In a store, data isn’t there to keep watch. It’s there to sell more.

• Does IRIS identify our customers?

  No, IRIS does not identify your customers: it detects objects, behaviors and situations. It does not recognize faces, does not compare them against any database, does not store who anybody is, does not follow a person from one store to another and is not cross-referenced with your loyalty program. What it sees is “a person,” “a shopping cart,” “an empty shelf,” where it’s and how long it’s been there. That’s why a store’s counting never says who came in: it says how many, through which door and at what time. If somebody ever offers you the opposite, know that we don’t do it, and that this isn’t an oversight: it’s a decision.

• Does it work with the cameras we already have in the store?

  Yes, IRIS works with the cameras you already have in the store. It connects to the feed of the ceiling IP cameras and analyzes it as it arrives: what changes isn’t the hardware, it’s what gets understood from the picture. During the project we check camera by camera whether the framing is enough for what you want to see there — a camera set up to watch the door may not reach the shelf at the back — and we tell you plainly which ones fall short and which just need turning a few degrees. Adding a new camera is the exception, not the starting point.

• Is this for catching shoplifters?

  No, this isn’t for catching shoplifters, and we’d rather say so before it comes up in a meeting. None of the ten cameras on this page does that, and it isn’t because it never occurred to us: detecting theft means judging the intent of one particular person, and IRIS doesn’t look at particular people. What it does do is what you have on this page: flag a gap on the shelf, something spilled on the floor, an area left in the dark or a shop floor busier than the shift can handle; and measure lines, fitting rooms, shopping carts, how people spread across the floor and what the promotional display actually achieves. In other words: sell better and keep the store in the state it should be in. If what you need is loss prevention, you’ll need something else, and we’ll tell you that in the first meeting rather than the last.

• How do I know how many people give up on the line and leave without buying?

  You know how many people give up on the line because IRIS counts two things separately: how many people enter the waiting area at the registers and how many reach the point of payment. The difference is the people who left before their turn came. Two more clues get added to that: the average wait in that line, and the shopping carts left abandoned in an aisle or beside the registers, which nearly always belong to someone who got tired of waiting. And all of it carries a timestamp, so it can be cross-referenced with how many registers were open at that moment. We aren’t going to tell you how much money that is — we don’t know, it never went through your register — but we’ll tell you what time it happens and with how many registers open it stops happening.

• Can it tell me whether a promotion is working?

  IRIS can tell you whether a promotion is working in the part you can see from a camera: how many people walk past the display, how many stop and how long they stay. The sale itself is in your register, and we don’t go in there. But putting the two halves together changes the diagnosis: if a lot of people walk past and almost nobody stops, the problem is where the display sits or how it looks. If a lot of people stop and it still doesn’t sell, the problem is the price or the product. Today those two situations look identical in the sales report — it sold badly — and they’re two different problems with two different fixes. The same works for comparing the same display in two stores, or the same spot in two different weeks.

• Does it work when the store is packed?

  IRIS works when the store is packed, with one caveat we’d rather say before signing: when a lot of people are close together, some block others and a camera stops telling them apart one by one. That happens to any vision system, ours included, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never tried it on a Saturday afternoon. What doesn’t get lost is exactly what matters most at that moment: occupancy. Measuring how many people are in an area and how they spread across the floor doesn’t require telling each person apart, so it keeps working, and detecting that the store is overwhelmed works precisely because it’s full. What does degrade is counting people one by one through a narrow, crowded gap; in that case the counting is moved to the entrance, where people go through in single file, and occupancy is left to cover the shop floor.

• Does the video leave the store?

  The video leaves the store or stays inside depending on the option you choose, and there are exactly two. In the on-site option it doesn’t leave: the servers are in your own facilities — in the store or at head office —, the video comes in over your network, it’s analyzed there and the system doesn’t need the internet to work. In the other one it is processed in our data center, which is our own cloud and not a third party’s. In both, communications are encrypted and the terms are set out in the contract. In a chain it is worth deciding early, because a server per store isn’t the same as bringing the analysis to one single place: it drives the network in every branch.

• And what about data protection, with a store full of customers?

  Data protection is handled by configuring the processing piece by piece: what’s stored, for how long, who can access it and from where. And above all of that sits the part that weighs most in a store: IRIS does not identify anyone, so there are no identities to protect and no customer profiles to build. Compliance, though, doesn’t depend on the software alone: it also depends on how you deploy it and what you decide to process, and that’s signed off by your organization, not by us. What we can put on the table is that our way of working is certified for information security and for privacy by an external auditing body. That paper isn’t signed by a salesperson: it’s signed by an auditor, and you can ask us for it before you sign anything.

• Does it work for a single store, or do you need a whole chain?

  IRIS works for a single store and for a chain alike; what changes isn’t the system, it’s what you do with the data. In one store it helps you decide your store: when to open the third register, where to put the promotional table, whether the back of the store gets visited at all or needs a reason to walk to. In a chain something appears that a single store doesn’t have: comparison. The same promotion set up in forty stores and measured the same way in all of them. The store where the line spikes half an hour earlier than the rest. The one that is the same size and has half as many people at the back. Starting with one store, seeing what comes out and deciding afterward is the normal way in, and it’s what we usually recommend.

• How much does it cost to put IRIS on a store’s cameras?

  You pay per camera. What it comes to depends on how many cameras are analyzed, what’s detected or measured on each one, how many stores are included, which deployment option you choose and whether the hardware is yours or we supply it. There’s no single price list, because measuring the registers and the entrance of a corner store doesn’t cost the same as covering the whole floor of a large supermarket, and one store doesn’t cost the same as forty. Tell us how many stores you have, how many cameras are in each and what you want to see, and we’ll give you a figure. Write to hola@infinityneural.com. Or call Spain: 011 34 902 02 70 91.

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