To the Edge and Beyond

In part two of a three-part series, Intel’s Christine Boles continues to lay out the intelligent edge's role in industrial transformation through the convergence of AI and business operations analytics. She shares a roadmap for how companies can use the “edge” to drive greater insight into business operations and enhance their sustainability goals. She highlights how to leverage the right compute, capabilities, and AI-derived analytics to unlock information hidden in terabytes of underutilized process data, thus improving enterprise visibility and the bottom line.

Learn more about Intel’s Internet of Things solutions by connecting with Christine Boles on LinkedIn or visit www.intel.com/industrial

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Christine Boles, Intel’s head of the Industrial Solutions Division, shares her vision and makes a compelling case to seize Industry 4.0 opportunities by leveraging the power of the intelligent edge in industrial transformation. She highlights how integrating industrial capabilities like AI and machine learning and vision can generate new and meaningful insights about business processes that can drive improved decision-making and real-time efficiency gains. Through more IT/OT integration on the factory floor, Intel can be a processing capability multiplier by bringing the power of its developer ecosystem to bear on the challenges facing industrial partners.

Learn more about Intel’s Internet of Things solutions by connecting with Christine Boles on LinkedIn or visit www.intel.com/industrial.

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When you think of the challenges that a convenience store owner or operator faces, bleeding-edge technology may not seem high on the priority list. Traditionally, the convenience store industry is conservative in its approach to early technology adoption due to slim margins and aggressive competition.

But challenges during the coronavirus have brought technology, innovation, and smart business solutions to the forefront of store owners' minds, according to Intel IoT Sales Specialist Kristen Call and IoT Marketing Manager John Klafin.

Call and Klafin joined host Shelby Skrhak on this episode of To the Edge and Beyond to discuss edge technology deployment in the convenience store industry.

"I would have agreed, a year ago, that bleeding-edge technology is not on the forefront, but this last year has shifted that," Call said." We're seeing a lot more of the industry dive into how to make their businesses smarter."

Smart businesses have smart devices.

"We've seen the proliferation of edge computing, computer vision and artificial intelligence in the retail industry, as well as Internet of Things, where we make devices smart and connected," Klafin said. "There's a tremendous amount of intelligence that we're helping retailers process and turn into valuable business insights."

Actionable intelligence requires huge amounts of data, and data from internet-connected smart devices requires bandwidth to keep pace. Rather than connecting a store's growing number of smart devices and sending all its respective data to the cloud, the edge platform can give stores the power to analyze data on-site.

More than making c-stores better with data and business insights, IoT is making stores safer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contactless temperature checks for customers, density monitoring, and customer counting are all tools that store owners can use to keep their employees and customers safe.

"Having artificial intelligence as part of your game plan is a huge advantage," Call said.

Learn more about deploying the edge in convenience stores by connecting with Kristen Call and John Klafin on LinkedIn or visit www.intel.com/retailSubscribe to this channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts to hear more from the Intel Internet of Things Group.

It’s a frustration many customers have encountered. After going online to see if a certain product or style is in stock, it’s time to head to the store and pick it up. But then, when you’re there, the item isn’t.

That could be changing, said Eshe Pickett, Software Architect for the Intel Internet of Things Group, as retail outlets utilize edge and cloud technologies to better manage data that tracks inventory and other metrics.

“One of the great things about this emerging interoperability … is where you have the ability to replicate your data in multiple locations and keep those datasets very well synced,” she said.

The two types of systems can work together to better integrate systems retailers need not only to work but to work quickly to provide the best type of customer experience.

“Enabling those systems to interoperate between cloud-backed inventory management or point-of-sale solution that is tied to in-store inventory is one of the things retailers have really been working to make seamless. So, being able to host data at the edge and cache the data, where it’s going to be most needed to reduce the latency in terms of going back to the cloud and coming back to the edge – you’re able to provide a much more seamless experience,” Pickett said.

That’s one of several use cases more advanced servers are helping retailers with, with others including improved point-of-sale experiences and loyalty customers being able to utilize an app to quickly get in and out of a store after deciding which items they want to pick up.

Intel is a founding member of the Open Retail Initiative, which provides the framework for a collaborative foundation for digital transformation and value-added innovation and a common deployment platform for edge-based solutions and devices.

Learn more about The Open Retail Initiative by connecting with Eshe Pickett on LinkedIn or visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/retail/open-retail-initiative.html.

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With the global IoT security market poised to grow from an annual $12.5 billion to $36.6 billion over the next five years, it is clear the need for solutions to protect the front-of-house bank operations is imperative. Devakumar Rajagopalan, Banking Segment Marketing Manager, and Wallace Lee, Senior Platform Solution Engineer, both with Intel’s Internet of Things Group, brought their insights on the current situation to this episode of To The Edge and Beyond.

Rajagopalan spoke about the frequency of cybersecurity events occurring in banking. “Every day, we hear of an organization where there is a data breach or a customer is losing money from their account with stolen credentials,” Rajagopalan said.

And how does the pandemic factor into these issues and risks? “2020 was a challenging year for banks when it comes to cybersecurity,” Rajagopalan said. “Because of COVID, the customer has to do more virtual banking, and employees are working from home. This has created the biggest cybersecurity challenge for banks.” Rajagopalan noted that, during comparative periods in 2020 vs. 2019, the number of cybersecurity incidents was up significantly.

“There is no doubt the financial industry’s done a good job keeping up with the investment in cybersecurity infrastructures,” Lee said. “Unfortunately, cybersecurity today is still pretty much like a game of cat and mouse. Why, you may ask? Because there is no way to know the vulnerability if you don’t know they ever existed.”

Edge Computing offers a wide range of security benefits for banks, including the ability to defend the attack right at the source without compromising the overall banking systems – once an attack has happened, there is a high chance it can multiply. This would allow a bank to defend an attack on one individual kiosk at the branch level rather than allowing the attack to spread to kiosks across all branches.

Intel is partnering with Independent Software Vendors, System Integrators, Video Analytics providers, and Banks to deploy and develop Edge security solutions.

Learn more about banking security solutions by connecting with Devakumar Rajagopalan and Wallace Lee on LinkedIn or visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/financial-services-it/financial-services-overview.html

Banks are a constant – they loom on urban corners and dot rural towns, providing necessary financial services to their customers. However, they’re also rigid, often resulting in slower adaptation of new technologies.

In today’s world of heightened consumer expectations and the desire for more personalized and automated experiences, that’s no longer an option. Even though physical, brick-and-mortar bank branches are here to stay, it’s time for them to evolve.

On this episode of To the Edge and Beyond, brought to you by Intel, host Sarah Dandashy was joined by a trio of industry experts in Senior Intel Principal Engineer and Chief Technology Officer of RBHE Sanjay Addicam, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at Karnataka Bank Pankaj Gupta, and Co-founder and CEO of DaveAI Sriram P H to explore how that evolution is taking place.

“There is a shift that is happening away from the role the branches used to play, traditionally,” Gupta said. “The branches are kind of moving toward managing processes, managing collections, [and] managing other regulatory requirements rather than the transactions, themselves.”

From a technology standpoint, Addicam said there’s been a recent explosion in kiosk implementation and use, which is transforming the way in which a typical branch operates.

That’s where solutions like DaveAI, an artificial intelligence-powered sales augmentation platform that “helps brands create a virtual sales avatar to understand their customers,” come in.

“When you have to cover a larger space in terms of number of branches, how can do that much leaner without compromising on the experience?,” Sriram said. “I think that’s where we try and leverage some of these technologies, like intelligent kiosks, to create what we believe is going to be a ‘branch in a box,’ where you can deliver the same experience, digitally, without compromising what really happens in a branch.”

Learn more about innovation in banking by connecting with Sanjay Addicam, Pankaj Gupta, and Sriram P H on LinkedIn.

There remains a huge opportunity to market to consumers on the go, and a whole industry has risen to meet that demand. However, out of home advertising has many drawbacks that prevent companies from relying on this channel too heavily.

Companies like Intel hope to change this perception, as well as the overall effectiveness of this type of advertising.

In this episode of The Edge and Beyond, Shelby Skrhak discussed the past, present, and future of digital out of home (DOOH) advertising with Maroun Isaac and Andreas Soupliotis.

Isaac, the Director of Business Development in the Retail, Banking, Hospitality, and Education division at Intel, helped shape the company’s vision of effective DOOH advertising. Meanwhile, Soupliotis is the CEO and cofounder of Hivestack, helping to innovate the DOOH media buying process when the company was first established.

Traditional out-of-home advertising has not been a large part of any company’s marketing strategy because “brands are no longer interested in this type of media,” Isaac said. “They’re no longer interested in paying for ads that are incredibly inefficient and have lots of spilled impressions.”

However, things began to change in the 2000s, once Intel began “championing a new marketing playbook for out of home,” Soupliotis said.

In 2018, Intel and other industry leaders pushed DOOH further with the 3A initiative. The three As – which stand for addressable, accountable, and attributable – are crucial to helping DOOH companies remain competitive with today’s giants of online advertising.

In 2020, Intel and Hivestack worked with Live Board to implement the 3A approach to a live campaign based on location data and audience movement patterns. Hivestack partnered with Intel to programmatically activate screens targeting a high concentration of business decision-makers. In total, intent from 1704 business domains was measured, generating an 8.8% overall lift, with nearly 4 million impressions delivered and positive consideration and intent-driven among key decision-makers.

Learn more about DOOH by connecting with Maroun Ishac or Andreas Soupliotis on LinkedIn or visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/iot-solutions/digital-signage/dooh.html.

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The COVID-19 pandemic forever altered the QSR landscape. Innovations once believed to take years to develop arrived out of necessity. Intel’s Internet of Things Group, joined by partners like PreciTaste, led the way with AI solutions that not only got QSRs up and running during the early stages of the pandemic but continued to innovate and create efficiencies and cost savings to better position the industry for success in the future.

To the Edge and Beyond took a closer look at the trends in QSRs and how process optimization can be used to address these, with Farhaan Mohideen, Product Strategy & IoT Spokesperson at Intel, Kristen Call, IoT Sales Specialist at Intel, and Hauke Feddersen, Director of Global Operations at PreciTaste.

Mohideen admitted the industry faces challenging times.“(QSRs) have been trying to do everything possible to stay open with mechanisms like delivery or integrating with digital companies. But, at the same time, for customers and even staff, they also had to focus a lot on safety,” Mohideen said.

With these myriad challenges, Hauke saw opportunities, as well.

“Those that have a drive-thru and have delivery, the business flourishes,” Hauke said. “That means 10-30% more kitchen tasks, and they’re all handed out through the drive-thru window. This puts a lot of strain on processes, the crew and the supply chain.”

While many QSRs have drive-thrus, very few were optimized for digital journeys, Mohideen said. Those restaurants that had were already in a better position when the pandemic arrived.

“Our partners, including PreciTaste, have been in the forefront of these innovations.

Some of the AI innovations now deployed in QSRs include the ability to assess and count inventory, monitor social distancing, smart cameras that access customer ordering demand, and the ability to learn patterns to develop refined production plans. Kitchen process optimization solutions like PreciTaste’s also help QSRs use technology to understand when their stock is running low, how to keep their food fresher for longer and reduce food waste.

Learn more about QSR solutions by connecting with Farhaan Mohideen and Kristen Call on LinkedIn or visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/hospitality/overview.html

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The modern consumer is one that no longer views interaction and engagement as a luxury – it’s now an expectation for doing business with an organization, particularly in retail and hospitality.

Consumers are looking for elevated engagement and end-to-end, holistic experiences, and that means, for those retailers and hospitality organizations, turning to visual and interactive experiences.

On this episode of To the Edge and Beyond, brought to you by Intel’s Internet of Things Group, host Daniel Litwin was joined by IoT Group Technical Lead Ben Cope and Technical Lead, Multimodal Analytics Sangeeta Ghangam. The trio tackled the challenges facing these industries in conducting those now-critical digital transformations – and what Intel and the IoT Group are doing to help.

“Digitization has multiple trends in the different verticals that Intel IoT serves,” Cope said. “There’s one direction of increasing operational efficiency, and another angle is the ‘wow’ factor and the experiential [aspect of a business].”

Operational efficiency goals can be met with solutions like self-service kiosks and other solutions that free up staff members to play other roles, while the experiential side requires more impactful solutions, such as large LED video walls or interactive smart mirrors in retail fitting rooms.

Intel’s solutions are designed to help organizations engage with these solutions and with the multimodal aspect of today’s holistic technology suites.

“The multimodality of that digital aspect is becoming more and more prominent, now,” Ghangam said. “The expectation is that the interaction has to be done in more than one way, which leads to a type of processing that has to comprehend the different data sources.”

Learn more about how Intel is working to guide hospitality and retail organizations through their digital transformations by connecting with Cope and Ghangam on LinkedIn.

Suggested further reading on the topics discussed:

11th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/products/docs/processors/core/11th-gen-processors.html

OneAPI Toolkit https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/oneapi.html

Intel® IOT Market Ready Solutions https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/market-ready-solutions/market-ready-solutions.html

Touchless Technologies for Kiosks and Vending Machines https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/iot-solutions/kiosk/resources/touchless-technologies-whitepaper.html

COVID-19: Re-Imagining Life in a Post Pandemic World https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/reimagining-life-cities-ebook.html

Benchmarking metrics for anonymous video analytics (Queen Mary University) http://ava.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/

Edge computing means various things to different industries. For Christie Rice, Director of Business Development for Retail at the Intel Internet of Things Group, and Richard Newman, CTO and Co-Founder at Reliant, edge computing is all about the retail experience.

“For a lot of enterprises, particularly the ones that we focus on in retail and hospitality, the edge is where they do business in the physical world,” Newman said. “And the question then becomes how do the applications that they deploy at the edge manifest themselves? What type of applications are they, and where do they run?”

Newman and Rice see the edge as giving retail the ability to run a platform in a store or restaurant that allows them to deploy various applications. From there, stores can run IoT devices like payment terminals. In this environment, edge and cloud work together to deliver a next-generation experience.

“In edge computing for a retailer, the magic really happens when you take all of that information from all of those different devices – from the cameras, digital signs, point of sales terminals, even from things like temperature sensors and motion proximity sensors,” Rice said. “When you take all of that and you put it into one place where different applications can share that information, the retailer can start creating some business insights, understand what’s happening, and act on that in a holistic, quick and flexible manner.”

Newman said one exciting example of how edge computing is transforming next-generation retail is cashier-less check out, a trend that more and more retailers and quick-service restaurants are utilizing. “What makes the cashier-less experience possible is edge and cloud computing working together.”

Intel is working with partners like Reliant to help retailers optimise existing cloud native apps to run on Edge, modernise their existing Edge architecture and is working with Open Source communities to find ways to help people get started.

Learn more about retail solutions by connecting with Christie Rice and Richard Newman on LinkedIn or visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/retail/overview.html or https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/edge-computing/overview.html

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