How AI biometric authentication is revolutionizing retail security
Security is an ever-present force in retail environments. It helps reduce customer theft and staff fraud, protect workers against violence and intimidation, and can even speed up checkouts.
Over the years, security has evolved from a heavy staff presence to more reliance on cameras, and now a variety of smart sensors, enabling the likes of Amazon’s staffless shops. But, for the majority of stores, there is still a reliance on the vigilance of staff, even as their numbers are reduced in a challenging shopping centre and high street retail operations landscape.
Answering the call in the latest wave of technology comes the use of AI and biometrics to support staff and reduce crime. Biometrics is the automated recognition of someone through their image, fingerprint, eye scan, or a smartphone that performs the operation through an app, allowing access to secure or other areas.
Laying Down the Biometric Law
At a simple level, smart access doors linked to facial-recognition cameras and an AI linked to a database can prevent access by known shoplifters or criminals. It can also halt people wearing hoods or face masks (while distinguishing between medical masks and those used for disguise) and ask them to remove them, through a speaker in the camera, before being allowed access.
Subscribe to TRBBiometric access also allows only known customers into a store, this can be through a loyalty card, promotional app or other form. They can be used as part of promotional or marketing campaigns, perhaps through a priority entrance where staff can provide a premium experience.
At the staff entrance, biometrics also makes it easier for management to monitor working hours and ensure that the right workers are turning up for shifts. While ensuring only relevant staff can access stockrooms or high-value cages where luxury or costly items are stored.
Exterior smart cameras can also watch for unusual activity, such as a gang gathering together before a break in, people preparing weapons that may be used in a crime, or other activity that a security guard can interrupt before it becomes an on-site crime.
Interior cameras can also track likely suspects and monitor their activity for signs of shoplifting, pocketing or bagging goods and then heading for the exits without paying. The camera can send an image of the person and even a description of what they took and where they put it to enable security to act swiftly.
The Power of AI Boosts Biometrics
AI is a useful tool across many business activities, but in retail security and biometrics it adds a new level of support. Behavioral analytics learns patterns in video and photographs to identify activity that is suspicious.
A readily available example is AI proving age verification by scanning facial photos at automated checkouts.
A more detailed effort could see a member of staff passing the same spot at a time when the security guard is at the other end of the store. The AI can establish this pattern, and even if there’s no obvious activity, by scanning through the stock database, it can identify that there is a shortfall in a particular product in that area, and perhaps zoom in the next time these set of circumstances align.
With adaptive learning it can identify new patterns as they emerge, and its insights can be used to generate advice about how to better protect the store, high-value goods and staff from crime.
Any AI system, as with all business technology, is prone to security risks. AI tools require high levels of cybersecurity protection, internal locks to prevent interference, along with expert human analysis to ensure they deliver correct information and can learn from false positive reports.
And the company must ensure that customer and staff privacy rights are protected according to national and industry laws and guidelines.
AI is Here, Ready or Not
Many companies have spent the last few years seeing AI creep into the business productivity software and management tools. The same is happening with retail store security systems, as biometrics replace traditional security methods, and AI is built into security management and back-end office systems.
The tools are here, and are largely self-learning or can be taught through guided learning. With security teams using smart apps, they can be fed live video across a large store to track someone down, with the AI even providing likely exit routes of thieves.
Even small stores with the typical multi-view screen above the counter could benefit during busy times. AI can provide an alert when the single staff member is focused elsewhere, and they can take the appropriate response.
Whatever the retail business, security is getting smarter and can help management and workers remain on the ball and safe when it comes to dealing with crime.
