Seven Questions to Ask Any Camera-AI Vendor Before You Sign

Almost every store has cameras, and almost nobody watches them. They sometimes get looked at after a loss, a week too late, by an owner scrubbing through footage at midnight. That is why "AI for your cameras" is suddenly on offer from everyone: your camera brand, your alarm company, and a dozen startups, including mine.

So take this for what it is: a vendor telling you what to ask vendors. I have watched the same technology sold well and sold badly, and the difference is rarely the AI. It is what the contract does not say. Here are the seven questions I would ask, in writing, before signing anything. Our own answers are at the end, and you should hold us to them.

1. Where is my video stored, and for how long?

"In the cloud" is a friendly way of saying "on our computers". Ask what actually leaves your building: video, still pictures, or text. Ask where it goes, how long it is kept, and how you would delete it. Then ask the vendor to show you the sentence in their privacy policy that says so.

That last step matters because the marketing and the engineering do not always agree. Eufy sold its cameras on local storage and end-to-end encryption. In late 2022 a security researcher found them sending images to the cloud with cloud uploads switched off, and the company later admitted its video streams had not been end-to-end encrypted as promised. If the sentence is not in the policy, the promise is not real.

2. Who can see it?

Employees of the vendor? Their contractors? Advertising partners? Get the list in writing.

This is not a hypothetical list. The FTC charged Ring with failing to restrict its employees' and contractors' access to customers' videos, and with using those videos to train its algorithms without consent; the settlement cost it $5.8 million in customer refunds. The same company told Senator Markey that it had handed footage to police without the owner's consent eleven times in 2022 by July, under an emergency exception the company decides on itself. And in February 2024, an outage at Wyze showed about 13,000 customers thumbnails from other people's cameras.

Those are home cameras, but the design is the same one being sold to stores: your video on their computers, with their staff and their policies between you and it. The best answer to "who can see my video" is "nobody, because there is nothing to watch". If a vendor says that, ask how it is enforced, not just promised.

3. Does it work with the cameras and recorder I already own?

Many systems only work with their own cameras or their own recorder. The new hardware often costs several times more than the software, and once it is on the wall, you are locked in. Ask by brand: Dahua, Hikvision, the DVR in the back room. Yes or no. Ask what has to be installed and who installs it.

4. Is every alert checked before it reaches my phone?

Motion alerts are noise. A cat, a headlight, a shadow: anything sets one off, and motion by itself means nothing. Within an hour you will turn them off, which puts you back to watching nothing. Ask how many alerts a day a store your size receives, and what checks an alert before it is sent. Then ask to see one real week of alerts from one real store. A vendor who has that week will be happy to show it.

5. Can I tell it what to watch for, in my own words?

Most systems come with a fixed menu: person, vehicle, line crossed. Your problems are not on that menu. "The lottery terminal used when no customer is at the counter." "The beer delivery left unsigned." "Someone eating in the aisle." "The back door opened after ten." "Long line at the checkout counter." Ask the vendor to type your own concern into their system while you watch, and see what happens.

6. When it alerts me, can I read why?

A text that says "motion detected, camera 4" is not information. Ask your vendor whether the alert says what it saw and why it mattered, and whether you can read it in plain English. A written record is something you can read or search when you need to, pull up the matching clip in one click, and hand to an insurer, an employee, or the police.

7. What happens when I stop paying?

Contract length, cancellation terms, whether the cameras keep working, whether you keep your records. Ask for the last two years of price changes in writing, because the pattern in this industry is clear. Arlo's single-camera plan went from $2.99 to $4.99 and then to $7.99 in back-to-back years. Google's Nest Aware has gone from $6 a month at launch to $10, and its Plus tier from $12 to $20.

Then ask the question nobody asks: is this price below what it costs to run? Underpriced AI is usually somebody else's money, and when that money runs out, the price rises, the free tier disappears, and the features you relied on move behind a bigger plan. If you can leave freely, none of that can hurt you. If you cannot, all of it can.

Our answers to the same seven questions

None of these questions requires you to understand how AI works. They require the vendor to write things down. A vendor who will put the seven answers on one page is a vendor you can hold to them. So here is our page. Shobdo VideoRAG watches the security cameras a store already owns and texts the owner only when something matters.

1. Where is my video stored? Video is not stored in the cloud. Our system looks at short segments as they happen, writes down what it sees in plain English, and discards the video. What we keep is text. The only video temporarily stored on our computers is the clip sent to your phone with an alert. That clip expires within 24 hours. The sentence is in our privacy policy.
2. Who can see it? Nobody at Shobdo can watch your store's video footage without your permission. You can view it in the user interface at ui.shobdo.ai. You can, of course, give permission to people to access the interface. However, the video clips that are shown within the UI itself are fetched from the recorder (for example, your NVR) at your store. If you delete a video from your recorder, it cannot be retrieved in the UI because we have no copy of it. That is enforced by the design, not by a promise.
3. Does it work with what I own? Yes: you can use Dahua, Amcrest, Hikvision, and any other camera or recorder system you already have that speaks ONVIF or RTSP. It runs on a $199.99 plug-in box (one-time, plus tax and shipping) or on your own Linux computer by installing our free software. Nothing on the wall changes.
4. Is every alert checked? Yes. Two AIs, not one. The first watches every camera and writes down what is happening; when something looks serious, or matches an instruction you wrote, a second AI pulls the clip and confirms it before you get a text. Both are AI, and AI can be wrong, which is why every alert carries the clip and the reason, so you can judge it in five seconds.
5. Can I tell it what to watch for? Yes. You type it in plain English, for one camera or the whole store, and it starts watching for it.
6. Can I read why? Yes. Every alert says what it saw and why it mattered, and your store's day is a written record you can read.
7. What happens when I stop paying? It is month to month; you cancel any time from your account, and your cameras keep working because they were never ours. The price is $25 per camera per month, with the first 30 days free once you add a card, and 10% or 20% off if you prepay six or twelve months. That price covers what it costs to run, with a margin. No investor is paying the difference, so nobody will collect it from you later.

Shobdo VideoRAG is an AI agent for the security cameras your store already owns. It writes down what it sees and texts you only when something matters. Learn more or book a conversation.