Part 1: The Rise of AI Video Analytics
Data analytics landscape
Data is essential in driving progress and growth for businesses, and a company’s ability to quickly derive actionable insights from its data is what allows them to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Accurate and quality insights on business operations and customer behaviour are critical to an organization’s success, as it allows them to see where they stand and identify the major challenges ahead. Therefore, having a reliable and accurate data analytics solution can address the majority of operational shortcomings to effectively cut costs and increase revenue margins, allowing the organization to invest in strategic business areas to maintain growth and increase market share, especially during tough economic periods.
While the advantages of having reliable data analytics are clear, businesses operating in physical spaces lack the analytics tools that their digital counterparts have, such as Google Analytics. In other words, physical spaces are still blind spots for businesses, as they do not have a comprehensive view of the journey visitors take in their facilities. Without having a 360-view, they are unable to conduct agile A/B testing for business strategies, as e-commerce businesses are intensively doing these days, to enhance their visitors’ experiences, boost their facility traffic and revenue. In recent years, video analytics has attracted enormous interest from various industries, as it has introduced the robust automation of tasks that were once exclusively done by humans.
What is video analytics?
Video analytics is a technology that processes the video streams received from a digital camera (typically an IP surveillance camera) and uses advanced algorithms in computer vision, pattern analysis, artificial intelligent (AI), and machine intelligence to extract meaningful and relevant information without requiring human intervention. In other words, video analytics transform video streams into business intelligence, automatically. There are many applications where video analytics has been a game-changer at, but the technology has been proven to be irrefutable in the worlds of surveillance, retail and transportation with its advanced capabilities in object movement analysis, people behavior and demographic analysis, as well as safety and security monitoring. With the prospect of further developments and technology trends such as 5G on the horizon, the significance and importance of video analytics can only grow.
Why AI video analytics?
Recent commercial usage of AI-powered video analytics for physical spaces has proven that data extracted via such solutions can be more comprehensive, accurate, and qualitative in nature via an extremely cost-efficient setup that leverages the existing video surveillance infrastructure widely adopted by businesses for security purposes. Moreover, advancement in AI, edge and cloud computing, as well as data privacy regulations related to video analytics have led to a significant decrease in the adoption of other people tracking technologies, such as Wi-Fi trackers, beacons or indoor counters, to get insights on business operations by 34% and on customer behaviour by 38%.
Moreover, the economic uncertainties such as the recent economic downturn that was led by a global health crisis at the start of 2020, have only amplified the demand for more advanced data analysis technologies. Worldwide lockdown regulations due to the pandemic have led to most commercial and public spaces closing down to slow down the transmission of the virus, heavily impacting the revenues of businesses primarily operating in physical spaces. Businesses heavily relied on data analytics for more effective decision-making to be able to take proactive preventive measures to minimize the impact of their decreasing revenues, such as maximizing operational efficiency and cutting down costs to increase revenue margins. As the world continues to navigate the uncertainties brought on by such economic crises, we believe among other trends like automation, one major area businesses will heavily rely on and invest in is advanced data analysis technologies like video analytics.
About the AI Video Analytics Series
In this series, we discuss the role of AI-powered video analytics, known as AI video analytics, in transforming indoor physical spaces by providing businesses with a 360-degree view into people behavior and business operations insights. In part 2 of this series, we’re going to discuss the competitive advantages of an AI video analytics solution for extracting data on the behavior of people and their socio-demographic in public or private physical facilities in comparison to other people tracking technologies.