Retail security is a crucial benchmark for today's retailers as it affects customer loyalty, shopping experience, and shopping centers' reputation. If you want to know how AI can improve security in stores, keep reading.
Retailers nowadays not only strive to offer a wide variety of products and fast, high-quality service but also ensure the safety and protection of their customers and staff.
Stores are vast public spaces with heavy foot traffic, making them vulnerable to numerous threats such as theft, shoplifting, and violent incidents, among others. Given that shopping centers are complex environments with different sizes and settings, they require a store security approach that enables loss prevention and personalized safety measures to address their issues. This is where artificial intelligence can make a difference.
Let's explore the vulnerabilities in retail security and delve into what AI has in store for retailers to tackle security issues and avoid losses.
How AI Can Enhance Store Management
AI applications range from cashier-less services and product search solutions to chatbots and virtual fitting rooms. AI capabilities are also utilized to analyze vast amounts of data and provide deeper insights into the business.
For example, video analytics in stores can track a customer's location and actions within a store, analyze them, and create heatmaps used for smarter merchandise planning, price optimization, and stock forecasting.
With AI insights, stores gain a clear understanding of how a particular supply chain functions, identify inefficiencies, and create ways to improve it.
Furthermore, AI analysis aids in boosting sales and enhancing the shopping experience by providing intelligent recommendations and delivering personalized advertisements and offers.
How AI Can Improve Store Security
Artificial intelligence is also leveraged to enhance security in retail stores, shopping centers, and retail supply chains. Security professionals can better comprehend the security landscape and make data-driven decisions to respond to threats.
Loss prevention
One of the primary concerns of security and loss prevention managers is inventory loss. It is a combination of theft, shoplifting, supplier fraud, and other errors. According to statistics, retailers lose over €31 billion annually due to theft.
To prevent inventory loss, many retailers employ enhanced security technologies and video surveillance. Fortunately, cameras are typically already installed in stores and monitored by security personnel.
However, the size of shopping centers and the large number of daily visitors make stores susceptible to theft, presenting an overwhelming task for security agents, who have to:
Constantly watch recordings from hundreds of cameras throughout the store.
Remain vigilant to detect instances of suspicious behavior.
Stay alert to provide an appropriate response to any situation.
This surpasses human capabilities. Fatigue and human errors are inevitable, resulting in missed detections and inventory losses. Thanks to AI technologies, surveillance cameras can be effectively utilized for loss prevention.
Intelligent algorithms analyze camera images to detect any potentially suspicious behavior, such as restlessness or unease, which may lead to shoplifting, and alert the security center of a possible threat.
Thus, the implementation of artificial intelligence helps security professionals gain a clear understanding of what is happening in a vast area of the shopping center and across the entire supply chain, improving inventory control.
Detection of Slips and Falls - Physical Security
AI-powered video analysis can also be effectively used to detect slips and falls, which are the most common accidents in shopping centers. These accidents may be caused by slippery floors, spilled drinks and food, uneven carpets, and other obstacles.
Artificial intelligence can detect slips and falls, alert the staff to respond immediately to the incident, and provide necessary assistance.
Violence in Shopping Centers and Stores
According to statistics, in the last 5 years, another emerging threat has become a priority for retailers. They are more concerned about violence related to shopping centers and stores, which can be reduced by using AI-driven technologies like object detection and anomalous behavior recognition.
These AI tools provide continuous surveillance and intelligent video analysis to detect various types of threats and automatically trigger an alert, drawing the attention of security agents and giving them the opportunity to respond to the situation to prevent escalation.
Intelligent video analysis comes in many different forms and can be used to detect weapons, intruders, unattended bags, read license plates, monitor perimeters, and identify unwanted behaviors such as fights and violence.
Parking Lot Protection
Intelligent video surveillance, whether in the cloud or at the perimeter, is vital for safeguarding parking areas. The busy parking lots of shopping centers are filled with security risks.
These risks range from car theft and accidents caused by vehicle and pedestrian traffic or misplaced shopping carts to loitering. Shoppers returning to their vehicles with bulky items and numerous purchases are also attractive targets for thieves.
Leveraging AI capabilities, security agents can mitigate these risks. Real-time monitoring and AI analysis enable stores to improve situational awareness in their parking lots.