LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 187

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

This week our hosts discuss some of the newest and latest trends, technology, and LPRC news! In this episode, our hosts discuss new LPRC Team Members, the top 5 global risks for the balance of 2024, the newest cybersecurity concern, artificial intelligence's newest roles in retail, and a look at NRF Protect. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more!

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, a weekly podcast series from the LPRC. And I'm joined today by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Vian, our co-host and our producer Diego Rodriguez and we're going to talk a little bit about crime loss opportunities in the U.S. and abroad. With no further ado let me turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio and we'll go to Tom after that. So Tony if you would take it away. Thank you Reed for all those great updates.

This week I want to focus on a brand new article that I just published on what's going on with the digital acceleration and also what are the top five global risks for the time of 2024 and so where are we? Well, the world's population has now reached 8.1 billion people and we're all on an accelerated march towards greater connectivity and digitization. Nearly 70% of the world's population now has a unique mobile phone subscription. Just over 67% of us are using the internet and maybe not surprisingly nearly 63% of all individuals living on earth have unique social media identities. What's maybe surprising to some of you is that on average each of us is spending an an outstanding six hours and 34 minutes per day on the internet and note that for how we've changed over time but by for example we spend 6.35 on the internet we spend only now three hours and eight minutes watching television we

spend two hours and 20 minutes on social media on average per day we spend just 49 minutes basically listening to radio it gives you an idea how media consumption is is changing so traditional television and radio continues its decline and Americans now are roughly as twice as likely to prefer getting their news from digital devices and television. Three in 10 U.S. adults regularly get their news on Facebook, with YouTube coming in second at 26%. For Gen Zers, one-third regularly scroll TikTok for news and that's up 255% since 2020. So the question that I ask myself are all these social trends for all of us around the world driving us towards a brighter more cooperative future? Before answering that question let me sum up a little bit of some of the other major trends that are going on in digitization i in my view ai is just getting started so artificial intelligence is just getting

started i speak a lot about it in my future of retail presentation gardner for example has a a chart that shows all the different applications that are emerging in artificial intelligence. The biggest one that's getting the most momentum is computer vision, and you can see a lot of that actually here at the Loss Prevention Research Council. We talk about it because I think it's a major function going forward. For Gartner, it's reaching the plateau of productivity which means it's getting ready to be commercialized on a grand scale also interesting as I point out is that in the old days if you were specialized in AI you were a computer geek and more than likely likely you are going to teach now an amazing 67 69 percent of people actually are hired by industry

if you have an ai as a phd also interesting to me is who's hiring and who's mentioning ai in their job listing retail is actually ranked number three following technology companies and banks so it's becoming a more and more function ai in terms of being important to retail and in fact to understand that there's some stats that i've used in terms of the impact that retail is going to have with ai and in fact the number is huge it's $9.2 trillion will be the worldwide retail impact of AI through 2029. It's going to be primarily in four segments, which is online retailers, food and grocery, mass merch and hypermarkets, especially hard goods, and then all the rest of the other segment. And largest retailers which

have the most data are actually the ones that will get the most benefit out of AI. And what's also interesting that I point out in this article is that younger generation are much more possibly to engage with AI than other applications. For example, when asked if I know something is created by an AI application, am I less likely to engage with it? Only 20% of the Gen Z, the younger, said that they would not engage, whereas 33% of the older people would not engage. So older people are much less comfortable with AI-generated content than younger generations.

So that's a big difference. Younger generations are more likely to trust and actually engage with artificial intelligence content going forward. So what all that means is that we're more connected, as I stated at the beginning, artificial intelligence content going forward. So what all that means is that we're more connected as I stated at the beginning, AI is gonna increase in terms of what does connection look like. But in news for all of us now is traveling

at the speed of finger trips. And really it's almost being published instantly in a lot of cases visually and sometimes very graphically on all our social media platform. With that in mind I actually highlighted the five risks that the Economist Intelligent Unit highlighted for the balance of 2024 and the five risks are Donald Trump basically becomes president and disrupts global trade and security alliances number two green technology subsidies races become a global trade war number three climate change extreme weather events disrupt global supply chains weather events disrupt global supply chains. Number four, the Israel-Hamas war escalates into a regional conflict. And number five, China moves to annex Taiwan, forcing a sudden

decoupling of how the world operates. I also added the Ukraine conflict, as I do believe it has potential of escalations in the rest of 24. The war in Ukraine actually has accelerated public attitudes towards international politics into two major opposing blocks. According to research that was published by the University of Cambridge, among the 1.2 billion people who live in the world's liberal democracies, three quarters, or 75%, now hold a negative view of China and 87% rest of the population of 6.3 billion who live in the world's remaining 136 countries So my summary is that yes, we are more connected, but unfortunately, we are also becoming more polarized as divided. And I think, although I stated the top five risks, I do think this is actually the biggest and greatest risk for 2024. So technologies on a march, learn a lot more with us in terms of what it's doing with us here at the Loss Prevention Research Council as it relates to security. But I wanted to share these broader trends in terms of what's going on around the world and how the rest of the world is seeing digitization and as it relates to all these global risks that we are still facing.

relates to all these global risks that we are still facing. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. And thank you, Reed. And last week was at RF Protect in Long Beach, California, and it was great to see everybody there. I think it was a great show. A lot of foot traffic, a lot of great sessions. Definitely, definitely the theme of AI was all over the place. I think when you're walking the expo hall, there was a lot of AI. there. It was a lot of activity, a very fast-paced event, and a great week overall.

So very excited to see each and every one of you that was there. And I'm excited to be able to participate in it. Going to do kind of a brief one this week because we were all together and last week wanted to just do a couple touch bases on some stories that are occurring right now in the news. In the news this week, there was headlines that read about retailers trying body cameras. And I think while some of the members were mentioned in there, that wasn't what really I thought was interesting. What I thought was interesting is that it made national headlines. And this is somewhat of a trend of the, what I would say is, for lack of a better term, the new norm when it comes to shrink reduction and violence reduction and that the media is picking these things up.

I always think it's exciting and great when retailers take the time to try innovative solutions and to step outside that normal box by trying things new. It's always hard to be first or one of the early adopters of a technology, but it's imperative that there is someone that starts so that we all can work together to reap the benefits of that. So very, very exciting indeed to see that. It's always great when a story like that hits national news. So I saw it in the Washington Post. I saw it in the New York Post. I saw it in numerous smaller publications as well as some TV publications. Very, very good coverage on that and more to come on that. conference. They mentioned what they're calling Apple intelligence. This is kind of the next leg of AI for Apple. They did mention a partnership with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, who also partners with Microsoft. So that's a very interesting kind of announcement because

they'll be partnering there. In theory, Microsoft keeps it completely separate, but I think it's very interesting when you have two rival companies that way. Apple showed some really, really great technology. One of the things that I think I'm the most excited about is a true voice assistant that you can have a conversation with, as well as some cross-platform throughout your Apple devices, understanding natural language and getting answers. The demos were very clean and smooth, very Apple-esque is what I would say. But I think this is kind of the evolution that I've been waiting for where your mobile devices really take full advantage of AI. Today, if you're using the ChatGPT app or any of these other apps, you definitely can

utilize some of the feature sets, but you don't get the full immersive experience of the smartphone. I think Samsung did a pretty good job of incorporating AI summarization into their web browser and their new devices, as well as some speech transcription summarization things. And I think Samsung's big feature was Circle to Search. Apple is now kind of taking the next iteration approach and integrating it into Siri. For the folks that are listening, we talk about AI all the time. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant were actually forms of weak AI, which was really AI that could answer very specific questions and basically could not go outside the realm. Adding some of the new chat GPT features that are out there

will really, really enhance that. If you haven't had a chance to, on the ChatGPT app, to look at their new voice assistant or voice option, I should say, it's pretty, pretty fantastic. You can have almost a real-time conversation with it. And it's as human-like as I've ever seen an AI chatbot with great information. as human-like as I've ever seen an AI chatbot with great information. I'm extremely excited at what's next for us as users of smartphones and how this can be incorporated in our daily day.

One of the examples given at WWDC was someone asking to help schedule a meeting and the device being able to look at your email workload, look at all of the things in there and identify whether or not you could have time for that meeting as well as something that I found fairly exciting was the fact that Apple, in Apple fashion, talks about how they are privacy-first functionality. So one of the things they mentioned is

how much of this can be done on device so that your privacy is first and foremost as well as be done on the device versus not. I really, really think that we're going to see a surgence of true AI voice assistance. And I do think that from a workflow and productivity standpoint, this will absolutely help your workflow. I talked about on-device indexing and symmetrical indexing so you can pull things up quicker. Private cloud on Apple M1 servers that are completely secure. Specific data will only be sent to chat GPTs, so keeping your privacy. will only be sent to chat GPTs, so keeping your privacy.

What we're going to see first is a Siri natural language and content aware, so you can have a conversation. If you make a mistake and misspeak, you can correct yourself in real time. Rewriting from a proofread and summarization standpoint built in, a automatic notification prioritization and some illustration sketch things. Those are the first things that we believe we'll see in the Apple Intelligence Suite. And I don't think you'll see Android far behind

in some of those same features. So very, very, very exciting time amongst a whole bunch of other announcements there. We continue to see a rash of these cyber incidences occurring. I don't think that there's an end in sight, right? We talk about it all the time. There's a ton of different things that are occurring out there um some of this is old news but you know new york times source code was stole using uh you know an exposed

g and github token um malicious uh vs code affecting millions of installations. There have been numerous patches and fixes that come through. I could literally list a long, long list of different things. The city of Cleveland, Ohio, shut down their IT systems after a cyber attack. This is all kind of fresh news. Chinese hackers breached 20,000 systems worldwide. There's a new backdoor for Windows being pushed by people getting fake job offers. There's just so many things from the cybersecurity place, this workplace and our home

that we need to be aware of. And I think it's just being extra vigilant and staying in front of as much as you can. I think that, you know, we should be very, very aware of all of these things. I think June 10th, there was an article yesterday from Silence confirming a data breach. So for the listeners, Silence is an AI intrusion detection software that was bought by Symantec or the parent company Norton. Semantic or the parent company Norton. And so you're talking about a very, very advanced intrusion detection software that had a breach. And what they're saying is it's linked to a third-party platform. So I'm not saying someone took advantage of them. But the idea here is there are no companies that are too large or too small to be impacted here as well as individuals. So how do we make sure that we all work together to keep each other safe? And listening to podcasts like this and sharing information, patch and update,

using strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, all of those things together. words, multi-factor authentication, all of those things together. And yes, I am repetitive about this, but the reason I am is because the risk is real for each and every one of us. We continue to see chatter throughout really all of the news channels around potential civil unrest and what's occurring in the future. So when we talk about civil unrest and the next leg of potential civil unrest, what does it mean for each and every one of us? Well, what it means for each and every one of us is that we need to be vigilant in paying attention to what is occurring. We are in a heightened sense of awareness. I think we all have discussed that around some political issues, the upcoming election, some of these legal cases on both sides of the fence. And we need to be very,

very mindful of civil unrest. There have been a rash of continued, while it be pro-Palestine or backing Israel for some of the things that are happening overseas there. There was a pretty major event over the weekend in Washington, D.C. where people were letting smoke bombs off. And when you have civil unrest like this that is teetering on violence, there are a lot of different things that can occur. And know you're always on the cusp of it turning into something that you don't want it to turn into so absolutely stay tuned to the Laws of Invention Research Council for updates as well as participating in the fusion net so that we can share information and get the information out to folks as needed.

So with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. All right. Awesome. Awesome, Tom. Thanks so much for that information. I want everybody to know that we now have an intern part-timer working with us on FusionNet. are working with us on FusionNet. Tom, me and Tom's been very instrumental in helping us get that launched and make that effective during the pandemic. And up to the present day, you'll see us taking that to the next level.

We're coordinating with Tom on ways to do that. Tony, I want to thank you for all the great insights. And I want to thank you, Diego, for your production. But I also, of course, want to thank each and every one of you. Let us know what we can do, what we shouldn't do, what we can do better, what we can do more of or less. Reach out to operations at lpresearch.org. But refer us, Crime Science Podcast, like us, repost, whatever you can do.

We appreciate it. We want to get better and we want to get the right information out there and connect the right people to make a real difference. So stay safe and stay in touch. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.