Every generation produces a handful of technologies that begin as marvels and end as infrastructure. 

Electricity was once something people gathered to witness. Today it hums invisibly behind the walls of every building we enter. The internet went from dial up patience to gigabit speed; not as a feature, but as an expectation. GPS, once confined to satellites and military systems, now guides daily commutes without a second thought. 

The most consequential technologies rarely remain impressive for long. They don’t linger at the center of attention. Instead, they weave themselves so thoroughly into everyday life that they become almost indistinguishable from it. 

According to Devon Felise, Director of Sales for Suprema America, biometric authentication has quietly reached that point. 

“The biggest thing we’ve seen,” Felise says, “is that facial authentication has really taken off.” 

Not because the technology suddenly leapt forward, but because the people using it did. 

Felise’s vantage point is unusually broad. As Director of Sales, he sits at the intersection of enterprise buyers, system integrators, and some of the most security sensitive environments in the market. He sees what customers ask for before it appears in market reports and just as importantly, what they stop worrying about long before the industry notices. 

When asked what has changed most over the past year or two, his answer was immediate. 

“As fingerprint adoption continues to grow. We’re still seeing strong double-digit growth in the U.S., but the pace has moderated,” he said. “At the same time, face authentication has accelerated significantly.” 

“Has changed?” We asked. “As in, past tense?” 
Felise didn’t hesitate. He nodded. “Yes. It’s already happened.” 

On the surface, it might sound like a routine technology shift. One adoption curve flattening as another accelerated. But Felise is quick to point out that the real story has little to do with performance metrics or hardware cycles. It has everything to do with something far harder to quantify: familiarity. 

And that turning point, he explains, didn’t originate inside the access control industry at all.  

It came from consumer technology. 

After Apple and Samsung introduced biometrics on smartphones, consumer adoption accelerated rapidly, driven first by ease of use and later by an understanding of the inherent security the technology provides. That familiarity set the stage for widespread acceptance beyond personal devices. Today, facial authentication is everywhere. “Delta uses it to board passengers, TSA has rolled it out at checkpoints, and laptops have adopted it,” he says. “By the time the industry noticed, everything was already using face.” 

What followed was subtle but decisive. Long before facial authentication was evaluated as an enterprise security control, it had already become routine. People were unlocking phones, boarding flights, and passing through checkpoints without thinking twice. The technology stopped feeling experimental. It started feeling ordinary. 
 
That shift, more than any improvement in algorithms or hardware, quietly changed the course of adoption. 

In security, trust is rarely granted quickly. It’s built slowly, constrained by privacy concerns, user resistance, and the friction that comes with unfamiliar interaction models. Facial authentication, Felise says, arrived at the enterprise door with many of those battles already behind it. By the time buyers encountered it in access control, they weren’t asking whether they trusted it. They were asking why they wouldn’t use it. 

What surprised many, including Suprema, was who moved first. 

Conventional wisdom suggested the most conservative environments would lag: data centers, critical infrastructure, and sprawling enterprise campuses that had relied on fingerprint biometrics for decades and operated tens of thousands of readers. Instead, they were among the earliest adopters. And the speed of that transition caught the industry off guard. 

“We thought those verticals would take much longer,” Felise admits. “But they’ve transitioned remarkably quickly.” 

The reasons, he says, are refreshingly practical. Accuracy improved, costs came down, and facial authentication reduced friction at entry points. It increased throughput, while eliminating the wear and tear issues inherent in touch-based systems. And then there was the simplest factor of all. 

“After the pandemic, people don’t want to touch anything,” Felise says. 

Obvious, perhaps, but powerful. While the post pandemic world didn’t create demand for touchless access, it sharpened it. In high traffic, security sensitive environments, minimizing contact shifted from preference to baseline expectation. 

Facial authentication met that expectation without asking users to change their behavior. 

“There’s nothing new to learn,” Felise explains. “People already know how this works.” 

That familiarity, he believes, is the true accelerant. 

Security systems often fail not because they’re unsecure, but because they demand too much from the people using them. Badges are forgotten. PINs are shared. Fingerprint readers degrade. Facial authentication mirrors interactions users already perform dozens of times a day. And simultaneously, it disappears into habit. When a security experience becomes effortless, organizational resistance tends to disappear with it. 

None of this suggests innovation has slowed. Felise sees continued experimentation across the industry; iris recognition, gesture-based authentication, and hand wave technologies are all appearing in retail pilots and controlled environments. The search for lower friction continues. 

But from his vantage point, one threshold has already been crossed. 

“Face has crossed that line,” he says. “People are comfortable with it now.” And comfort, more than novelty, is what determines scale. 

The technologies that reshape industries are rarely the ones that remain futuristic. They’re the ones users stop noticing the ones that quietly become infrastructure. From Felise’s perspective, facial biometrics didn’t win because it was the most impressive option on the table. It won because it became normal. 

“When people stop thinking about the technology,” he says, “that’s when adoption really takes off.” 

And in access control today, that may be the clearest signal of all.