A quiet revolution is reshaping how physical spaces are analysed and understood. As artificial intelligence (AI) matures and grows more capable, it is increasingly displacing the sensors, cameras and physical infrastructure traditionally used to understand footfall. The latest step in this evolution comes from British startup Yellow Sub AI, which has launched a software-only platform capable of delivering real-time footfall and transactional data for any retail location in the world, all without ever installing a single device.
Pinpoynt.ai, unveiled at the Retail Technology Show in London, is a striking example of how AI is challenging long-held assumptions about data collection in the built environment. Trained on historical camera and card transaction data but now operating autonomously, the platform uses machine learning and what the company describes as “quantum mechanics” to estimate how busy a store is, how well it is trading, and how that compares to its competitors.
What sets Pinpoynt.ai apart is its total reliance on publicly available datasets such as Google’s busyness data. There are no cameras, no sensors, no apps tracking shoppers. The result, according to the company, is an anonymous, real-time view into the dynamics of any shopfront or street anywhere in the world. It is, in essence, visibility without surveillance.
A new model for spatial intelligence
For retailers and investors, the implications are significant. Planning new store openings, optimising layouts, adjusting staffing levels, or benchmarking competitors have all traditionally required some form of on-site hardware or third-party data collection. That infrastructure is expensive, limited to physical access, and can raise privacy concerns.
With AI-powered location inference, the model flips. A store in Bangkok or Birmingham can be monitored with equal ease. Investors can build real-time pictures of footfall trends across entire property portfolios, while retailers can trial marketing campaigns and instantly gauge impact on customer volume and behaviour.
“The power of AI here is not just in processing data faster, but in its ability to generate useful signal from noise,” said Justin Staines, founder of Yellow Sub AI. “We’re combining publicly available metadata with years of machine learning development to give users a clear view of physical and transactional activity without breaching privacy or deploying hardware.”
The approach reflects a growing trend in AI development, the move from supervised training on labelled datasets to more complex unsupervised systems that adapt over time. Yellow Sub AI’s models have evolved across multiple retail environments, with data verified against actual store performance. Already deployed by organisations including Burger King Thailand and Bluewater Shopping Centre, the company claims its accuracy has been benchmarked against physical sensor systems.
The ethics of invisible insight
This technology also raises questions about how invisible analytics could shift the balance between privacy and data insight. While Pinpoynt.ai does not collect personal data, its ability to infer detailed patterns of human movement and commerce could challenge existing norms around transparency and consent, not because it breaches them, but because it avoids the usual routes entirely.
The removal of cameras and physical tracking might seem like a step towards greater digital ethics, but as AI systems grow in sophistication, so too does their ability to operate beneath the threshold of public awareness. Retailers and urban planners might be tempted by the promise of frictionless intelligence, but society may eventually need new frameworks to govern what is seen, inferred, and acted upon.
As AI increasingly becomes the lens through which the physical world is interpreted, tools like Pinpoynt.ai represent a new frontier. Less visible than their hardware-based predecessors, but potentially far more powerful, they signal a future in which software, not sensors, tells us how the world moves.
The launch also reflects a broader shift in how AI startups are focusing on practical, high-impact problems. Rather than building general-purpose platforms, firms like Yellow Sub AI are targeting niche but valuable applications, in this case, footfall analytics, where AI can be a direct substitute for physical infrastructure. The promise is not just efficiency, but entirely new ways of thinking about visibility, behaviour, and commercial performance in the real world.
