Getting the Most Out of AI-powered Video Analytics

Video analytics has become an increasingly important tool to help organizations make better business decisions, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve their competitive position. This is especially true with the growing adoption of AI-powered video analytics, which enables building managers to act based on real-time alerts and insights. But many organizations struggle with the process of designing and implementing solutions and don’t know what to expect from AI-powered video analytics.

How AI-powered video analytics are reshaping decision-making across industries

As organizations strive to compile their vast oceans of data for financial, operational, and reputational improvements, IT decision-makers have looked for new data sources to harness. High on the list of candidates is live and recorded video, a rich source of largely unstructured data that yields great insights into a wide range of activities, such as how shoppers engage with store employees and interact with merchandise.

Many factors have made video analytics a great tool to help businesses better understand and manage a wide range of environments, while generating valuable insights and context about customers and settings. Today, digital video cameras are more sophisticated, of higher quality, and even more contextually aware than ever, thanks to advancements in AI-powered analytics, higher resolution imaging, and improved connectivity to help enable real-time data processing. Those video cameras are increasingly being used as part of a wider array of smart technology solutions. Additionally, next-generation video analytics can be enhanced by sophisticated access control systems, providing even more value to the business. This highlights the importance of using video analytics as a core part of a wide-ranging ecosystem of technologies and providers.

Additionally, the availability of powerful, yet affordable, compute and storage resources has made it far easier for systems to accommodate rich data feeds. Network technology advancements have also made it easier to send and receive high-bandwidth video streams without latency or dropped files. The availability of these, and other high-function technologies, gives retailers and building managers a broad set of options to use video in new and innovative ways.

But unquestionably, the power of AI has taken analytics to a new level. According to the “Unleashing the Power of AI in Analytics and Business Intelligence” research report from Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 90% of organizations agree that AI has enabled their users to do more with their data⁠¹, a trend that will likely accelerate with the increased use of video data. AI helps organizations get more from their video analytics applications through features like smart search technology, including enhanced data filtering, automated object recognition, real-time alerts, and predictive analytics—all helping enable accuracy, speed, cost efficiency, and alignment with compliance goals.

As a result, exciting new use cases have emerged, including:

• Customer journey mapping in retail, including measuring interactions with employees, checkout wait times, and more.
• Video monitoring and real-time alerts for multifamily properties to help impact security.
• Predictive alerts in industrial and shop-floor settings to mitigate large-scale disruptions with proactive maintenance.
• Video analytics embedded in smart outdoor lighting and infrastructure in cities, multifamily properties, and campuses.
• More comprehensive patient experiences as healthcare facilities analyze wait times and enhance patient safety features.
• Traffic flow analysis in public transportation systems to provide cities with critical insights that impact efficiency.
• Entry detection and perimeter monitoring across industries to complement existing security plans.
• Occupancy counting and access control for more easily managed entry/exit systems.

These systems help organizations gain critical insights into customer needs and behavior, help create a more secure physical environment, and provide organizations with data-backed information to make smarter, faster, and more precise decisions.

Understanding and overcoming the challenges of an AI-powered video analytics system

As desirable as video analytics has become as a core requirement for many use cases, implementing a smart technology system—and managing it for optimal benefits—isn’t easy. Addressing these challenges is essential for organizations looking to get the most out of video analytics. Fortunately, the state of video analytics solutions—and the technology providers standing behind tools and solutions—has advanced substantially in recent years. Organizations should feel confident in adopting video analytics solutions that can help them achieve measurable, meaningful improvements in business processes and workflows.

Still, it is important for organizations to fully understand and address core challenges to get the most from their video analytics solutions. For instance:

• Analytics tool sprawl is a big challenge. According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, 73% of large midmarket and enterprise organizations currently have at least three analytics tools in use². This is particularly challenging in video analytics environments because of device fragmentation at scale, a mix of vendor tools and solutions, and inefficiencies due to skills gaps and the distributed nature of video analytics environments.
• There is a significant skills gap in analytics-driven use cases, making it extremely difficult for organizations to play and build video analytics without experienced third parties. More than a quarter (27%) of large midmarket and enterprise organizations acknowledge they lack the proper in-house skills to get the most from their data analytics platforms. And those skills extend from technical stakeholders to business leaders, with nearly a third (31%) of organizations saying that aligning business goals to analytics strategies was a top challenge³.

Other important issues should also be acknowledged and addressed, including:

• “Responsible AI use” protocols and procedures that consider the sensitivity around privacy and strict compliance guidelines.
• The lack of proper tool integration technologies and expertise.
• Data quality issues such as inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent data that could impact the reliability and accuracy of insight and decision-making.
• A lack of understanding how video analytics can complement other smart technology solutions for a greater impact.
• Out-of-date software or lack of maintenance to keep hardware running.

While the technical issues are certainly important, it’s even more essential for organizations to acknowledge that they may lack the experience and expertise to properly plan, design, develop, deploy, and manage these sophisticated systems in a secure, responsible, cost-efficient, and scalable manner. There have been impressive advancements in the technologies available to capture footage and extract keen insights from video, but many organizations are still looking to experts within technology providers to help them overcome challenges and quickly gain value from their investments.

What to look for in an AI-powered video analytics solution

Finding the right video analytics solution is more than just picking high-end products and integrating them into an existing infrastructure. Organizations must first be clear on their video analytics goals and then select a trusted, proven technology partner that can deliver the right solution based on those goals. Holistically, that means successfully implementing a video analytics solution from start to finish, including use case planning, technology selection, integration, testing, training, and support.

To more fully leverage analytics to support essential use cases, organizations need to follow leading companies already incorporating enhanced capabilities in their analytics platforms. Organizations reported taking steps like incorporating automation to reduce process delays (44%), leveraging self-service capabilities (39%), and incorporating generative AI capabilities (38%) to enable those working with data to best leverage analytics⁴.

When it comes to picking a partner to guide and support an organization through its journey to AI-powered video analytics capabilities, there are benefits to collaborating with either a single vendor or a simplified vendor ecosystem. Working with a provider that can create a one-stop-shop experience can deliver value to customers by reducing complexity, integrating into existing infrastructure more seamlessly, and offering end-to-end solutions under a unified framework with unified management. This approach can eliminate the need to coordinate multiple vendors, mitigates compatibility issues, and drives time to value. Additionally, a single provider can offer centralized support, consistent security patching and updates, and the flexibility to scale solutions as needs change, enabling businesses to focus on achieving meaningful outcomes rather than managing disparate systems.

Organizations should consider a provider that has experience helping other companies on their journey to AI-powered video analytics and has the engineering and technical skills, as well as the business acumen, especially in understanding workflows and processes in industries where video analytics is becoming a standard requirement, including retail, healthcare, residential facilities management, industrial/manufacturing, and the public sector.

How Comcast Smart Solutions helps organizations

At Comcast Smart Solutions, our cutting-edge video analytics solutions help clients better understand and monitor their environment with customized hardware and software solutions. More importantly, our robust video analytics portfolio integrates AI with other smart technologies, including cameras, access control, IoT devices, and granular analytics tools. This results in solutions that yield automated, real-time, and contextually aware insights from a wide range of video sources that help information security and safety procedures, while also helping retailers, buildings managers, and municipalities make smarter, faster, and more cost-efficient operational decisions.

Comcast Smart Solutions’ video analytics solutions are deployed across a wide range of use cases, including:

• Smart search technologies to help identify and locate people, vehicles, and objects simply by typing in a description.
• License plate recognition (LPR), using AI algorithms to automate parking management, impact security, and track customer loyalty.
• Visual analytics, enabling organizations to utilize pattern recognition for human actions and movements, helping to monitor public safety, physical security, space utilization, and customer experience.
• Real-time alerts, such as identifying when cameras are disabled or when sensitive or prohibitive areas have been breached.
• Access control and integration into video intercoms to better monitor entry and exit points.

One of Comcast Smart Solutions’ key capabilities is its ability to integrate and collaborate with a wide range of hardware, software, and IT services, creating a rich provider ecosystem that enables both functionality and efficiency.

Comcast Smart Solutions’ services include engineering and deployment professionals to provide technical and business skills to simplify and speed video analytics system implementations. By working closely with our clients throughout the process, from solution design to installation and post-install support, Comcast Smart Solutions delivers streamlined service.

Video analytics solutions can also be integrated with other Comcast Smart Solutions technologies, such as smart buildings, smart mobility, smart lighting, and digital signage. By implementing holistic smart technologies, properties provide a more complete view of their environment which can have a greater impact on customers, employees, and guests.

How video analytics complements other smart technology solutions

Video analytics is one of the most exciting, innovative, and quickly evolving elements of the data analytics landscape. Unlike in the past when video feeds presented numerous technical and cost-related challenges for organizations looking to glean insights from video, today’s solutions help organizations leverage video to make smarter decisions for a wide range of properties and facilities, ranging from a single retail store to huge multi-location, multi-family complex properties.

Importantly, video analytics can now complement other smart technology solutions, helping to create a more comprehensive understanding of a facility’s operations. But fully leveraging video analytics requires a level of knowledge, experience, and resources that relatively few organizations possess. That’s because so much of the success of video analytics is driven by knowing where to start, how to attack problems and opportunities using precise implementation best practices, and how to measure success.

Comcast Smart Solutions has the technical skills, tools, experience, and provider ecosystem to plan, develop, and implement sophisticated AI-powered video analytics systems. Its ability to leverage the broad and deep complementary skills of hardware, software, and services enables us to pull together the best solutions for unique industries and organizations, regardless of the scale, complexity, or challenge. 

©TechTarget, Inc. or its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. TechTarget, and the TechTarget logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of TechTarget, Inc. and are registered in jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names and logos, including for BrightTALK, Xtelligent, and the Enterprise Strategy Group might be trademarks of TechTarget or its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, logos and brand names are the property of their respective owners.

Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources TechTarget considers to be reliable but is not warranted by TechTarget. This publication may contain opinions of TechTarget, which are subject to change. This publication may include forecasts, projections, and other predictive statements that represent TechTarget’s assumptions and expectations in light of currently available information. These forecasts are based on industry trends and involve variables and uncertainties. Consequently, TechTarget makes no warranty as to the accuracy of specific forecasts, projections or predictive statements contained herein.

Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of TechTarget, is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact Client Relations at cr@esg-global.com.