ASIS and the Protective Intelligence Shift

ASIS Recognizes the New Paradigm: A Shift Toward Protective Intelligence

A Profession at a Turning Point

The annual Global Security Exchange (GSX) conference, hosted by ASIS International, has long served as a barometer for the security profession. The 2025 gathering in New Orleans represented more than an industry congregation. As over 15,000 security professionals from nearly 100 nations convened for more than 200 educational sessions, a clear theme emerged: the security landscape has changed and demands an evolution in how we protect people and assets. This shift was crystallized through two landmark standards: the ASIS Executive Protection Standard and the ANSI/ASIS School Security Standard.

These documents signal a unified pivot: away from reactive, asset-centric physical security toward a proactive, intelligence-led strategy focused on identifying and mitigating threats before they manifest. In the new era, protective intelligence is not a peripheral function. It is the engine that turns standards into living, effective, resilient programs.

The New Abnormal

Leaders at GSX 2025 described a complex risk environment where traditional assumptions are no longer valid. The keynote address by Ian Bremmer defined a "G-Zero world" with a leadership vacuum. Consequences: sustained geopolitical tension, volatility, and limited ability to address global crises. For security teams, this translates into tangible risks: conflict spillover, civil instability, supply chain shocks, and new vectors of threat from aggrieved state or non‑state actors. Risk is diffuse, transnational, and unpredictable. This demands constant, global protective intelligence rather than static, location‑based presence.

The Tangible Manifestations of Volatility

General public anger increasingly blurs into targeted violence against visible leaders. Reputation itself has become a threat vector. Cited examples included political assassinations and attacks on corporate leaders, reinforcing that modern threat actors may be strangers radicalized by online discourse and narratives. Protective intelligence must therefore include continuous monitoring of public and digital sentiment around principals, families, and organizations. The core question expands from "Who is a threat?" to "What ideas and narratives are creating a permissive environment for violence?"

The AI Revolution: A Double‑Edged Sword

AI is becoming mission‑critical infrastructure for defenders and adversaries. Security teams must integrate AI to amplify human strategy while countering AI‑enabled fraud, spoofing, and disinformation. Protective intelligence must fuse digital and physical domains: deepfake risk, social engineering, phishing against executives, and narrative manipulation all translate to physical risk.

Redefining Duty of Care: Inside the ASIS Executive Protection Standard

Released September 23, 2025, the Executive Protection Standard is a comprehensive framework that elevates executive protection from a reactive service to a strategic function. It emphasizes leadership commitment, policy, resource allocation, and explicit inclusion of intelligence gathering as a core operational procedure. The head of protection is reframed as a senior risk manager. The standard's pillars depend on timely collection, expert analysis, and discreet dissemination of intelligence.

The Intelligence Link: Making the Standard Actionable

Every pillar depends on protective intelligence: risk assessments need actor intent and capability; program design needs an intelligence‑led understanding of the environment; close protection is optimized by detailed briefs; continuous improvement relies on feedback loops. Organizations can build or partner to obtain a 24/7 intelligence function aligned to these requirements.

A Blueprint for Resilience: The ASIS School Security Standard

Released August 27, 2025, the School Security Standard provides a multi‑disciplinary framework beyond simple hardening. Its three pillars: Physical Security, Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM), and Emergency Operations Planning. Elevating BTAM institutionalizes protective intelligence in public‑facing environments. BTAM's "collect, analyze, mitigate" mirrors corporate protective intelligence processes.

Broader Applications

The standard is directly applicable to universities and healthcare systems that share open‑campus challenges, transient populations, emotionally charged contexts, and insider‑threat risk. A protective intelligence firm can leverage the standard as a blueprint and provide expertise to build BTAM and related processes.

The Intelligence Engine

The two ASIS standards provide the blueprint. Protective intelligence is the engine that operationalizes the blueprint into resilient capability. An intelligence‑first posture prevents harm by understanding and mitigating threats before they materialize.

From Blueprint to Reality: The Consultant's Role

Implementation is not plug‑and‑play. It requires interpretation, customization, and management. Executive protection and school safety environments both demand a dedicated protective intelligence capability and multidisciplinary collaboration to meet the standards in practice.

Conclusion and Call to Action

In this new environment, reactive posture equals failed posture. The expectation is proactive, strategic, and intelligence‑led risk management. The standards provide the "what" and "why." A protective intelligence consultancy provides the "how."