By Amber Bradley | Editor-in-Chief | TalkLPnews
When I first started in LP more than 20 years ago (gulp) I was working for a technology company that claimed they could provide alerts on any outliers loss prevention pros needed to know about. It was novel, even innovative. But even back then – 20 years ago, the smartest LP professionals I knew were like, “yeah, but that’s a lot of alerts.”
Fast-forward to more wrinkles and a ton more life lessons….that’s still a lot of alerts. I feel like the ‘alerting on outliers’ days have been LONG gone for a long time. In this age of AI, it seems LP/AP professionals need an extra brain. A brain that works for them without intervention to provide the full story of what’s happening – in real time even. I recently had a guest on my podcast that understand this (he’s not in sales so wasn’t a sales pitch, you know me). I asked Sunil Mudholkar to explain the future of finding the missing dollar and he delivered.
Mudholkar runs product for physical security at Octave, the software company that spun out of Hexagon and listed on the Nasdaq in May. His group has been in the market about 15 years, so nobody here is pitching vapor (unlike the first tech company I worked for). Retail hung thousands of sensors across every location and then gave them one job, which is confirming what already went wrong.
Enter every vendor and their mom building alerting on outliers because ‘it will fix everything!’ Everybody built it, and now the alert queue is wallpaper. Mudholkar’s answer is filtering the signal out of the noise before any of it reaches a person, because pointing your business in a direction based on noise means you decided on nothing. You need a story – an actual real time story of what’s happening in your organization and apparently there are some companies that can provide that (like Octave apparently).
The filtering works by putting camera metadata next to the systems the store already runs on, the register up front and the inventory platform in the back. One camera gives you a signal. The building gives you a story. If that story can tell merchandising four shoppers circled the same endcap and walked out empty-handed, the camera stopped being a security expense. LP has confirmed that the merchandising budget pocket is open for business.
He drew some lines too. The learning must stay local, because nobody wants their footage training a competitor’s system. And he does not think a hands-off version of this is anywhere close, calling it a bridge too far for now. Thank you for the honesty!
Five years out, he puts security data in the same pool as everything else the business runs on, the way financial data finally escaped the spreadsheet people and became something the whole company could see. The video wall slides off center stage, and the next operator asks the system a question in plain language – which can happen now if you’ve been paying attention.
Which sounds great until you remember somebody still has to own the answer. I’ll take it anyway because who couldn’t use greater context in a story written for us to discern. There have been way too much time wasted scrubbing footage, finding the exact transaction, or that exact wrong movement – check out the full convo with Sunil Mudholkar here.
I, for one, am excited to be out of the vaporware business and into the TalkLPnews media business – even if it means a few more wrinkles because of the tougher skin.
