The project waAI (demarcating shopping areas with AI) aims to set up a new and advanced monitoring system to bring local governments and entrepreneurs closer together and generate new insights to steer and monitor developments in a local retail policy. This project fills the gap where local authorities have too little insight into the evolution of the shopping areas on their territory. The press mainly publishes vacancy figures for the entire territory, but this gives a distorted picture of the situation in a shopping area in the commercial centre or on the periphery. The project builds on principles from other ERDF or CoT projects that have already developed methodologies and dashboards to support shopping areas. From such an existing dashboard, local authorities themselves can easily monitor the indicators in their shopping area(s) over the years. Subsequently, municipalities can benchmark the performance of shopping areas with similar areas in Flanders. In addition to the well-known indicators for a shopping area (e.g. area, number of commercial buildings and number of vacant buildings), new parameters are also being developed in a digital way that provide additional insights into the evolutions of shopping areas. Example: facade widths of commercial buildings and the length of the shopping street are further mapped to propose some parameters such as commercial and shopping density, visual vacancy from the consumer perspective, etc. In a next phase, the province of Antwerp will develop a digital tool based on all defined parameters to dynamically demarcate core shopping areas. Finally, an AI expert also brings a predictive factor into this tool where AI trained models will predict whether a piece of shopping area will still perform in the future. By playing with the boundaries of a predetermined shopping area, one can see how the parameters adjust and the local retail policy can carefully steer this. The development of a benchmark via an existing dashboard and a dynamic demarcation tool means that the local authorities quickly start drawing up or evaluating a shopping area and the corresponding demarcation themselves. The provincial retail coaches have been doing this work for years through many manual calculations. By digitising the process, they can also support even more municipalities in their retail policy in a data-driven way.