Pathr.ai, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Spatial Intelligence platform, has unveiled its Sensor Layer v2.0 software and announced its expansion beyond the retail space to new verticals such as commercial real estate, grocers, manufacturing, industrial and critical infrastructure. The new software integrates directly with a physical space’s existing infrastructure, delivering fast, cost-effective solutions to companies that want to understand how people move and interact inside their physical spaces. With the move to Intel-based systems, the software will provide improved power efficiencies, make future deployments more viable and make it simple for the Pathr.ai ecosystem to develop new computer vision modules on its stack, the company said. The new technology will be initially used by a major U.S. mall operator.
“After launching in the retail space, we quickly recognized the need and potential for spatial intelligence solutions across other industries, particularly shopping malls, grocers, manufacturing, industrial, and commercial real estate,” said George Shaw, the CEO and Founder of Pathr.ai. “Our technology helps unlock areas of growth and arms companies with actionable insights to increase sales, reduce losses, and optimize their workforce. We also chose to move to Intel processors due to the global chip shortage and the fact that GPUs are expensive to scale.”
Pathr.ai integrates and collects data from existing infrastructure, measures human movement inside a physical space and anonymizes data, allowing companies to be general data protection regulation (GDPR)-compliant and handle fraud in a non-biased way. According to the company, the re-architected and more composable Sensor Layer enables Pathr.ai to run any computer vision model, either made internally, from open source or from third-party partners, on its stack, extending its capabilities to build industry-specific use cases at scale based on their clients’ business needs.
“The AI capabilities within our Intel Xeon Scalable processors help retailers turn their data into powerful new insights,” said Matthew Formica, director of Edge AI Developer Evangelism and Marketing at Intel. “Combined with the AI inferencing software acceleration delivered by the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO Toolkit, these capabilities help enable customers to meet critical and transformational business objectives at the Edge.”
Pathr.ai’s technology can be used to improve business outcomes in a variety of scenarios and typically generate a +10x annual ROI, including:
- Increasing sales: Redesigning how certain merchandise is placed in-store to target sales growth per customer.
- Decreasing losses: Predicting suspicious customer behavior, like shoplifting, in physical stores in an unbiased way.
- Optimizing the workforce: Ensuring checkout counters are appropriately staffed during a given time and day of the week.
- Improving staff and customer interactions: Enhancing staff and customer interactions and ensuring customers are being helped in a timely manner.
- Understanding mall traffic: Determining which hallways and entrances get the most traffic and adjusting rent accordingly.
- Determining elevator wait times: Providing optimal elevator wait times for tenants in large office buildings.
- Ensuring worker safety and optimizing flows: Preventing accidents by addressing safety issues before they become a problem and optimizing the worker paths taken in manufacturing/industrial environments to ensure maximum efficiency.
