What Our Customers Are Saying

Andy Edwards

In this interview, Andy Edwards, Head of Loss Prevention & Corporate Audit at Iceland Foods touches upon some of the key benefits he sees from implementing SAI’s visual AI platform across their store network. Here are a few key points that emerged from this discussion.

• Al-powered alerts for aisle theft: SAI's visual AI platform detects product concealment in hotspot areas and sends immediate alerts to store devices enabling colleagues to respond swiftly.
• Real-time, colleague-friendly intervention: The platform is designed to ensure colleagues can engage with customers politely, correct customer behavior, and intervene safely with the back up provided by the evidence collected in the system.
• Mis-scan and checkout fraud detection: The platform can identify non-scanning at checkouts, including both malicious fraud and non-malicious errors, giving the store teams accurate inputs before they respond.
• Low-noise, high-confidence alerts: The system provides high quality alerts as it is designed to identify genuine concealment events. Consequently, store staff do not get overwhelmed with irrelevant notifications. According to Andy, “The system just tells us exactly what we want it to tell us, which is that an individual has concealed something.”
• Facial recognition to detect repeat offenders: Iceland is working with SAI to create faster identification of repeat offenders and strengthen incident reporting, case management, and deterrence.
• Operational and financial impact: The implementation of SAI visual AI platform led to productivity gains, stronger shrink performance, and year-on-year improvement, especially in stores associated with the highest-risk. Andy feels that the platform’s impact is quite visible: “It’s certainly playing a huge part in our worst 100 stores, which cost us about a third of our total shrink.”
• Flexible platform with multiple use cases: Beyond theft detection, the interview touches upon various experiments carried out in queue management, slips and trips, violence alerts, interactive CCTV querying, customer flow analysis, merchandising, and wider operational use cases.
• Strong vendor partnership model: The customer stresses that the solution works because the vendor listens, adapts to Iceland’s culture, and learns directly from the retail environment rather than forcing generic use cases. “In order for us to be more proactive, we needed to have a solution that was far more proactive and that worked alongside us rather than behind us” says Andy.
• Organization-wide momentum around AI: While loss prevention is one entry point, the transcript makes clear that AI is spreading across the business into reporting, operations, supply chain, IT, HR, and broader productivity improvement.

Pull Quote
“To have a technology that enables them to offer a level of protection in their store whilst concentrating on the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day, I think is a real enabler for them.”
— Andy Edwards on how colleagues at Iceland Foods view SAI’s visual AI platform