ADT Commercial recently appointed its first-ever director of artificial intelligence. In this new role, Philippe Sawaya will lead the company’s efforts in the development and deployment of AI to support the specialized needs of commercial customers across industries. 

Sawaya leads a newly formed AI team to help mobilize ADT Commercial’s purposeful innovation efforts by building the tools necessary to automate and streamline commercial customers’ security programs to encourage adoption of future technologies. 

He first joined the organization when ADT Commercial acquired Percepta in 2020, a technology company that he co-founded with the mission to develop ethical computer vision-based analytics by utilizing anonymized data — addressing the issue of inherent biases prevalent in many of today’s analytics. 

“It is precisely this kind of ingenuity and forward-thinking that we know will be key to our success as innovators in the commercial security space, and we’re thrilled to have him as a leader as we look to disrupt and revolutionize the industry,” said Ed Bacco, vice president, emerging technologies for ADT Commercial. 

Prior to founding Percepta, Sawaya studied robotics and computer vision at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he was selected to join the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) laboratory. His work at GRASP focused on implementing video pose estimation models and training convolutional neural networks.