AI propels European businesses towards increasing smart video adoption

AI is influencing business attitudes towards the adoption of smart video use throughout Europe, as revealed in recent research conducted by Western Digital. The research surveyed over 1,300 entities across the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Traditional use cases for intelligent video including security, theft prevention, incident investigation, and maintaining employee health and safety continue to rank high in application. However, newer uses are emerging with the rise of artificial intelligence applications.

This study incorporated views from high-ranking decision-makers across varied sectors such as manufacturing, finance, education, automotive, and retail. Findings revealed that AI's prevalence is pushing the growth of smart video, with a quarter of surveyed European businesses expected to embrace the technology in the forthcoming year.

Key considerations for adopting smart video systems include high-resolution video quality (25%), data storage options (24%), and high-speed connectivity (23%). Furthermore, 43% of respondents intend to invest up to $100K in their systems, signifying the importance businesses attach to this burgeoning technology.

Research indicates that 46% of European firms acknowledge the impact of AI on smart video capabilities. They expect that it will further streamline business optimisation. In the survey of 1,362 companies across six European countries, a quarter were willing to employ the technology and invest significantly in new systems, with 43% of them prepared to invest up to $100,000.

Participating businesses also named scalability of operations (44%), system efficiency (44%), surveillance personalisation (44%), and analytics (43%) as the main factors affected by the rise of AI. Responding to these changes and keeping up with the progress in camera technology, AI-advanced features, and data storage innovations, businesses would need to scale and adapt their data storage systems besides use cases.

Darragh O'Toole, Western Digital's Product Marketing Manager in Europe, elaborated that presently cameras are not just recording at 4K resolution, but with on-camera AI chips, they are able to deliver real-time data analysis. These factors, combined with a minimum of 24 frames per second, triple or double the storage capacity required by organisations. Out of all the data European firms generate, 50% resides at the edge of their networks where continuous recording is a necessity, necessitating high-endurance, high-capacity, and high-performance storage solutions.

The benefits are increasingly visible across business sectors. For instance, the retail sector can employ smart cameras for diverse functions ranging from managing shop layout to enhancing the customer experience by detecting in-store movement. Businesses also back up camera data locally as network availability failures can have detrimental effects. Consequently, 48% of firms in the region gravitate towards a local storage solution rather than the cloud.

In conclusion, O'Toole posits that while every corporation has different requirements for its smart video storage dependent on case uses, the common demand across all is for the systems to be equipped to meet future data needs and scalability demands. Confirming this, 53% of surveyed organisations plan to opt for high data storage capacity ranging between 13 and 22 TB. This poises them to meet the challenges and opportunities proposed by artificial intelligence in the future.