This is the Electe Review. Today, Artificial Intelligence Video Analytics, a 2026 Guide. The pitch is simple. Point a camera at anything, a warehouse floor, a checkout line, a parking lot, and AI turns the footage into a stream of business insight. Security teams get automated threat detection. Retailers get foot traffic patterns, shelf stock alerts, and customer behavior data. The promise is efficiency, machines watching so humans don't have to. That promise deserves scrutiny before it deserves adoption. Every one of these systems runs on the same premise: constant recording, constant analysis, constant retention of footage of people who never explicitly agree to be data points. The guide frames this as a business upgrade. It is also a surveillance upgrade, and the two are not the same thing wearing different clothes. Security use cases are the easiest to justify, spotting a break-in, flagging a hazard. Retail is murkier, tracking how long a shopper lingers at a shelf, or how their face reacts to a price display. Is analytics dressed up as convenience? The guide's framing treats this as a natural evolution. It doesn't ask who owns that footage, how long it's kept, or what happens when the same tool that counts customers starts profiling them. There's also the accuracy problem no vendor likes to dwell on. AI video systems still misidentify, still misclassify, still generate false positives, and those errors land unevenly, often on the people least equipped to contest them. A 2026 guide that walks through use cases without walking through failure rates is only telling half the story. The technology works. That's not in dispute. What's in dispute is whether it works is the same as it should be deployed everywhere on everyone by default. Businesses adopting these tools are making a decision about their customers and employees, not just their operations. And that decision deserves more than a guide's worth of consideration. Watch this space, not just the cameras, that's the review.