From reactive to ready: How agencies are rethinking public safety technology

Digital transformation and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) took the spotlight at MTX (Milipol TechX) 2026.  

At the homeland security event, held between April 28-30, experts in cybersecurity, technology, and public safety explored next-generation security solutions for a smarter and safer future. 

GovInsider spoke with DXC Technology at the sidelines of the event to explore how government agencies should approach digital transformation, cybersecurity, and AI developments so that innovation walks hand in hand with security.  

These are the main insights from the interviews, which you may access here. 

Achieving predictability

DXC Technology’s Consulting Partner, Strategy, Advisory & Research, Dr Alex Kokkonen, noted that governments were embedding governance in the process of developing AI-ready capabilities, rather than placing governance on the sidelines.

This was a key aspect of not just being successful in digital transformation but also having the foundations ready to implement solutions that brought benefits to the organisation.  

A salient solution that emerged was the Agentic Control Tower (ACT), which leveraged AI to enhance command capabilities through monitoring, predictive insights, and decision-making support. 

The ACT enabled the move from reactive to predictive public safety as authorities could move beyond situational awareness to ready and intelligence-led operations, shared DXC Technology’s Singapore Managing Director, See Sing Ng. 

DXC Technology’s Head of Cybersecurity in ASEAN, Om Rai, added that for anticipatory operations to be trustworthy, the security infrastructure underneath had to be built for it from the ground up. 

He emphasised that operationalising AI came down to three non-negotiables: explainability, auditability, and model integrity. 

“If an AI model is drawing data from multiple agencies to anticipate a threat, every one of those data pipelines needs to be verified, every access point needs to be authenticated, and every inference the model makes needs to be auditable,” said Om, noting that a zero-trust architecture was required as a design principle for every layer. 

That was where security teams should take a proactive approach to ensure the AI will not compromise future operations, noted Om. 

“Accountability still rests with humans. AI should be augmenting the decision, not replacing the decision-maker, and this needs to be enforced architecturally,” he added. 

“It’s about being proactive wherever possible and being on the front foot,” said Kokkonen.  

What it takes to succeed in digital transformation 

The organisations that were making progress in digital transformation were those that embraced the future landscape, said Kokkonen.  

She explained that agentic AI was one of the forces impacting security models, converging physical and cyber security as the network became more interdependent, interconnected, and integrated.  

The Agentic Security Operations Centre (SOC) was an example of this.  

Rai shared that the Agentic SOC deployed agents for autonomous detection, investigation, and response at machine speed, reducing manual investigation time. 

For organisations that handle great volumes of alerts and risk analyst fatigue, the agents help to detect over 6,000 alerts in disconnected siloes to be seen in one unified view, in addition to providing remediation strategies ready to be executed. 

With modern solutions like the Agentic SOC, cybersecurity teams can stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats, Rai noted.

He added that the agencies who are succeeding in digital transformation show a different level of maturity by looking to continuously improve detection, response, and recovery times. 

“The organisations that are ahead have included cyber security into their operational excellence,” he said, highlighting the need to treat cybersecurity as a capability rather than a compliance activity. 

The role of zero-trust  

According to Om, zero-trust is the most important security posture shift for public safety, as a compromised system could affect an active operation.  

“The biggest misconception I encounter is that zero-trust is a product you procure. It’s not. It’s a philosophy: never trust, always verify—whether that’s a user, a device, an application, or a data request. You verify continuously, not just at the point of login,” he explained. 

The organisations that are ahead, have started implementing zero-trust with identity, implementing measures to authorise who and what is accessing the systems. From there, micro-segmentation, monitoring, and least-privilege accesses could be added on, he said. 

While Singapore stood as a regional leader in cybersecurity maturity, Om noted that the agencies in the region were moving through this maturation curve faster than they did in previous years, given that the threat environment has enhanced the urgency for more secure postures. 

Embracing strategic partnerships  

Kokkonen emphasised the importance of nurturing and expanding partner networks as we moved forward. 

Since many challenges that governments and organisations faced were too complex to solve alone, partnerships could help to develop resilience and adaptability to increasing changes. 

Om highlighted that strategic partnerships provide shared accountability, visibility, and escalation paths.  

“The relationship only works if there’s genuine knowledge transfer happening, not just service delivery,” said Om, adding that the regional teams have context on the threat landscape their clients operate in, so that the security is contextualised to their environment. 

“We have a challenging geopolitical landscape that inspires us to think how can we become more resilient? How can we make our processes, systems, and ecosystems more resilient and adaptive to what may occur in the future?” Said Kokkonen. 

In a separate presentation at MTX, Kokkonen noted that in the next five years, public safety would depend on these predictive and future-ready capabilities to prevent and respond to challenges.  

In the future, strategic partnerships could help to enhance these proactive and predictive capabilities, toward the shared goal of ensuring digital ecosystems are ahead of every crisis.