Smart AI platforms enable retail and hospitality organisations to turn their existing CCTV investments into proactive security systems and smart retail ecosystems that boost customer service and ROI.
This is according to Robert Falkner, national sales manager at iOCO SBT, who says overlaying AI-enabled video analytics and threat detection can add immense value to existing CCTV systems. “CCTV cameras have traditionally been deployed for security. AI allows us to become much more proactive with the information we are gathering from these cameras, while combining digital identity and AI in surveillance is a real force multiplier for CCTV systems.”
Smarter surveillance
Advanced video analytics systems dramatically improve physical security and public safety by unifying AI-powered face recognition, gun detection, watch listing, visitor management, and automatic licence-plate recognition. These systems can also help retail and hospitality organisations improve customer service and measure the success of marketing campaigns.
With facial recognition and the ability to determine attributes like gender and age, AI-enabled video analytics systems can tell retailers at a glance what type of shoppers are in store, which areas they are most drawn to, and what their general sentiment is, based on their facial expressions.
Falkner elaborates, “If you want to do a product activation on a children's toy, for instance, you might want to make sure you are putting it up at the right time and day of the week that the people most likely to have children of the target age group are in store. Because the AI can tell whether somebody is smiling or frowning, we can more easily determine whether the customer experience is a good one or a bad one and start getting daily customer experience statistics without requiring people to fill in a survey.”
A leader in the field is ROC’s unified Vision AI platform, ROC Enroll, which Falkner says is trusted by military forces and law enforcement.
ROC Enroll turns a selfie into a secure biometric template for fast, accurate biometric enrolment in KYC onboarding, with face recognition, age estimation, and liveness detection, while ROC Watch fuses biometric identity verification with tactical video analytics.
iOCO SBT’s DIMPL Digital Identity Management Platform is built on ROC, harnessing ROC Enroll and ROC Watch capabilities to optimise retail.
Enriching insights
Falkner says ROC, integrated into other systems such as marketing, CRM or loyalty card databases, offers retailers enriched insights into their customer behaviour.
“If you have enrolled customers on a database using facial recognition, you will be able to identify them as soon as they enter the store. If a VIP customer enters, you can set up a workflow to ensure they are properly welcomed right away. If your loyalty club members respond to a specific marketing campaign, you will know when they come into the store to view the special offer - even if they did not buy the product.”
“While existing CCTV cameras may help count footfall, it takes AI to analyse exactly who is coming into an area,” Falkner says. “You may see a dramatic increase in the number of people coming and going in a mall, for example, but the AI will identify their clothing and tell you if those numbers are actually fast-food couriers returning repeatedly to pick up orders.”
Smart watch
The better the camera quality, the better the result; however, ROC Watch can work with analogue cameras. “Using the cameras organisations already have, iOCO SBT will set up ROC Watch to feed the footage into the AI server for analysis. We may also recommend additional server capacity and integrate the system with other internal systems, depending on the use case.
“The ROC Watch dashboard gives organisations the ability to select particular video streams for analysis and configure the alerts and workflows they require. For example, notifying security if someone enters the premises carrying a gun.”
The convergence of AI, digital platforms and facial recognition is creating a new generation of intelligent security and business solutions. “iOCO’s unique value proposition lies in combining our group-wide expertise across these disciplines, enabling us to deliver capabilities that differentiate us in the market. As a subsidiary of iOCO, SBT has access to a vast array of skills and competencies that enable it to integrate, customise, and optimise the capabilities of access control, workforce, identity, and building management systems, to deliver smarter operations across businesses.”
Find out more at https://sbt.ioco.tech/
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