The world without checkouts dreamed of by Amazon is moving away: the company is backtracking on its technology allowing it to identify items purchased by supermarket customers before they leave the store: called “Just Walk Out”, this one will no longer be deployed in future Amazon Fresh convenience stores and will even be uninstalled from the group’s stores where it is present, in the United States, announced Tuesday, April 3, a group executive to the media The Information.
This announcement has no significant consequences for Amazon in the short term: only twenty Amazon Fresh grocery stores – out of forty – use Just Walk Out in the United States. Cashierless technology is expected to remain operational in a few such stores in the UK and in Amazon Go stores (another type of small physical store, without cashiers, launched by Amazon), according to The Information. The few points of sale of other companies which had purchased the solution from the e-commerce giant – notably sports stadium stores in the United States – should also continue to use it.
The failure of this attempt at innovation is, however, symbolic: it was put forward by Amazon as a demonstration of the capabilities of artificial intelligence, supposed to ultimately revolutionize retail commerce. Providing, according to the company, a feeling almost ” Magic “ at the customer’s, this technology was developed at great expense from 2012 on an initial idea from founder Jeff Bezos. It relied on numerous cameras installed on the ceiling of the store. These were to identify items taken from a shelf by a customer − for small items that were difficult to distinguish, a sensor scale placed on the shelf signaled that they had been removed. Then the cameras had to follow the buyer through the shelves until they left.
Human intervention
But The Information revealed that the Just Walk Out artificial intelligence system had flaws : it was in fact based in part… on humans. More than 1,000 people were employed by Amazon in India to look at images, in order to classify items and assign them to customers: 700 transactions out of 1,000 thus needed human intervention in 2022, far from the initial objective of 50 per 1,000.
Could AI have only been the technological screen for a simple relocation of cashier employees to India? Amazon disputes this version while recognizing the existence of Indian employees: these would only validate one “small minority” sales and would be used to “annotate” images in order to improve algorithms for detecting movements, objects, assured the company to the site Gizmodo…
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