Earlier this year at ISC West 2026 in Las Vegas, I had an interesting conversation with the operations executive of a large grocery chain. A couple of years ago, his company deployed one of the industry’s popular cloud-based AI Asset Protection platforms.
Naturally, I asked:
“So… was it worth it?”
He smiled.
Then he laughed.
Finally, he said:
“Honestly? I’m still trying to figure out what’s costing us more – the shoplifters… or the system we bought to stop them.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected.
The initial investment wasn’t the issue. Cameras, networking, installation, employee training – that was all expected.
The surprise came later.
Every month brought another bill for cloud AI subscriptions, centralized monitoring, Loss Prevention Officers, infrastructure, and software licensing.
What bothered him wasn’t the monthly cost.
It was the uncertainty.
“Are we actually reducing shrink… or simply spending more money and resources trying to reduce it?”
That question stayed with me.
Here are a few things the marketing brochures rarely mention.
Cloud AI doesn’t eliminate infrastructure costs.
It simply moves them.
Live video has to be transmitted, processed, analyzed, stored, and protected. That requires bandwidth, compute resources, GPUs, storage, and redundant infrastructure.
Ultimately, the customer pays for all of it.
Your operational data leaves your organization.
Live video.
Store activity.
Employee accounts.
Operational metadata.
All of it is continuously processed by a third-party cloud provider.
Will everything remain secure?
Probably.
Hopefully.
That’s certainly what every vendor promises.
Subscription pricing is only part of the equation.
Ask your vendor to estimate the CAPEX and OPEX for your entire retail network.
Then ask Finance to add everything else:
- Loss Prevention Officers
- Centralized monitoring staff
- Workstations
- Employee training
- Staff turnover
- Administrative overhead
That’s when the real Total Cost of Ownership starts to emerge.
Back to the sales floor.
Dedicated Loss Prevention Officers are becoming a luxury.
For many convenience stores and neighborhood markets, staffing every location with LPO coverage simply isn’t economically sustainable.
Ignoring shrink isn’t an option either.
So what’s the alternative?
Technology shouldn’t replace people.
It should make the people already in the store more effective.
It should be easy enough for existing associates to use, affordable enough to deploy across hundreds—or thousands—of locations, and focused on preventing incidents before they happen.
Not through confrontation.
Simply by making potential offenders realize one thing:
They’re no longer anonymous.
Experienced retailers have known this for years.
Investigations are expensive.
Documentation is expensive.
Legal action is expensive.
Employee turnover is expensive.
Preventing the loss in the first place is almost always the least expensive option.
Or, as I like to put it:
The most affordable investigation is the one that never has to begin.
See how it works
