Retail’s Multi-Billion-Rand Blindspot
The cost of doing business South Africa’s retail sector rang up an estimated R1.36 trillion in sales last year. Shrinkage – theft, fraud, and error – is estimated at around 2% of turnover. Do the maths and retailers are quietly writing off somewhere in the region of R27 billion a year, every year, as the […]
The Hidden Cost Of Seeing Everything
Why We’re Re-Thinking How AI-Powered Security Is Priced Every business running on data and compute is feeling the same squeeze right now, and Refraime is no exception. IT hardware costs keep climbing. Global supply constraints, currency pressure, and demand from the AI boom itself mean the servers, sensors, and edge devices our industry depends on […]
South Africa Has Four Guards To Every Police Officer. And We Still Don’t Feel Any Safer?
The Guard-To-Camera Ratio Is Broken South Africa has roughly four active private security officers for every police officer on the ground – an estimated 650,000-strong private workforce against a SAPS headcount of around 184,000. Zoom out further and the scale gets almost surreal: PSIRA’s 2024/25 annual report puts total registered security personnel at 2.92 million, […]
What Livestock Theft Is Actually Costing Farmers Across The Country
Business is different in the Freestate. I spend most weeks driving between farms, forging relationships with old fashioned rural folk and I can tell you that farming is not for the faint of heart. South African Farmers face a host of challenges. The trials posed by nature, debt and risk can be daunting to the […]
From .Net To Neural Nets
Building AI That Actually Understands Its Environment Almost two decades in software gives you a certain kind of confidence. You know how systems are supposed to work. You know how to spot a problem, trace a failure, build something that holds. But, building AI for the physical world is a different discipline entirely, and it’s […]
A System Is Only As Good As Its Foundation
The Foundation Factor When I joined Refraime, I was immediately drawn in by the intersection of AI and real-worldinfrastructure. Not the theoretical kind. I was intrigued by the infrastructure that matters in aSouth African context, where security is not a luxury and the consequences of a system failureare felt immediately, on the ground, by real […]
Why Training Is The Most Underrated Part of Your Tech Investment
The Night Before Everything Changed There’s a specific kind of anxiety that comes before you step into a room and ask people to trust you with their workflows. I know it well. Before my first training session at Refraime, I didn’t sleep. Not because I didn’t know the platform, but because I understood that knowing […]
AI Security: Why Most Of The Hype Misses The Point.
Everyone Is Selling “AI” As Magic. Watch every camera. Catch every threat. Replace your entire control room overnight. Yet clients keep telling me the same story: months after deployment, their security teams are still drowning in false alarms, while real risks slip through unnoticed. Across Africa this disconnect is even sharper. Generic overseas AI models […]
BEYOND THE BUZZWORD
A buyer’s guide to separating real AI from re-packaged automation in video surveillance. BY DAVE KEATING – REFRAIME – APRIL 2026 THE AI GOLDRUSH HAS A CREDIBILITY PROBLEM Open any product brochure in the physical security industry today and you will find the letters “AI” on virtually every page. Artificial intelligence has become the most […]
From Detection to Understanding
Building AI That Works in the Real World We recently had the opportunity to join SMART Security Solutions for a virtual round table discussion on surveillance, AI and the changing face of operational intelligence. The session brought together multiple industry perspectives and unpacked some of the most pressing questions in the market today, from the […]
