Automation will soon reach the point where sellers will completely disappear from stores.
As the correspondent points out DOPs, Internet trade in products and things is strengthening its position in everyday life more and more every day. The situation was analyzed by journalists RIA News”.
Recall that the technological base was ready in the middle of the last decade – cameras, scanners, neural networks for data processing – all this has already been created. And in 2018, Amazon opened a small point of sale in Seattle. Now there are more than 20 such stores in America, and the system can track more than a hundred customers at a time.
Walmart is the leader in US retail using AI in stores. For many years, this company has occupied the first positions in terms of revenue in the ranking of the world’s largest companies. They use the neural network when paying, on the company’s website, and even when delivering goods by drones! They also have a Bossa Nova robot that monitors the quantity of goods and the correctness of price tags.
The robot works 50% faster than merchandisers. Walmart notes that Bossa Nova is not so much helping them reduce the number of employees as it gives them the opportunity to give them more time to work with customers.
Walgreen`s has touch-screen refrigerators in its segment that show everything that is inside them. And if some product is over, the icon on the screen also disappears. These refrigerators are filled with ice cream and drinks.
Everything would be fine, only at the legislative level in the United States such a system is still poorly regulated – in some states the law does not allow food stocks to work without a seller.
On the other hand, the main task of artificial intelligence is to ensure security – the neural network has learned to cope with this task. In real time, it scans body movements and analyzes human postures. So the risk of theft under the supervision of a neural network is even lower than under the supervision of live sales consultants.
In the future, it is considered bringing to absolute automation the entire process of monitoring the store and identifying intruders.
Artificial intelligence can make automatic accounting, teach scales to recognize products. Its implementation will simplify the work of retailers, including reducing queues and optimizing staff costs. Automation, in general, is beneficial for business, the costs of it pay off much faster, I eat many other financial investments.
According to experts, AI will be able to recognize a buyer who has already gone to the store and track him more closely if he tried to steal something last time.
“Of course, at the initial stages, the entire system is strictly controlled by people – no one is immune from errors, so it would be more correct to watch what AI brings results until the moment of full debugging,” says Olga Akulina, director of the Finn Flare retail chain.
There are also interesting precedents in Russia. In Moscow, there is a network of Pyaterochka called “#About”. Project director Vadim Rydkin says they are working very successfully. Although this system does not exactly repeat Amazon: it operates through a mobile application, through which the buyer scans the goods that he plans to purchase.
A startup from Samara offers another interesting solution project – a smart video camera that recognizes the scanned product and adds it to the cart itself.
The pandemic has definitely changed the plans of retailers, as people have already become accustomed to ordering goods online in two years. But if the described technologies are implemented, buyers may be interested in their features – basically, people do not go to stores in order to avoid queues.
By the way, literally in January of this year, the large chain retailer Lenta automated the process of printing price tags, which immediately simplified the work of cashiers and ensured greater customer loyalty due to the reduction of errors on price tags – the portal wrote about this Retail.ru.
Neural networks and automation are considered the most promising areas in which specialists are required – the magazine wrote about this Inc.
