Pull up the last business case you built to justify a loss prevention technology purchase.
Now check the footnotes. The shrink statistics, the ROI benchmarks, the "industry studies" — trace each one back to its origin.
In most LP business cases, a meaningful share of the supporting data was produced, funded, or published by a company that sells loss prevention technology.
That is not research. That is marketing with a methodology section.
The conflict is structural, not occasional
The AI-driven retail theft deterrence market is real money and growing fast: $2.62 billion in 2025, $3.12 billion in 2026, on track for $6.26 billion by 2030 (The Business Research Company, 2026).
That kind of money funds a content ecosystem designed to drive purchasing. Walk the chain:
The most-cited shrink figure in the industry — roughly $100B+ in annual U.S. shrink — is anchored heavily to Appriss Retail benchmark data. Appriss Retail also sells return-fraud and transaction-monitoring software. The number that sizes the problem comes from a company that sells the solution.
Vendor "thought leadership" pages publish shrink breakdowns, buyer's guides, and ROI frameworks — then gate the download behind a lead-capture form. The research is the sales funnel.
Vendor case studies typically rest on a single customer's self-reported result — "All Star Elite reduced shrink after deploying our platform" — with no control group, no independent audit, and no disclosure of customers where the deployment underperformed.
None of this is fraud. The numbers may even be roughly right. The problem is that the entire evidence base for a multi-billion-dollar spending category is produced by the parties who profit from the spending — and the AP profession consumes it as if it were neutral.
The conference layer
The same dynamic structures the events where AP leaders go to learn.
The major LP and AP conferences — the trade shows, the "innovation" stages, the award programs — run on vendor sponsorship money. The companies funding the event are frequently the same companies whose executives appear on the panels framing what "the future of loss prevention" looks like.
This is not a secret and it is not unique to retail. But it has a specific effect on AP: the questions that never get asked on a vendor-sponsored stage are the questions about whether the vendor's category works. You will see ten panels on how to deploy AI video analytics. You will rarely see one on the independently-measured false-positive rate of AI video analytics, or on what happens to the ROI when you subtract the cost of investigating false alerts.
The accuracy claims illustrate the gap. Vendor materials routinely cite detection "accuracy rates exceeding 90%." That figure is almost always vendor-reported, measured under vendor-favorable conditions, and rarely reproduced by an independent third party. In a 1,000-transaction day, the difference between 90% and 99% accuracy is the difference between 100 false events and 10. That gap is the entire operational cost of the system — and it is the number least likely to appear in the sponsored white paper.
Why this lands on AP specifically
Finance has audit standards. Legal has rules of evidence. Procurement has competitive-bid requirements.
AP, in most retailers, has none of the above for the research it relies on. The business case gets built on the most readily available numbers, and the most readily available numbers are the ones vendors spend marketing budgets to put in front of you.
The result: AP is the function most exposed to vendor-funded evidence, and the function with the least institutional defense against it. When the CFO eventually asks "where did this ROI projection come from, and who paid for the study behind it," the AP leader who cannot answer cleanly loses credibility on every future ask.
A perspective from the field
I have sat through hundreds of vendor pitches across two decades and four countries. The good vendors and the bad vendors make nearly identical claims, because they are all drawing from the same pool of self-generated evidence.
The discipline I learned the hard way is simple: never let a vendor's number into a business case without a second, independent source. If the only proof that a technology works comes from the company selling it, treat the claim as unproven — not as data.
This is not anti-vendor. The technology is often genuinely useful. It is pro-evidence. The AP leaders who insist on independent verification before they spend are the ones who stop overpaying for underperformance — and the ones the CFO learns to trust.
Three practical moves for the next 90 days
Audit the footnotes in your last three business cases. For every statistic, identify who produced it and whether they sell into the category. Anything sourced only to a vendor gets a flag. You are not throwing the numbers out — you are marking which ones need an independent second source before your next executive review.
Demand a control group or a third-party measurement before your next purchase. Ask any vendor for results that were not measured by the vendor. If the only available evidence is self-reported, that is your answer about the strength of the evidence — and a legitimate point of leverage in the negotiation.
Build one independent data point of your own. Run a measured pilot in a small store set with your metrics, your baseline, and your false-positive accounting. One clean internal number is worth more in a CFO conversation than ten vendor case studies — and it is the asset that makes you, not the vendor, the authority in the room.
Closing note
The retail loss prevention technology market will pass $3 billion this year and keep climbing. A spending category that large deserves an evidence base that is independent of the people being paid.
Right now it mostly doesn't have one. The studies, the benchmarks, the conference stages, and the buyer's guides are largely funded by the sellers. None of it is hidden — but almost none of it is neutral either.
The AP leaders who learn to read the footnotes before they sign the purchase order are the ones who will spend the next decade being right about technology while everyone around them is being sold.
I'd like to hear from AP leaders who have pushed back on vendor-funded claims and asked for independent proof. What happened? Reply with anything you can share, anonymized if you prefer.
Forward this to one LP or AP leader who should be reading it.
— Gabriel
The LP Brief is a weekly intelligence read for senior loss prevention and asset protection leaders. Free. No vendor noise.
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