Key metrics
3 campuses across Monterrey
75%–97% faster investigations – from 1–3 hours to 5–15 minutes
Faster response and clearer communication with staff and parents
For more than 50 years, the American Institute of Monterrey (AIM) has served students in Mexico with a holistic educational experience grounded in academic excellence, innovation, values, and student wellbeing. Part of Inspired Education Group, AIM operates three campuses in Monterrey and serves children from ages 2 to 18.
But like many multi-campus schools, AIM’s security environment had not kept pace with the needs of a fast-moving operation. Before Verkada, the school relied on fragmented security systems, on-premise recording, local storage, and manual review processes. That made it difficult to get quick answers when incidents occurred. Accessing footage could take hours, investigations often required coordination across multiple teams, and visibility across campuses was limited.
“At AIM, I lead facilities, operations, and safety across three campuses,” said Richard Colter, Projects & Operations Manager at Inspired Education Group. “With Verkada, we’ve moved from reactive investigations to real-time visibility and faster decision-making across our campuses.”
Replacing fragmented infrastructure with a unified, cloud-managed approach
As AIM’s operations grew, the limitations of its legacy setup became harder to ignore. What should have taken minutes could take hours, creating delays in response, reducing confidence during active situations, and increasing operational risk. The team evaluated multiple providers, but many relied on fragmented systems and heavy infrastructure. AIM chose Verkada because it offered a cloud-managed platform that was simple to use, scalable, and capable of delivering real-time visibility across campuses without adding complexity. By storing footage onboard each camera rather than relying on NVRs or DVRs, Verkada helped reduce the burden of managing legacy, on-premise infrastructure while enabling cloud-based access and centralized management across campuses.
The school began its deployment at two key campuses, Chipinque and Valle, using the December break to minimize disruption. The rollout was completed in partnership with MOPEC, whose planning, installation, and coordination helped keep the implementation smooth and straightforward. According to AIM, clear communication and close collaboration between the school, Verkada, and MOPEC were key to the project’s success.
Today, AIM has Verkada cameras deployed across its campuses and is exploring additional ways to expand within the platform over time. On a day-to-day basis, the cameras support three especially important workflows: investigating student-related incidents, supporting attendance monitoring, and overseeing vendors and contractors on campus.
Turning hours of investigation into minutes
One of the most meaningful improvements for AIM has been investigation speed. Before Verkada, a typical student-related incident required staff to identify where something may have happened, access local systems, locate the correct footage, and piece events together camera by camera. The process was manual, time-consuming, and often involved several teams.
Now, the team can go directly into the Verkada platform, open the relevant camera group, narrow the timeframe, and quickly identify the key moment before reviewing adjacent footage for full context. AIM says that what once took one to three hours can now take roughly five to 15 minutes, making investigations an estimated 75% to 97% faster. That time savings has improved response times, strengthened internal decision-making, and helped the school communicate more clearly with leadership, staff, and parents.
“A common scenario is a student-related incident during the school day,” Colter said. “Before Verkada, investigating something like this required multiple steps, locating the right footage, accessing local systems, and often coordinating across teams. It could easily take hours. Now, we can quickly identify the moment, locate the relevant cameras, and reconstruct the sequence in minutes.”
Reducing manual review with intelligent search
Beyond faster access to video, AIM is beginning to use Verkada’s intelligent search and detection capabilities to reduce manual review even further. Verkada’s AI-powered search allows teams to search footage using everyday language, timeframes, and other descriptors, helping users surface relevant clips faster without scrubbing through hours of video. AIM says these tools are helping its team spend less time reviewing footage, identify relevant moments faster, and respond more accurately overall.
That has also reduced dependence on IT and physical infrastructure. With less reliance on on-premise systems and manual video retrieval, AIM has lowered operational overhead while giving operations, security, and leadership teams a platform they can use every day without extensive training. The feedback internally has been consistent: the system is easy to use, fast, and reliable.
Building for the future
For AIM, Verkada is not just a point solution. It is the foundation of a longer-term strategy to bring security, access, and monitoring into a more connected ecosystem over time.
“With Verkada, we’ve moved from reactive investigations to real-time visibility and faster decision-making across our campuses.”