How to boost a business’s security and sales simultaneously
Data management and artificial intelligence are capable of increasing security while generating new sales and customers. In a few tenths of a second, they can check the face of any intruder to determine whether they are a threat, and they can also obtain general information about attendance capacity, gender, age ranges, clothing, or even the public's mood in order to use these in subsequent market studies.
Ana Mazo, Video Sales Specialist at IBD Global, says that our society has entered a new era over the past few years, one where artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of our day-to-day lives: “from the very palm of our hands with a smartphone, to the field of security, where we live with CCTV and access control”.
According to the expert, these new devices provide us with access to the power of information: “they extract metadata from what they capture and send it to a server or management software for an endless number of uses adapted to each facility's requirements”.
“We're talking about cameras that sample how many people are in an area and how long each of them have been there, thus avoiding crowding and/or possible dangerous situations afterwards”, she explains. Thus, for example, “it enables us to send out a reminder if a worker isn’t wearing the required PPE to avoid unnecessary accidents, or it can detect people’s faces in the scene and compare them against a database in a few tenths of a second to find out if that person has been blacklisted, allowing us to take quick and efficient action to detain the intruder”.
Marketing and occupational risks
While this facial recognition is being carried out, it can also obtain “various types of information with great precision, such as gender, age range, whether or not someone is wearing glasses, a facemask, has a beard, or even their mood, in order to use this information in subsequent market studies. In other words, we try to make the most of the information that the device gives us for our benefit.
This enables a business to use it to increase sales and for its own safety. “In the latter case, AI helps us to save time when reacting to an incident, and it also saves time when it comes to forensic searches because we are able to find out if an alarm was raised by a person or something else. We can therefore rule out false alarms that were previously caused by backlighting, animals, leaves in the wind etc. Now we can easily find a video after the fact by carrying out a search for a human and a specific date and time. The recording of what caused the alarm will be available as well as the dome camera's tracking of the individual using AI”.
Ana Mazo highlights that “security has always been deemed an expense rather than a benefit”, but she adds: “thanks to AI, we can think about it in terms of benefits, with current devices that provide us not only with better security, but which can also be used by other departments, such as Occupational Risk Prevention or Marketing, in order to derive some financial benefit through the use of facial recognition, heat mapping, counting individuals and attendance capacity, among many others”.