The retail industry faces significant and disruptive challenges in enhancing brick-and-mortar store experiences and streamlining operations to compete against online retailers. AI is driving a new industrial revolution, offering immense opportunities to accelerate innovation in retail.
From personalized recommendations and queue management to fast and efficient checkouts and smart mirrors, AI is revolutionizing the shopping experience. Additionally, it enhances marketing through in-store analysis and improves loss prevention strategies for more efficient operations.
The real challenge, however, lies in providing low-cost computing power for OEMs and service providers, enabling them to to fully leverage AI's potential and transform retail operations and customer experiences effectively.
“The exceptional performance and accuracy of the Axelera AI Acceleration platform have significantly fueled our collaborative efforts. Its unmatched performance-to-price ratio, surpassing traditional GPUs and dedicated AI Processing units, has been critical in our selection process.”
~Alexandre Perez, R&D Director at XXII
Transforming the retail industry with computer vision AI
Computer vision AI reduces the need for physical assistance from staff, streamlines operations, and improves customer satisfaction. This technology can transform your digital signage monitors into an effective in-store media channel, providing valuable customer insights and enhancing their shopping experience. From deploying additional staff to reducing wait times to offering a seamless just-walk-out experience, AI-driven computer vision can significantly improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
However, implementing these AI solutions requires expensive centralized AI data centers and high-cost AI-embedded cameras, which can slow down innovation due to high infrastructure costs and complexity.
Axelera AI offers groundbreaking hardware solutions to these obstacles. By providing the computing power of a cloud data center within a standard workstation or industrial PC, Axelera AI enables the use of cost-effective camera infrastructures combined with next-gen Edge AI technology at a fraction of the former costs. This approach not only accelerates innovation processes in retail AI but also offers a tenfold reduction in required power and ease of deployment at the Edge. It allows installation in uncontrolled environments while ensuring reliability and significantly reducing the total cost of ownership thanks to a reduced upfront investment and low maintenance required.
This innovative edge AI technology positions Axelera AI as a key player in transforming the retail industry, making advanced AI applications more accessible and affordable for OEMs, Service providers and retailers.
Ready to see how Axelera AI can accelerate retail computer vision AI?
Create the future of retail with affordable computer vision AI
Computer vision AI-enabled Point of Sales
Computer vision AI significantly improves retail operations, such as preventing label switching at self-checkout points. This technology uses object detection networks to ensure that scanned items match their labels, reducing errors and enhancing user experience. Using video recognition instead of weight and scale measurements enables self-checkouts to become more efficient and user-friendly.
However, the high costs associated with current hardware solutions, which often rely on expensive GPUs, hinder large-scale implementation. This financial barrier often results in innovations getting stuck in the pilot phase, preventing widespread adoption.
Axelera AI addresses these challenges by integrating the computing power of a cloud data center into standard workstations or industrial PCs. This approach allows OEMs and solution providers to use standard camera infrastructures combined with next-gen Edge AI technology at a fraction of the cost. This setup not only accelerates innovation in retail AI but also reduces energy costs by tenfold, enabling deployment in uncontrolled environments while maintaining reliability and significantly lowering the total cost of ownership.
Optimize shopper behavior and curbside pickup
Computer vision AI significantly enhances retail operations by monitoring shopper traffic and queuing in supermarkets and malls. This technology optimizes staff shifts to reduce wait times and improve the shopping experience. By analyzing video data, AI can provide real-time insights into customer flow, helping retailers make data-driven decisions about staffing and layout adjustments.
Additionally, computer vision can recognize car license plates, streamlining curbside pickup processes and improving reliability. This ensures that orders are accurately matched with arriving vehicles, reducing errors and enhancing customer satisfaction.
These advancements showcase how computer vision AI-driven solutions can transform retail efficiency and customer service.
Enabling large scale autonomous stores
In retail environments, combining object detection, classification, and pose estimation is crucial for tasks like automated inventory management, customer behavior analysis, and enhancing shopping experiences. For example, a system can use object detection to identify products, classification to verify items, and pose estimation to understand customer interactions with products on shelves. The Axelera AI Metis design, with its four self-sufficient cores, efficiently handles these tasks in parallel, significantly enhancing performance.
By utilizing existing camera infrastructures, Axelera AI's solution avoids the substantial investment required to replace cameras with expensive AI-equipped alternatives. This makes it feasible to scale such solutions across large stores. Moreover, Axelera AI’s hardware brings data center-level performance into a compact and cost-effective form factor, reducing the total cost of ownership and enabling widespread deployment in retail settings.
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO & Co-founder explains how Axelera AI addresses market gaps with innovative computer vision AI and AI accelerator hardware, delivering high performance and efficiency for the embedded and Edge spaces at lower power consumption and cost.
Freedom to innovate
The highly cost-efficient, easy-to-integrate and future-proof Axelera AI Metis Platform accelerates equipment and software deployment by providing a comprehensive hardware and software solution for accelerating Vision AI in Security and Surveillance. While the hardware design enhances performance and reduces cost and power consumption, the usability of Metis makes vision AI technology accessible to a broader range of developers and enterprises worldwide, so they have the freedom to innovate.
Exceptional price and performance
Axelera AI offers unmatched price-performance with its hardware capable of delivering up to 214 TOPS from a single AIPU. The Metis PCIe system offers an industry-leading performance of 16.4 FPS per dollar and 614 FPS per watt on Resnet-50, making high-performance AI solutions more accessible and cost-effective for retail applications.
Utilization of existing infrastructures
Axelera AI enables retailers to tap into their existing camera infrastructures, avoiding the substantial costs associated with replacing cameras with expensive AI-equipped alternatives. This makes it feasible to scale AI solutions across large stores without significant additional investments.
Enabling advanced parallel processing
The Metis design, featuring four self-sufficient cores, allows multiple neural networks—such as object detection, classification, and pose estimation—to run simultaneously. This parallel processing capability enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of AI applications in retail, from inventory management to customer behavior analysis.
Compact and cost-effective hardware
Axelera AI's hardware delivers data center-level performance in a compact and cost-effective form factor. This reduces the total cost of ownership and enables widespread deployment of AI solutions in retail environments, enhancing operational efficiency and customer experiences.
4 reasons why Metis accelerates your Retail AI innovation
Axelera Metis AI acceleration hardware supports solutions for a variety of retail formats, from small pods to complete autonomous stores, facilitating scalability and adaptability in retail computer vision initiatives. Additionally, the emphasis on edge processing enhances privacy, allowing all inferencing to be handled on-site, minimizing data exposure. With the Metis platform, integrating retail computer vision into your projects becomes seamless, accelerating deployment and encouraging a forward-thinking approach in the retail sector.
