The 89% turnover problem pushing property security toward robots

Annual turnover in investigation and security services hit about 89% in 2024 and peaked near 99% two years earlier. Robot dogs and drones are arriving at stadium and warehouse gates because employers cannot keep those overnight shifts staffed.

Roughly 1.3 million Americans work as security guards, according to a July report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Security guards make up about three-quarters of the investigation-and-security-services workforce. The private sector overall turns over about 66% of workers a year; the industry these guards anchor runs at nearly twice that rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the occupation roughly flat through 2034, but the industry still expects to fill 160,000 or more openings a year, almost entirely to replace workers who leave.

The median security guard earns $18.70 an hour, the same Berkeley study found. Close to 43% of guards have no employer-sponsored or union-sponsored health coverage. A Berkeley news write-up of the findings describes a workforce that is paid at the bottom of an essential-services industry, given limited training, and exposed to higher safety risks on the job.

One source told Business Insider the pattern amounts to "a retention crisis." The industry is not short of people who want a security job. It is short of people who will stay in one.

That is the market Asylon Robotics sells into. The Pennsylvania-based company deploys autonomous drones and quadruped "robot dogs" for perimeter patrol at stadiums, manufacturing plants, and warehouses. The robots stream video to a remote operations center, where humans verify alerts before any on-site response. CEO Damon Henry told Business Insider the company charges $120,000 to $170,000 a year for the white-glove package: robots, maintenance, software, and remote operators. A fully loaded 24/7 human guard shift, he said, runs closer to $250,000.

Henry frames the opportunity as covering the "blackout period," the overnight and weekend coverage gaps employers cannot keep staffed. The third shift is the target. That is the same shift where the $18.70 wage and the missing health coverage are hardest to recruit against.

Boston Dynamics has published a position paper on scaled security robotics, framing the deployment as a labor economics problem rather than a product launch. Multi-vendor activity is a signal that the ROI math is no longer dependent on a single pitch.

Asylon's model is not full replacement. The robots handle the perimeter loop; humans sit in a remote operations center and decide which alerts matter. That is part of the appeal: the same human in the loop, just at a different cost structure and a different location. The headcount per site shrinks, and the work that remains moves off-site to lower-cost labor markets. That is also part of the longer-term stakes for the 1.3 million guard workforce: not just fewer jobs, but a re-tiering of the jobs that stay.

A real deployment is already on the ground. Asylon's quadruped, nicknamed "Benzie," has been patrolling Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta with facial recognition capability, according to local Fox 5 Atlanta reporting and the Atlanta Business Chronicle. The stadium is a useful reference: large, high-traffic, and exactly the kind of site where a third-shift vacancy is a problem rather than a budget line. It is also the kind of site where the surveillance posture of the patrol, not just the headcount it replaces, is part of the contract.

The labor story, though, runs through all 1.3 million guard jobs, not just the venues large enough to afford a six-figure automation contract. A stadium can sign a $150,000 annual service deal. A mid-sized warehouse, a hospital, or a municipal site usually cannot. Those sites are the ones the Berkeley study is actually about, and they are the ones where the retention crisis is the whole story.

Asylon says its next deployment wave will target logistics and manufacturing perimeters where the third shift is hardest to staff. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its next security-services turnover series in 2027. The Berkeley Labor Center has follow-up work on coverage and training in the pipeline. Those two releases are the test: if turnover stays near 90% and automation contracts keep scaling, the robot is the new third shift. If the wage floor or the coverage number moves, the math changes.