in data-driven video technology, recently completed Milestone
Xperience Days (MXD) Dubai 2025 with a plenary of live demos and an ecosystem that focused on how open-platform video technology is moving beyond security into traffic, mobility, and city operations.
The event brought together customers, partners, and technology allies from across the region to discuss practical AI adoption, cyber-hardening of video deployments, and edge-to-cloud architectures for large, distributed estates.
“AI is breaking new ground in video technology, transforming how we detect, interpret, and respond to what’s happening in real time,” said Louise Bou Rached, Director for the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa at Milestone Systems. “We are already seeing strong outcomes: applying advanced video analytics to traffic and crowd flows, cities can accelerate response times across complex urban environments, enable real-time alerts with higher accuracy and ease operator workloads by minimizing false positives.”
What MXD Dubai 2025 delivered
- Open platform at scale: Sessions highlighted standards-driven interoperability (including ONVIF) and continuous device testing to keep multi-vendor estates flexible without lock-in. This has been identified as a priority given how GCC customers expand city and critical-infrastructure footprints.
- AI for mobility and major venues: Case discussions highlighted how real-time video intelligence can assist with incident spotting (for instance, vehicles driving the wrong way and pedestrian anomalies), crowd movement, and congestion to help teams act sooner with fewer false positives.
- Edge-to-cloud reliability: Demonstrations stressed hybrid designs such as using local recording for continuity and cloud for scale while having central oversight to support multi-site rollouts to optimize bandwidth.
- Responsible data for better AI: Milestone also spotlighted Project Hafnia, an initiative that provides developers with access to large volumes of high-quality, compliant, annotated and anonymized real-world video data so video-language-models (VLM’s) can be trained faster and more responsibly. Project Hafnia aims to reduce the time and cost of AI development by up to 30x and was introduced earlier this year in collaboration with NVIDIA.
Region-specific priorities
Speakers linked the MXD program to the Gulf’s city and infrastructure agendas that include everything from safer roads and smoother event operations to more efficient use of storage and energy in large, camera-dense environments.
“Bringing together partners, customers, and vendors across the ecosystem is essential to having meaningful discussions on how we address real business challenges. As a hub for innovation and digital transformation, these collaborations take on even greater importance in Dubai and the GCC. By combining diverse regional perspectives, we can better identify evolving needs and leverage AI-driven video technologies to deliver solutions that are innovative, practical, and future-ready,” said Martin Stockfleth Larsen, Chief Marketing Officer of Milestone Systems.
The company reported sustained momentum in the adoption of video management software (VMS) across the Middle East, driven by rising demand for open-platform ecosystems, cyber-resilient solutions, and AI-powered operations across both public and private sectors.
