AI applications, from smart labels to more agile e-commerce

AI in stores

The idea of ​​supermarkets without cashiers has not been fully realized. Amazon tried this with its Just Walk Out system, which allows customers to scan codes and leave the store without going through a register, however, this year the company said it would remove it from its Fresh stores and replace it with smart carts. Dash Carts, which record each customer’s purchases.

What happens is that the Just Walk Out system turned out to not be as automated as it was believed and although there were sensors and cameras powered by AI to track the products that people took, this information still passed through a group of people who had to rectify and guarantee that payments were accurate, so the work of cashier was also done but from a distance.

In the case of Microsoft, it exhibits a system that, through sensors, can distinguish the number of people in a store and their movements, so it knows when someone approaches a shelf and selects something. At the end of the purchase, the user receives the purchase receipt on their cell phone based on the AI ​​record of their activity.

However, the problem with this type of supermarket remains that the products cannot be off the shelf – something common in stores – because even if the AI ​​had an accurate reading of the shelf the user approaches, if the product displayed is different from what exists in the registry, the result in the account would not match.

Another solution on display on campus for physical stores are radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that make them easier to read for inventory.

These labels look like any other at first glance, but against the light you can see that they have a small device inside, in which the information about the product is encoded and to register them in inventory it is not necessary to go one by one, but rather Simply bring the scanner closer and it emits a signal wirelessly, so an hours-long task can be done in minutes.

A company that is already implementing RFID technology is the fashion retailer H&M, which in addition to helping with real-time inventories, allows the store to know where a garment is located and avoid shortages.

According to Adecco Group’s Global Future Workforce Survey, the use of AI is saving workers an average of one hour each day, allowing them to spend time on other creative tasks, thinking “more strategic or to help achieve a better balance between work and personal life.”