Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who are the buyers?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It’s usually the airports. There are a number of stakeholders involved that get access to the data. It’s usually the airport that we work with directly. There are also the landlords. They’re the ones that install hardware into the ceiling. They usually tend to be open with this information with government agencies, security checkpoint provider, airline, or ground handling personnel. It could also be the regulator.

Sramana Mitra: How many airports are using this technology?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It’s over a hundred. It tends to be the mega-hubs of the world all the way down to small airports that tend to have seasonal peaks.

Sramana Mitra: This is all in Europe?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It’s all over the world. There’s a concentration in western Europe, North America, Australia, and the Middle East. We also have airports using our solution in African countries and Latin American companies.

Sramana Mitra: That sounds like that’s one of your major use cases.

Florian Eggenschwiler: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the commercials. How much does an airport spend on technology like this? What is the average deal size?

Florian Eggenschwiler: Airports are very CAPEX-driven businesses. They build infrastructure. In the big picture, the passenger management flow is a very small part of airports. There’s a hardware component. Airports, being CAPEX-oriented, tend to purchase that outright. Then there is a software element and services that we provide that are completely scalable. We have airports starting out with two sensors covering a very small area. Eventually, they grow all the way to covering a vast portion of the terminal.

Sramana Mitra: The software is a subscription business?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It’s easier for everyone involved if it’s provided as a service.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do other use cases.

Florian Eggenschwiler: I’ll let you choose. There are two sectors that are super interesting – retail and public transportation.

Sramana Mitra: We can talk about both. We can start with retail.

Florian Eggenschwiler: When I say retail, I’m referring to brick-and-mortar retail. If you’re familiar with e-commerce, you get an idea of the vast amount of data that is available to optimize your e-commerce operation. When it comes to brick-and-mortar, it’s mostly based on gut feeling and experience. We bring in the technology so that you can replicate what you do in the digital world in the physical world.

At its most basic level, a sensor at the store entrance can count how many customers come in and out. You can then overlay that with POS data and then you have your conversion rate as well as use profiles – what time of day and what day of the week. You can use that to optimize staffing and the availability of products.

Once you start going deeper into the store, you can do a much more complex analysis. If you cover an entire store similar to what I described for an airport, you can follow a customer’s journey anonymously. Based on AI, we can understand a person’s view direction. We would know which shelf they’re looking at for how long. You, then, need to overlay that with what’s on the shelf to understand product attention.

Using AI, we can distinguish between customers and staff. We can then measure how many staff-customer interactions were. How long did they last? Did this lead to a higher conversion rate? Based on gender detection, we get some idea about the demographics of customers. We can then understand what implications that has for the store. This is all information that enables the retailer to better understand what happens between a customer entering a store and, potentially, completing a transaction.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis
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