You can learn a lot about an industry by walking the floor at its largest gathering.
For CAP Index team members Kyle Andersen, Mitch Koch, and Kevin Kelly, GSX 2026 offered a chance to do exactly that. While each came to the show with a different level of experience in the security industry, all three were attending GSX for the first time.
After the show, we brought them together to compare notes on what surprised them, what they heard from security professionals, and what they came away understanding differently.
Kyle: The first thing that surprised me was just how much technology there was. Cameras, guards, gates, all these different products and services. I knew there would be a lot, but I don’t think I realized how much was actually out there.
And honestly, it made me think about our data a little differently. None of that technology is cheap. If you’re making those investments, you need good information to help decide where they actually belong.
Mitch: That was probably my biggest surprise too: just the sheer size of the industry. I’ve been at CAP for about a year, and I didn’t have much security industry experience before that. You realize very quickly that security is so much broader than you might think from the outside.
There were so many companies doing really specialized and innovative things.
Kevin: What surprised me was almost the opposite. The show was enormous, but the industry itself felt really small.
It seemed like every other person I met knew somebody I knew, had worked with somebody I knew, or had some other connection. I’ve only been in the industry for about four years, so seeing how interconnected everyone was really stood out to me.
A lot of responsibility. Not always a lot of people.
As the conversation continued, all three brought up another observation: the surprisingly small teams responsible for some very large security programs.
Kevin: I talked with a CSO who had recently moved from being a security consultant for the organization into running global security. And he told me, essentially, “It’s just me.”
I’ve seen that before. You might have a four-person team responsible for a Fortune 500 company’s footprint around the world. When your team is that small, you have to rely on outside resources and technology to do what you need to do.
Kyle: I had almost the exact same conversation with someone else. Her industry is expanding quickly, but the security team is basically her and one other person.
That gave me a much better appreciation for how much these teams are handling. They’re responsible for keeping a lot of people safe, and they’re doing it with limited resources. Anything that can make part of that job easier matters.
Mitch: I heard a version of that too. One of the conversations that stuck with me was with an organization that already had a lot of information, including its own internal data. What they were missing was a way to bring those different sources together and see the bigger picture.
Seeing CAP Index from the other side of the booth
For three team members accustomed to talking about CAP Index from inside the company, GSX also provided a chance to see how others in the industry viewed it.
Kyle: That was probably one of the coolest parts for me. A couple of times, people came to the booth because someone else had basically told them, “Go talk to CAP.”
There were also people who had used CAP at a previous company and wanted to bring colleagues from their new organization over to meet us. In sales, you obviously hear “no” plenty. It was nice to see the other side of that and hear directly from people who already saw the value in what we do.
Mitch: I had a similar reaction. Being there gave me more context for CAP’s place in the industry. We’ve been doing this for decades, but seeing the company in that environment made that history and reputation much more tangible.
Kevin: As somebody newer to CAP, I noticed that too. People would walk by, recognize the logo and say they’d used us before.
But I came away with something else I hadn’t really thought about. I talked with consultants, distributors and other providers across the industry, and it made me realize we’re not only providing information to in-house security teams.
Our data can help a consultant support a recommendation. It can help someone determine where additional security resources make sense. It can help another provider give its customer a more objective basis for a decision.
I started seeing CAP less as one company operating in one piece of the security industry and more as a resource that can support decisions across the broader security ecosystems.
The challenge isn’t always getting more data
That distinction between having information and being able to use it became a recurring theme.
Kyle: These teams have so many decisions to make. That’s probably one of the biggest things I took away from the conversations I had. They need ways to make some of those decisions easier.
Even something like gathering local police incident data across locations can be incredibly time-consuming if you’re trying to do it yourself. If you’re responsible for locations all over the country, that’s a lot of work before you even get to deciding what to do with the information.
Kevin: That’s what really clicked for me at GSX. In this industry, people can get an enormous amount of data. You can subscribe to different feeds, use open-source intelligence, put dots on maps and pull information from all kinds of places.
The challenge isn’t necessarily getting more information. It’s figuring out what matters and turning it into something you can actually use to make a decision.
With small teams and limited budgets, those decisions matter. If you’re going to invest somewhere, you need to have confidence in why you’re doing it.
That’s where I better understood the role objective data can play. Sometimes it validates what you already believe. Other times, it challenges an assumption. Both are valuable.
Summary
For three first-time GSX attendees, that’s a lot to bring home from Atlanta.
And perhaps the biggest takeaway was also the simplest: security teams don’t necessarily need more information. They need trusted information that helps them decide what deserves their attention, where resources should go, and what action to take next.
What decisions is your security team trying to make?
Whether you’re prioritizing locations, evaluating security investments, or trying to make better use of the data you already have, the CAP Index team is here to help.
Connect with our team to learn more.
Recent Posts
Crime Analytics and Healthcare Security: Casey T. Harris on The HealthSpark
What GSX 2026 Told Us About Where Security Is Headed
