Genetec’s Framework for Long-Term Technological Leadership

At the Genetec Global Press Summit ‘26 in Montreal, Canada, Genetec CEO and President Pierre Racz spoke about long-running pillars for technological leadership: cooperation, architecture, and truth.

Why Racz believes cooperation is the key to lasting tech relationships

Racz highlighted that values-based cooperation is a strategic foundation, emphasizing the relational over technical. The cooperation between organizations succeeds because of shared values, not necessarily because of contracts or optimization models.

“One of the values is that we’d rather lose the deal than lose the relationship,” says Racz.

This principle fundamentally reframes incentives. Rather than maximizing each transaction, Genetec prioritizes durability and trust. Profitability fluctuates, but relationships can establish consistency.

“Not every deal we make the same amount of money,” said Racz. “Sometimes we make more, sometimes we make less … but this value-based leadership is that we understand each other when there’s a failure. We roll our sleeves up and we solve it.”

Shared outcomes and co-creation: the deal impact

Establishing this trust also helps enable long-term innovation. Their partnerships are not vendor-to-customer, but rather a co-creative experience.

“50 percent of the features that [we] add to the product are invented by our partners and our end users,” Racz explains.

Durable cooperation – rooted in shared values rather than transactional leverage – is the strategic precondition for everything that follows.

Architecture, scale, and the logic of cooperation

Racz also spoke about the connection of technical architecture to game theory and systemic resilience.

Utilizing the CAP theorem framework, Racz discussed how systems must balance consistency, availability, and partition tolerance – extending the concept of “partition” beyond physical outages to include logical and economic separation.

How flexibility builds lasting trust and data governance

Among the crucial design principles for Genetec, Racz states, is that customers should not be trapped.

“We do not monetize our customers’ data, and we will not hold their data hostage,” he said.

In support of this, Genetec differentiates between core elements, which operate independently, and service elements, which rely on ongoing vendor resources. If disconnection occurs, the system can degrade, but not collapse.

This architecture protects autonomy and resilience. It acknowledges real-world failure – technical, economic, or political – while preserving operational continuity.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma and open architecture

In discussing long-term technological leadership, Racz used game theory to explain why open architecture is strategically superior.

Racz turns to the Prisoner’s Dilemma to illustrate how rational self-interest can lead to suboptimal collective outcomes. Cooperation, though seemingly risky, produces the highest total value, according to Racz.

“The enlightened player will actually realize this and will choose what at first glance is the irrational choice, which is to cooperate, but it turns out that that’s the global optimal,” Racz explains.

Racz also referenced Robert Axelrod’s tournament – a tournament of various strategies of the prisoner’s dilemma – and the success of the “tit-for-tat + forgiveness” strategy. 

The displayed tournament strategies can be seen as translating into ecosystem design, which include: 

• Nice (don’t defect first) 
• Retaliatory (respond to defection) 
• Forgiving
• Non-envious

Truth, AI, and accountability in the Information Age

Additionally, Racz argues that the security industry operates fundamentally in the domain of truth, saying that Genetec is in the business of truth.

“We are in the business of truth. Documents don’t lie, documents don’t die, and documents don’t forget,” Racz says.

In this framing, video and metadata are instruments of durable truth, however, this commitment stands in contrast to the current trajectory of AI. 

Racz added a refreshingly nuanced take on AI, critiquing large language models (LLMs) as statistical engines as opposed to reasoning entities.

“These technologies are [essentially] search engines. What they remember from their training set is impressionistic and statistical,” said Racz.

LLMs predict likelihood and not truth, according to Racz. The tools determine what is highly likely because that is what it has found in its training set.

Racz connects the current enthusiasm for AI to previous hype cycles – saying that each were followed by disappointment and correction. The issue is not that AI is useless, but that expectations exceed its knowledge capacity.

The throughline is consistent in all this: short-term maximization in deals, architecture, or AI hype ultimately undermines resilience. Cooperation, openness, and accountability are what generates superior long-term outcomes, despite sometimes appearing suboptimal in isolation.

Whether AI is overhyped or not, organizations are still dedicated to making significant investments in the space. Read more about Opkey debuting Design Studio, an agentic AI suite.