By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
The easier it gets to steal from a store shelf, the less appealing the store shelf becomes. That is the logic Mitchell Jacobs sees driving organized retail crime away from the storefront and toward the parts of the business most people never see.
Jacobs, who leads safety and security at Lennox, has spent his career across retail, supply chain, fulfillment, manufacturing, and aviation. On a recent TalkLPnews podcast episode, he named two trends he thinks deserve more attention than they get. The first is where theft is heading. The second is what the industry decides to do about AI.
Start with the theft. As companies pour money into hardening fixed retail locations, criminals are following the path of least resistance to the supply chain, where a single hit can pay off in a way a shelf grab never could. Instead of pocketing items one at a time, organized groups are going after trailers, yards, staging areas, and distribution operations. The math is simple for them. Why work a store when you can take a whole load at once?
Jacobs argues that staying ahead of that shift means investing in the unglamorous work of supply chain visibility, layered security, access control, yard management, and real-time intelligence. None of it is flashy. All of it is the difference between losing a pallet and losing a truck.
He is blunt about the limits of enforcement here. You cannot arrest your way out of cargo theft. Prevention comes from operational discipline, smart facility design, access management, and teams that are actually engaged with the work. The strategies that hold up tend to be the simple ones that get executed consistently, day after day, rather than the elaborate ones that look good in a deck and fall apart on the dock.
The second trend is AI, and Jacobs lands somewhere more interesting than the usual hype. His position is that organizations have to embrace it rather than fear it, because it is going to change how teams investigate, spot trends, analyze risk, and make decisions. The value is in cutting through noise and surfacing risk faster, which frees people up for the parts of the job that need a human.
He is careful not to oversell it. Technology alone is never the full answer. Human judgment, operational experience, and strong frontline relationships still matter, and in his view they always will. The work is learning to automate intelligently and validate what the system gives you, so AI ends up working for the team instead of around it.
What ties the two trends together is a view of the job that goes well past theft reduction. For Jacobs, modern loss prevention is enterprise risk management, covering safety, investigations, workplace violence prevention, crisis preparedness, cargo protection, and continuity. The organizations he expects to pull ahead over the next decade are the ones that connect safety, security, operations, AI, and culture into one strategy that scales.
There is a personal thread under all of it. When Jacobs was three, his grandfather was killed in an industrial accident. He says that loss shaped a career built around preventing the incidents that never make the news because someone was prepared enough to stop them. The biggest wins in this work, he points out, are often the ones nobody ever sees.
Jacobs goes deeper on cargo theft, AI, and what he has learned leading across five very different industries in the full conversation.