Motorola Solutions, Inc. (MSI) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Awesome. Well, good morning, everybody. Jim Fish with Piper Sandler. Hope you had a good start to your day. We've got Mahesh from Motorola here. Mahesh, thanks for joining us and welcome to Nashville.

Thank you for having me.

So one thing we've been asking every company kind of just to start is kind of lay of the land of where you guys see spending and budgets at this point. Obviously, you know, you guys are a little bit more exposed to public safety kind of budget, state, local, as well as government. So especially in the U.S. Fed and how are things looking?

I would say things are looking reasonably good on the state and local level. I think Jack Malloy articulates it the best, saying that state and local budgets are continuing to be strong. And everything that we provide is a need to have more than a nice to have. So we get prioritization within that budget framework as well. And on the federal side, we're seeing good traction. So I think we are not seeing an issue there.

So, you know, as we kind of talked about in April, you guys outlined kind of a, I'll say, a renewed AI strategy or a pivot, you know, rather than starting with that blank sheet of paper approach. What is Motorola doing now with helping responders via AI and what makes Motorola's approach the right approach?

Yeah, and maybe, Jim, if you allow me. Absolutely. It's so loud. Motorola didn't enter the AI space this year or last year or even the year before. We've been in this space for a very long time. My entire career, as an example, has been really focused on machine learning and AI applications and security and in public safety. I came into Motorola through the acquisition of Avigilon. And the way Avigilon really took market share from its competitors and grew actively is applying computer vision machine learning techniques right into our video management systems, our cameras, et cetera. And one of the lessons that we learned in that process was that having AI capabilities as a sidecar or an over-the-top application that helps users outside their normal course of their workflows, initially makes for a good proof of concept, but doesn't have that sustainable legs to it where it becomes the thing that gets actively adopted. So the tact we took at Avigilon that really led to our success early on is embedding a lot of these capabilities within our core applications. It is that same strategy and tactic we have taken into the public safety space as well. So as we think about our command center applications, be it 911, Vesta, computer-aided dispatch CAD, or even console applications across the board, that's the dispatcher suite that you were referring to. The more we thought about it, having stuff like transcription or translation capabilities capabilities be something that's an adjunct to the core workflows really didn't serve our users well. So we redesigned our core applications. Vesta Next, which we launched last year, has AI capabilities natively built into it. Native capabilities that actually facilitate transcription in real time as the user is, the call taker, is having a conversation with the caller, automatically recognizing that perhaps a call taker cannot understand the language that the caller is calling and being able to switch to a translated form immediately without having to wait for an interpreter to join the the 911 call line being able to fill out forms summarize send that summary to and to an apex next device with a with a responder in the field being able to communicate all those capabilities seamlessly behind the scene I think that is really where we see the embedded capacity of AI. 100% of the 911 orders that came in in the past few quarters have gone with our AI capabilities. And literally, because it's embedded, the customers choose a tier, the AI tier of our solution. That's the assist tier. That's the highest tier of our solution. And as a consequence, we have seen an ASP uplift across each one of our workflow applications because they are all choosing the assist tier. What the dispatcher suite and the responder suite allows us to do beyond the adoption of those individual applications is that when someone already has bought into Vesta, adds CAD to their portfolio, and wants to be able to add assist capabilities into their CAD solution, this just makes it an easier purchase decision because it's available as a suite.

Got it. And look, you guys sit at a kind of bit of a unique positioning, between LMR, access control, and that command center software. What's sort of the hardest engineering challenge in blending that voice communication with the high-bandwidth, real-time video streams?

Yeah, I would say it's less of a network challenge. It's a user experience challenge, and it's an opportunity to how we can leverage data more effectively. So let me just maybe talk briefly about the data portion of the story. We launched SVX last year. And one of the key things that SVX enables, along with the Command Central DEMS platform, digital evidence management platform in the background, and also our records platform, is the ability for officers to author narratives in an AI-assisted manner. And one of the issues that we saw very early on as a challenge for officers is that as they use their body-worn camera to capture what they see and they hear, a good chunk of information gets missed out because they're using an earpiece attached to their radio and having conversations and listening to conversations via the earpiece, which the body-worn camera never captures. So the officer is not actually capturing everything that he or she hears or sees within that body-wound camera recorded audio. By integrating all those pieces of information, audio both that's recorded by the body-wound camera, but also by the LMR audio streams that are captured in the background, and, by the way, 911 audio, which also becomes relevant, all that information now comes together to author a more accurate, more complete narrative post facto and that accurate narrative actually is what ends up saving the officer time so not just the first draft it's really through continued iteration where it's checked for accuracy you checked for making sure all details were included in it the ability for us to make sure there are no holes in that incident timeline via all the data points were able to collect

and coalesce that is the opportunity and that's video data with audio data with other data streams all bringing coming together in a particular application that makes that workflow much easier for the officer yeah and maybe just on the lmr side before kind of diving into some of what you just actually brought up but um you guys are going through this uh base station refresh on on the d series um i think you even just want to want a nice little refresh down in louisiana so um how's that refresh going why do customers need to kind of upgrade to this latest and great as D-Series?

Yeah, so some of the cool things that D-Series really brings into the table here is first, there's the core and there's the base station. Both of those together form the D-Series refresh. At the core, this new generation virtualizes a lot of the typical hardware-oriented capabilities that the customers deployed. And what that means is 80% less real estate footprint that they need to deploy the solution. And by the way, very significantly, up to 90% reduction in energy costs in actually managing the solution, which is starting to become a significant deal. Separately, at the base station level, what D-Series allows you to do is we have introduced this new thing called sectorized antennas. And what sectorized antennas does is allows us to customize coverage. And so, A, we can make sure our customers customers get the best possible coverage. Two, we can optimize it for where their needs are as opposed to just giving them a 360-degree blast of energy, which may not be useful in that particular circumstance. So effectively, from a TCO standpoint, this ends up being a much more significant advantage, benefit to the customer. We are seeing excellent engagement. St. Louis was our most recent win. It was a substantial win. And these customers, by the way, they're not getting, renewing their infrastructure services with us for a year or so. It's multi-year, multi-decades in some cases as well. So it's a significant thing. Pipeline's great, but this is a long, we're at the early stages of this, and it's going to take an extended period of time as customers slowly refresh their infrastructure.

So one of the questions we always get, and I'm sure you're at nauseam for talking about this, why won't LTE just replace LMR over time, especially as we become a little bit more video-centric?

Yeah, it's a good question. By the way, what public safety wants most from us is coverage and resilience. Those are the two things that really determine whether or not a particular technology is capable of serving the needs of our customers. Where LTE today has substantial weakness is one on coverage, And coverage not because of just raw, hey, is this area covered? It's because given the frequency at which typical cellular signals work, getting coverage right in a basement of a building or in the depths of some place where there's an urban canyon, there is questionable coverage irrespective of what other priority preemption and other things that the network starts to introduce. That remains a significant challenge. Secondly, it's a resilience problem. The resilience problem is one where, let's say, a cell tower fails. Everything fails. All communication goes down. You think about how an LMR network works. An LMR network, A, is private. It's a private network. It's dedicated to that customer's use just for public safety. Secondly, if the main site fails, the main network fails, the site still operates. So everything that's at the site level, everybody connected to that site can still continue to talk to each other. If the site fails, the devices can actually talk to each other. So if two officers are a mile apart, there's something called direct mode that our radios support, where they are able to have that conversation directly irrespective of what other infrastructure is alive. So at the end of it, resilience means that we can operate either with infrastructure, with partially available infrastructure, or with no infrastructure at all. And that is a significant difference and necessity compared to a typical cellular network. Now, if I take a step back, this can't be a question of LMR versus LTE, or even, for that matter of fact, LEO satellite capabilities, right? One of our core advantages is across our LMR infrastructure and our devices, we have software-based abstraction. It's an application that's the most common application that gets bundled with our Apex Next devices. It's called Smart Connect. What Smart Connect does is, in the eyes of the user, abstracts all their interactions with networks from what their needs are to communicate. So whether that's voice, whether that's video, whether that's messaging, whatever, we will choose the right, most available carrier in the background to make sure that that communication fits the need of the application and also is resilient across those different carriers. So at the end of the day, when you think about resilience and coverage, by making sure that LMR is part of the story, LTE is part of the story, satellite is part of the story, all within one device and also one infrastructure in the back end, D-Series sites also support LEO backhaul, by the way. You put all those pieces together, we are the solution that is maximally resilient while making sure the user never has to care whether they're using LMR, LTE, or LEO. It just works.

So maybe on that end, you brought up satellite here, LEO. Is it going to be this kind of... How do we think about that balance then between LMR and LEO? Why isn't satellite more of a threat?

So when you think about satellite today, the bandwidth download and the bandwidth upload is fairly limited, especially when you're thinking about it in a director device fashion so what leo today can reasonably support are things like messaging type of applications telemetry location data uh understanding where an officer is at any given moment uh today the available qos controls for audio are still in the in more or less in the non-existent stages where it's not a reliable replacement for for LMR the other thing is it's also just physics of the frequencies that are being used for director device communication through satellite there are higher frequencies and those frequencies don't penetrate structures hard structures that easily so if you have clear line of sight to the to the sky yes you're you're you may have good connectivity the moment you go within a building or in a sheltered area of any sort, which is where lots of incident responses happen, it ends up being unreliable, even if you had the bandwidth to have audio being uploaded. We do use Leo. Where Leo is useful is in our base stations, where we have an antenna that has a clear view of the sky, there's bandwidth upload, it's not a direct or device type of problem, it's not a device power problem. There, as a backup to effectively wired communication backhaul, Leo has a very clear role to play. It is like having fiber coming into your house and then using Wi-Fi for all your devices. I think there's a similar complementary relationship between everything that we do with LMR, LTE, and Leo.

Got it. One of the things that's been going on in the space broadly on public safety is, you know, a lot of, I'll say, flack around some data privacy. If you kind of get the reference there, but especially as you think about automated license plate readers and analytics, how is Motorola proactively collaborating with some of these communities and agencies to build trust and transparency around being responsible with AI?

Yeah, so anytime we think about any sort of data or AI-oriented product capability or product itself, for us, it starts with the should we do it question. And internally, we have a Motorola Technology Advisory Council. This bunch of people are cross-functional, so they are not just engineers, they're not product managers, they're not just in sales, it's across the entire organization. They represent a cross-section of the community that can come in and say, hey, we think that this is worthwhile to do, there's clear benefit to it, or no, this is probably something that we should not go after. So that's the first gate. The second is, once we decide that we're actually going to do it, we also very carefully enumerate the risks associated with fielding the technology. There's almost always a clear benefit, which is why we engage in the process, but then there may be some inadvertent things. It could be misuse of the technology. It could be whatever else that we say, okay, here are risks that we need to think about. And then we ask the question, can we figure out sufficiently good mitigation to these risks? And if the answer to that is yes, only then do we go continue. With quite a few things that are out there today in terms of data privacy and such, our first element to mitigation is we have incredibly tight audit controls. For one, public safety customers of ours, they own their data 100%. We use what we call a zero-trust sharing philosophy in that customer data doesn't get automatically shared. We don't make that choice at all. Then we give customers policy-level controls. If you're running an investigation, you need to first be able to enter things like case numbers associated with why you're running that investigation. Subsequently, you need to be able to enter a reason as to why you're running particular searches. That then allows for an audit log. That audit log can then be automatically sent to supervisors or other people who can verify to make sure that the reason why somebody used this capability was a justifiable reason within policy, et cetera. We also support our customers by providing them a transparency portal. So many of our customers have a transparency site, a website, where they... So these are the technologies that are in use. This is how the technology is being used. This is the data that's being collected. This is how that data is being used. This is when some data was accessed, and this is how it's being shared if they choose to share it. So from all that standpoint, that transparency element now is another tool for our customers to gain the confidence of their community. We also offer free certification and training to all our customers to both help them use the technology appropriately, but also help them with community-based conversations. We're part of a bunch of different standards organizations, APCO, NINA, ICERT, et cetera, to make sure that we are indeed making sure that from a policy, framework, thinking standpoint, we are consistent with what our communities are asking for as well. So those are just a few ways separately. I think we also try to make absolutely sure that we are compliant with all the laws and regulations and the landscape is changing rapidly. So we make sure we are proactive in understanding where the law is heading to and implementing those controls in advance of anything actually that's taking shape. So that's how we end up hopefully doing this in a very responsible way for our customers.

Makes sense. Maybe just moving over to drones, which is kind of the hot topic in the space. What's Motorola's strategy here with Silvis and now Defend as part of the family here? how are you thinking about sort of the detection versus mitigation side of drones and counter-drone DFR?

So to begin with, Sylvus focused on defense. Defend very much a public safety critical infrastructure play. So defend sounds like defense, but defend is not focused on defense. So in terms of SILVAS and where SILVAS is focused, it's really enablement for drone communications in the battlefield. It is making sure that when drones and autonomous vehicles of all sorts need to communicate in the battlefield where they could be jammed, where the communication could be intercepted in some way, where you need to make sure that the communications should not be detected in the first place. That is where Sylvus really shines. That is where the intellectual property that Sylvus brings out to the table is differentiated from everybody else in the space. That's why it's adopted as the default communication modality for Manet networks or unmanned systems as a whole. As part of that, we also have spectrum monitoring capabilities, which is understanding what kind of RF emissions are happening in the space to understand perhaps there's a drone that's coming in and enabling detection of that drone based upon RF emissions, but really focused on more defense-oriented problem sets. And that's also part of the syllabus portfolio. DEFEND extends that, but really from a public safety standpoint. This is our ability to not just detect drones based upon RF emissions, capture remote ID data from drones. And usually most consumer drones, what's called Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3 drones, that are above 250 grams in weight, they all need to broadcast a remote ID. DEFEND can capture that. DEFEND can capture RF emissions. Full-blown detection. But what sets DEFEND apart from everybody else is that they have a mitigation model. This mitigation model is one where it doesn't focus on destroying the drone or jamming all communication with the drone. We're able to take over control of the drone in populated areas and land it safely, which means that if you're trying to mitigate the presence of a malicious drone in a stadium or in a populated urban area, Defend is the only option you really have, which is why 11 out of the 12 FIFA stadiums, the stadiums that hosted FIFA, leveraged Defend as the key solution for mitigation and detection. So that is the Defend counter UAS story. And separately, on the drone as a first responder solution, which is also squarely focused on the public safety market, we have our strategic alliance with Brink. We recently increased our investment in Brink, and we are their exclusive channel into public safety in North America. We're tightly integrating that into our core solutions as well. And there again, where we see the evolution here, much like DEFEND, from a counter-UAI standpoint, was not just detection. Detection is a problem that there are many solutions for. It is a mitigation that really sets DEFEND apart, especially mitigation in urban populated areas. In the case of BRINK, where we see the DFR advantage really becoming a big deal, it's not just getting eyes on site as quickly as possible, but defense next generation drones can actually carry a payload they can actually deliver things that are needed whether that's a that's a personal flotation device defibrillator a narcan canister whatever else that you potentially may need it is actually an active participant in the response as opposed to just being eyes on site as quickly as possible so when you think about that silvis really anti-GM, low probability of detection, low probability of intercept, really sets it apart in the battlefield scenario for defense applications, unmanned systems. You think about defend, mitigation, unique capability for group one, two, and three drones in urban populated environments, public safety focused. And BRINK, really from a DFR standpoint, not just being eyes on site, but giving us a path where drones become an active participant of the response. That is where we see our drone strategy really taking shape.

Yeah. And maybe just on the video side quickly, you guys have been with Alta moving from on-prem to cloud. How's that playing out? How's that conversion been? And what differentiates Alta versus some of the competitors out there?

Yeah. So by the way, this week, there's a video security show called GSX that's in process right now in Atlanta. Actually, I think it ends today. And we introduced a new solution called Avigilon Extend. And one of the core things with Avigilon Extend is we are bringing together what historically used to be either strictly cloud, that is Alta, or strictly on-premises, which was Unity. Those two are converging to one platform. And to your question about migration, we want to make it very easy for our customers to not just migrate from on-premises to cloud if they think it's appropriate, but in many cases, it's actually the case that some customers, especially international customers, want to be on-premises, except in certain cases where they want to extend to the cloud. So we want to be as flexible as possible. At the end of the day, their choice as to what's cloud-hosted, they're free to make that choice. In many cases, they want to be fully cloud-managed. And what Avigilon Xtend does is it allows cloud management for their entire portfolio of products. And so we see this convergence between Alta and Unity actively happening. In terms of differentiation, first is Alta is an open platform. In other words, it allows us very flexibly to take over brownfield installation. Customers who previously perhaps weren't thinking about cloud, perhaps who have a deep investment in existing cameras or infrastructure, Alta has the capacity to take all of that, ingest that into its system, and offer a unified cloud-managed framework, along with all the analytics and AI capabilities that we offer on top of it. Over the past few years, we've added a numerous set of modules that are either vertical-specific or specific to particular use cases. Visitor management is a very good example. All that complements the Alta story in a manner where, with a single pane of glass, our end users can manage everything that they have on site, add new capabilities, without necessarily ripping and replacing everything that they already have spent money on in a timeline that is, I think, sensible for them. So we think that that is a powerful story. Operator, just a quick minute on that. Operator is our overall umbrella platform that then takes Alta video, now a Vigilon Extend video, access control data, integrates push-to-talk systems. So that for customers that have a security operations center, now they have one pane of glass, a single platform that is AI native, that orchestrates the response across everything that they're doing. And for customers who do not have a physical security operations center, operator is the agentic platform that will handle their response for them and really make that something where you're not just getting video or access control as an insurance policy. when something goes wrong, you have evidence after the fact, you can actually actively prevent, mitigate that incident as well in a fairly automated way, including, by the way, escalations to public safety. So when you look at all of that, that's how Alta and our video security portfolio is quite different from, I think, what other options in the market.

Awesome. Well, we're out of time, but we could talk about this for a long, a lot more if possible. But appreciate you joining us, appreciate everybody in the audience, and have a good rest of your day. Thank you, Jim.