Walmart Experiments with AI to Monitor Stores in Real Time
April 25th, 2019Enable face recognition so the system can tempt Bubba with three cents off his next bag of Doritos with alerts on his phone as he’s standing in front of the chips.
Via: AP:
Inside one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market grocery stores, high resolution cameras suspended from the ceiling point to a table of bananas. They can tell how ripe the bananas are from their colour.
When a banana starts to bruise, the cameras send an alert to a worker. Normally, that task would rely on the subjective assessment of a human who probably doesn’t have time to inspect every piece of fruit.
The thousands of cameras are a key feature of Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab, which officially opens inside this 50,000-square-foot store on Thursday. It’s the retail giant’s biggest attempt so far to digitize the physical store.
Walmart envisions using the cameras, combined with other technology like sensors on shelves, to monitor the store in real time so its workers can quickly react to replenish products or fix other problems. The technology, shown first to The Associated Press, will also be able to track when shelves need to be restocked or if shopping carts are running low. It can spot spills and even detect when more cash registers need to be opened before long lines start forming.
