Idis: AI video and the new race for retail profitability
Koray Ozyildirim, Country Manager, IDIS Türkiye
Video surveillance has long been one of the best tools for retail loss prevention, but today’s solutions are adding even more value. Thanks to the emergence of AI-powered video analytics and easier integration with wider retail data systems, the race is on to achieve new competitive advantage.
By driving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experiences, and improving retail decision-making video innovations are not just protecting profits but helping to grow them.
The best of the current video solutions feature higher-performance cameras and more powerful AI analytics. They deliver the benefits of extended device durability; ease and speed of installation; and minimized operating and maintenance costs. And crucially they allow seamless integrations with systems such as point-of-sale, inventory management, and ERP.
Designed properly, and within the right budget, they can deliver return on investment (ROI) within a year or two, sometimes faster. As well as cutting losses, they will give store owners and managers more detailed, more granular, and more actionable data to steer their businesses.
With phased migration options making upgrades to these smarter solutions easier, many more retailers – from regional chains to global brand franchises – are taking advantage of AI video tech to transform the value of their long-trusted camera systems.
Influencing how customers feel
Influencing the way customers feel about the store environment can help to drive up sales. This can be achieved by changing store layouts and designs; by targeting promotions and displays; and by allocating staffing resources more responsively. Successful store managers have always done these things, using experience, instinct, and observation. But the new layers of insight delivered by AI video are allowing more proactive and consistent decision making.
For remote management this is particularly useful.
For example, directional heatmaps can reveal at-a-glance how customers move through stores and around displays, where they spend most of their time, what catches their attention, and what they ignore. Heatmaps also show how behaviors can vary, depending on the time of day, or day of the week.
People counting and automated crowd density analysis can help manage staff/customer ratios, ensuring that customers are not kept waiting and that staff are fully utilized. These analytics can be used in real-time to make operations more responsive, especially in larger stores where rostering is more complex, and can also be used in review and planning by revealing occupancy trends.
Integrated System Capabilities
In the past, many retailers struggled to connect their legacy retail systems with newer surveillance technology. But encoders provide a practical answer by digitizing data from point-of-sale and overlaying data on video, so it can be monitored and stored on NVRs and viewed, used, and analyzed in high resolution. Using the same approach, log collectors can now feed video analytics data into wider ERP and inventory management systems. This mean that stores have the stock they need and head office gains complete oversight across their branch networks.
And looking ahead, as AI analytics continue to develop they will make even more detailed insights available, for example demographic metrics showing which kinds of customers are entering stores, and automated measurement of customers’ reactions, body language and facial expressions, giving even greater understanding of how people respond to retailers’ offerings.
IDIS will be exhibiting at Retail Days in Istanbul, Türkiye on 28th – 29th May 2025.
