After deployments in shops in China and Japan, IoT provider Thundercomm is bringing its Smart Visiting AI face recognition-based digital store management system to a wider market.

Thundercomm, headquartered in California, is a joint venture between Chinese firm Thunder Software Technology and Qualcomm established to accelerate innovation in the IoT and automotive industry, providing one-stop services powered by Qualcomm mobile and automotive platforms.

The firm uses operating systems including Android and Linux, and a broad software and on-device AI technology portfolio from ThunderSoft, featuring Snapdragon mobile platform technology, and a global sales and support network.

Smart Visiting is said to facilitate the intelligent and digital transformation of traditional retail through an end-to-end commercialisation model as well as a combination of 5G- and AI-based applications.

Compared with traditional retail, smart retail focuses on the consumer experience. Smart Visiting is designed to create smart consumer experience by breaking the traditional store management model.

The AI face recognition-based system lets stores address problems that cannot be solved by the floor staff on their own, creating an intelligent and digital store management system that can transform traditional stores to smart ones.

The end-to-end system includes a front-end camera, edge computing platform, back-end management system and user application. It comes with features such as VIP recognition, customer flow statistics, customer sentiment analysis, equipment management and remote store inspection, helping retailers deliver personalised and customised services, enhancing the efficiency of store management, reducing operating costs and increasing single-store revenues.

It can seamlessly connect to traditional retail CRM and ERP systems, intelligently guide sales staff and customer service personnel in providing one-to-one customised services to all shoppers, standardising the store’s service management and delivering better services.

Smart Visiting has been deployed at many retail locations in Japan and China. Among them, a Japan-based retail store uses it to analyse its customer flow and then optimise and adjust the shift schedule of all floor employees, enabling the store to reduce labour costs by 5% and increase overall revenue by a quarter.

A store in Beijing’s central business district uses it to identify members and non-members, as well as their shopping habits in real time in addition to providing marketing management strategies to the manager, helping the store increase its monthly sales over the long term by an average of 25% and by 10% year-on-year.

In the 5G and AI eras, digitalisation and intelligence could become the main drivers of smart sales. In line with the trend, Thundercomm is willing to collaborate with upstream and downstream partners across the industrial chain to achieve the transformation from traditional retail to smart retail.