Walmart Jumps on AI Bandwagon to Sell Groceries

The competition in the American grocery market is intensifying as major companies call on artificial intelligence to transform their stocking and inventory systems – all to make your shopping trips easier and less expensive (and to keep their cash registers ringing). 

Walmart, one of the country’s largest retail grocers, just entered the fray, opening what it called an Intelligent Retail Lab in the New York City suburb of Levittown.

The store by the Bentonville, Arkansas, retail giant serves an experiment to learn how artificial intelligence technology can help make grocery shopping more efficient while containing costs.

The store ‘s multiple cameras are connected to a computerized system of shelf sensors, digital screens and servers that monitors shopper choices and back-office storage bins to ensure shelves stay well stocked and clean.

The technology is not designed to replace human workers completely, Silicon Valley executives say in addressing concerns about AI, but can make employees more efficient by identifying what needs to be done and ensuring that those actions are carried out.

“Thousands of cameras suspended from the ceiling, combined with other technology like sensors on shelves, will monitor the store in real time so workers can quickly replenish products or fix other problems,” Associated Press reporter Anne D’Innocenzio wroteOpens a new window after a tour of the store, located inside a super-sized Walmart on Long Island.  “Cameras, for example, can determine how ripe bananas are from their color, and workers will get an alert on their phone if they need to be replaced.”

The store itself contains more than 30,000 grocery items. At the back of the store sits a data center, which includes more than 100 servers and cooling towers to process all the data collected from the store – a process known as edge computing.Opens a new window

“With artificial intelligence-enabled cameras, interactive displays and a massive data center, this store suggests a retail future that seems like science fiction,” Walmart spokesman Matt Smith writes in a blog post.Opens a new window “All this hardware is connected by enough cabling to scale Mt. Everest five times and enough processing power to download three years’ worth of music (27,000 hours) each second.”

Walmart’s plunge into artificial intelligence comes a little more than a year after Amazon purchased the Austin-based Whole Foods Markets chain and introduced its own line of Amazon Go stores, which have replaced live cashiers – and the wait in lines – with artificial intelligence technology that can monitor and bill for the items customers select.

And while Amazon still only has about a dozen stores stocked with far fewer items than the Walmart store, it has demonstrated that all the data-gathering technology performs as seamlessly together as promised.

“I put Amazon Go through its paces and found that the technology, which relies on cameras and other sensors to track your every move, works extremely well,” saidOpens a new window Matt Weinberger, a writer for Business Insider. “On two visits, I couldn’t manage to fool the system, and I did indeed walk right out with my purchases.”

A customer needs the Amazon Go app and an Amazon code to enter an Amazon Go store. The account generates a bar code, which a customer scans at the store’s turnstiles, to step inside, similar to the barcode tickets used by many subway stations.

The technology is a combination of computer visionOpens a new window , sensor fusion and deep machine learningOpens a new window , according to Amazon, which also developed its own cameras for the stores.

One of the biggest challenges to the success of the new system will have to reach beyond what artificial intelligence can address: persuading customers that the technology will do no harm to people and is to their benefit.

“For retailers to be successful, consumers must feel comfortable about how their data is being used and with how they’re tracked,” Fortune writer Jonathan Vanian reports.Opens a new window “There’s no guarantee that retailers will be saved by it because consumers may balk at cameras tracking their movements while they walk up and down the aisles and being bombarded by discount offers.”

There is also growing awareness that these new developments in the grocery business could be the beginning of the staggering wave of job displacements that artificial intelligence is expected to trigger.

McKinsey & Company, for instance, has estimatedOpens a new window that 800 million workers could be displaced by artificial intelligence by 2030.

“At the same time, it’s another example of how technology will replace human labor in many jobs,” Business Insider’s Weinberger says. “With Amazon Go proving that the technology works really well, the consequences are likely to be felt sooner rather than later.”