Walmart Deploys AI Technology to Monitor Retail Stores in Real-Time

As the competition in the retail market is increasing, Walmart is experimenting with its physical stores. The company is digitizing its stores to manage it more efficiently and make the customer shopping experience more pleasant. The retail giant has rolled out its Intelligent Retail Lab officially inside a Neighbourhood Market grocery store on Long Island.

In order to timely restock the products and fix any issues, a number of cameras have been suspended from the ceiling underpinned with certain technologies say sensors on shelves which will monitor the store in real time.

The technology will be able to find the spills and identify when the shelves in the store needs to be replenished or when the shopping cart is running less. For instance, cameras can determine how the bananas are from their appearance and send an alert to the staff if it is needed to be replaced. Following Amazon's investment in the grocery business, Walmart has delved deep AI in its retail store. To recall, Amazon purchased Whole Foods Market two years ago.

This move of Amazon increased the peer pressure in the market compelling other competitors to invest more in technology. Simultaneously, the companies are keeping food prices down to manage expenses.

While Walmart's online US retail is less than Amazon's online global empire, the former says that more than 140 million US buyers visited the store in person and online per week which generated the global sales up to $500 billion in the latest fiscal.

Mike Hanrahan, CEO of Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab and co-founder of Jet.com said, "We really like to think of this store as an artificial intelligence factory, a place where we are building these products, experiences, where we are testing and learning. The cameras are programmed to focus primarily on the products and shelves right now. Sensors embedded in shelves will give the store extra information because they know what's at the back of the shelves that the cameras can't see."

Well, cameras do not identify faces and determine the ethnicity of any person picking the product from the store or track shopper movements there. In response to this loophole, some companies have started experimenting with store shelf cameras which are capable of guessing shoppers' age, gender, and moods.

Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University and a privacy expert said – "Machine learning fundamentally finds and matches patterns. But the companies run into trouble when they start to match behavior to a specific customer."

This lab is Walmart's second physical store as Walmart Sam's Club established a 32-000 square feet lab store last year. The lab is experimenting with novel traits surrounding the Scan & Go app. The app enables the customers to scan items and they prefer to make a purchase using their phone rather than standing in a checkout line.