Cameras, AI drive car sales

CarExpert’s AI experiment showed which cars attracted different demographics.

Artificial intelligence has been used to map behaviours of purchasers as they move around a car display area inspecting new cars.

In a move that could be adapted to new and used car yard sales, carexpert.com.au installed network-connected overhead cameras during a trial showroom from March to June at Westfield Warringah Mall in Brookfield, in Sydney’s northeast.

CarExpert’s trial involved letting prospective buyers and others inspect a range of car makes and models in a showroom. Their car reviewers provided advice and expertise to those who attended, rather than sales representatives from the car makers. People could also test drive the cars.

Concurrently, CarExpert positioned 40 cameras that focused on each car, and the entrance and exit in the centre.

Some of the findings of the trial are fascinating. “We saw engagement for one particular SUV increase by over 400 per cent after changing it from white to red,” said CarExpert CEO Andrew Dalton. “Information like this is incredibly helpful for car manufacturers and in the planning of our future centres,” he said.

Engagement measures when a person‘s velocity decreases by 90 per cent in the vicinity (zone) of a car. Urban, family, adventure and electric are categories of cars. Click on the image to enlarge the graphs.

Armed with the cameras, CarExpert could see which cars were attractive to different demographics, for example, which cars appealed to younger women or elderly customers. It could record how people approached a car and how long individuals inspected it.

Mr Dalton said the camera streams were uploaded to a licensed software-as-a-service based AI product for analysis. CarExpert marked out zones across entrances, exits, cars and car segments. “The AI software could then identify customers who entered each zone, how long they spent there, and approximate age and gender.

“That information came back to us as raw data in the form of a CSV file, which we ran through a customised presentation layer to graphically display the outcomes in a way similar to Google Analytics.”

The cameras also recorded the walk-in rate, time, perceived age, gender, vehicle zone entrance, vehicle zone dwell time, segment zone entrance and segment zone dwell time, and a metric it calls “attention”, which measures people who slow their walk around particular cars.

Mr Dalton said the move from a digital to a physical environment had offered a unique opportunity.

A zone is a specified space around a vehicle and the count measures the number of visitors in that space. Urban, family, adventure and electric are categories of cars. Click on the image to enlarge the graphs.

“Unlike traditional retailers who shift from a physical to digital environment, we‘ve gone the other way and that has most definitely caused us to approach retailing from a very unique perspective,” he said.

“Most of us here have had a long career specialising in digital and we‘ve been conditioned to expect the depth of information and performance transparency you receive from even the most basic online analytics platform.

“Because of that, I think it was very instinctive for our team to begin searching for an innovative way to bring digital analytics into a physical retail environment right from the outset.

“It was critical for us to be able to gain deeper insights of how car buyers engage with our Experience Centre and each car inside of it.”

Mr Dalton said CarExpert was conscious of protecting people’s privacy. “Our camera based analytics technology is privacy assured with no facial recognition,” he said. “We do not store the data as faceprint in order to comply with the global privacy standard of General Data Protection Regulation.”

Data & Operations Manager at CarExpert Jin Tee said the technology allowed the company to quantify real-world physical behaviour in a way typically only reserved for digital environments.

“It‘s allowed us to not just measure engagement with our brand, but also the brand products within our space. This provides our clients and our business with powerful insights that would traditionally be subject to sampling and a laborious means of manual measurement.“