How to Optimize Offline Retail Business with NVIDIA
The retail management challenge today is a great opportunity for NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and retail video solutions companies.
From Timberland to Walmart, from quarterly fashion to your daily supply, innovative retail brands and retailers worldwide are aggressively using Artificial Intelligence (AI) powers provided by disruptive technology companies to streamline logistics and store operations, prevent shrinkage and deliver better shopping experiences both online and in the brick-and-mortar stores.
Some said that computer is smarter than human brains. It is true that advances in AI have accelerated considerably. It has already found its way into numerous aspects of our day-to-day lives, including text, image, and speech recognition. Many of us are probably regular users of translation tools, own a smartphone with a facial recognition feature, communicate with chatbots to solve basic problems or manage our daily schedule via intelligent voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa.
Move further to the commercial field online, personalized online advertising is based on AI, the same as Google’s algorithm for determining which search results appear at the top of the screen. And some of us do enjoy the semi-autonomous vehicles taking us everywhere with convenience. Thanks to a steady increase in available data, continuously improving algorithms, and increasingly efficient computers, AI has become more and more powerful in recent decades.
Today’s AI applications, however, always specialize in a given task. They solve problems based on rules established specifically for that task. So although a chess program may be able to continually optimize its game strategy, it would not be capable of driving a car. In contrast, human beings are able to use their intelligence in a variety of contexts. Certain characteristics of our brains are very difficult to simulate. The human brain is extremely flexible and can adapt intuitively to unpredictable environments.
While humans are creative, curious, and endowed with social skills, all of which continue to set us apart from even the most intelligent computer, it has been proven that deep learning and machine learning algorithms can help cut operational expenses, increase revenue and improve decision making. We don’t move forward and against AI.
AI empowers us with a high efficient lifestyle. Just look at the numbers: an Accenture report estimates that AI has the potential to create $2.2 trillion worth of value in retail and wholesale by 2035 by boosting growth and profitability.
In this AI-leading age, everyone knows NVIDIA. NVIDIA Corporation is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California, designing graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as systems on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market.
Being a leading AI company, NVIDIA has worked with over 170 retail technology companies that are using NVIDIA GPUs and software libraries to develop disruptive AI technologies. They built AI applications that perform real-time compute in stores for loss prevention, stockout notification, and optimizing product placement. Out of these remarkable companies, SkyREC Inc. has demonstrated the greatest business value to retailers so far.
Established in 2015, SkyREC was founded by KS Mooi, JW Liao, and Cate Xie with a strong technical background and global marketing experience in the video surveillance industry. SkyREC was first introduced to the public by Jensen Huang, the Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA at GTC 2016. By using NVIDIA Jetson systems, SkyREC solutions were soon being adopted by well-known retail brands including Timberland, Kipling, The North Face, Uniqlo, IKEA, Dyson, Ecco, 7–11, and several shopping districts or malls.
While the market was still wondering what AI can actually do to raise the brick-and-mortar store up from the massacre by online shopping, the successful story of world-famous outdoor clothing brand Timberland (owned by VF Corporation) has proven that it is possible to increase 30% of sales revenue with anyone who makes good use of the technology innovation and data analytics.
The AiMS Retail Focus Solution that SkyREC provides to fashion companies like Timberland is specially designed for retail chain operations. AiMS stands for Autonomous Intelligent Management System; it is the next-generation video management system driven by AI video analytics. SkyREC’s disruptive algorithm empowered by its exclusive object-focused overwhelming changed the way how people use the security video.
One case once happened to a beauty products retailer “D Company” that owns nearly 200 brick-and-mortar stores in Europe. D Company discovered there were internal theft issues and they were eager to solve the problem by getting the evidence as soon as possible to let those inappropriate employees leave.
However, with the traditional CCTV system in the stores, collecting evidence is much more difficult than they thought. Using a regular way to playback the security video could have taken them 2 to 3 months just for digging out 1 or 2 employees’ abnormal behaviors in each store; not even to mention some of the staff of the security department are at their middle ages which is not ideal for watching the monitors and trying to discover small details for a long time.
D Company chose SkyREC as the first priority to replace their legacy video security systems. For those flagship stores with the most internal theft incidents, D Company bought computers in the local pc markets or through system integrators to let the IT of D Company installed AiMS software on the pcs. After connecting the AiMS system to their existing Axis or Hikvision cameras in the shops, a powerful self-learning system is ready to go!
SkyREC AiMS learns, thinks, and optimizes itself with daily improvement. After collecting, analyzing, and learning the in-store image with the behavior D Company intended to get, AiMS supports D Company to get enough evidence to lay off their employee thieves within just a few weeks without additional human efforts cost by the security department.
Meanwhile, D Company received intuitive daily online reports of their offline shopper behaviors for the marketing and merchandise selection team to make further strategies planning.
For more details about SkyREC AiMS or its Retail Focus Solution, please feel free to visit our website. https://www.skyrec.cc/
