The same platform, configured for five very different floors.

A plant already knows when a machine faults, because the machine tells it. What the plant does not know is why the line stopped when nothing faulted: the operator waiting on a part, the buffer that filled, the material handler who could not get down an aisle because a cage was parked in it. Machine data is silent on all three.

Agents in a plant are usually scoped to a station or a buffer rather than to a whole hall, because the rules depend on the normal cycle at that point. A station that is unoccupied for ninety seconds is normal in one cell and a stoppage in another, so the threshold comes from the cell's own standard work rather than from a plant-wide default.

Safety scenarios sit alongside flow scenarios, and they are usually owned by different people. Pedestrian routes through a plant are crossed by forklifts at predictable points, and those crossings are where a segregation agent earns its place. Spills and obstructions are the other common start, because both are cleared faster when somebody is told immediately rather than at the next walk-round.

The environment is the hard part. Lighting varies from bright bay doors to unlit aisles, lenses collect dust, and a camera that was installed for a security purpose may be looking down a rack rather than across a floor. Onboarding checks the view against the rule before anything is configured, and repositioning a camera is a cheaper fix than a narrower rule.

A store's operational problems are smaller and more frequent than a distribution centre's. A queue that reaches six people, a spill nobody has coned, a cage left in an aisle during trading hours. Individually trivial, collectively the difference between a good and a bad trading day, and currently managed by whoever happens to walk past.

Privacy zones are set up before any agent is switched on, and they cover anything that is not part of the operational question: tills and payment areas, staff welfare routes, neighbouring property, and any area where the only thing the camera adds is identification. Excluded areas are removed from the frame before detection runs, so the model never receives those pixels.

Agents in retail work with counts and durations rather than with individuals. A queue agent measures how many people are waiting and for how long; it does not track a person around a store. That distinction is what keeps a useful operational tool separate from a surveillance product, and it is enforced by what the rules are allowed to express.

Multi-site retailers usually want one agent definition applied everywhere with per-store thresholds, because a queue threshold that suits a city store is wrong for a retail park. The agent library carries the definition; the local threshold carries the store's reality.

In a station, an airport concourse or a venue, the operational question is usually about movement: is this route passable, is this area filling, has something stopped in a place where stopping causes a knock-on effect. Those are aggregate questions, and they are answered with counts and durations rather than with identities.

Visibility and signage are obligations in these environments, and so is restraint. A venue deploying vision has to be able to explain what it analyses and what it does not, to regulators, to staff and often to the public. Privacy zones that exclude an area before inference are the clearest form that explanation takes, because they are a property of the pipeline rather than a promise about behaviour.

Events in public space need to reach people who are already moving. Escalation paths route to a control room, a duty manager or a response team, with the clip attached so that the first minute of a response is spent acting rather than assembling context.