Launched in 2018, the walk out system was widely hailed as the future of shopping, highlighting AMAZON’s progress in artificial intelligence, using camera, sensors, and AI to track customer purchases and eliminate the need for traditional checkouts. For one, I was impressed – a grocery store technology that allowed you just walk in with your credit card and then walk out with all of the goods needed without so much as a barrier or checkout – all because the AMAZON system’s AI knew exactly what I was taking ….. except it didn’t!
Amazon told The Grocer the decision was “completely driven by what customers wanted”. Shoppers “enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line” enabled by Just Walk Out, but ultimately “wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store”.
It now transpires that AMAZON’s so-called innovative solution to the future of shopping – the “Just Walk Out” Technology – wasn’t so smart after all, and needed hundreds of overseas workers to monitor customers activities, effectively using cameras to follow shuffles around the store and costing AMAZON a small fortune.
The AI enabled system requires significant human intervention for a significant proportion of transactions, and this accounted for the bottlenecks in some stores were getting your receipt, was sometimes delayed for a surprisingly long time, now we know why! There are also concerns about privacy and accuracy about the data that was collected. Whilst there were notices all round the shop saying that AI is monitoring your shopping it didn’t say that lots of humans were!
The intensive machine learning task needed to recognise humans and track when products were being picked up, put back (often somewhere else), put in a bag, put back on a different shelf, or passed from one person to anothermeant that the system didn’t work well and that the tech actually relied on more than 1,000 people in India manually watching and labelling the purchases, causing delay, in order to make the magic happen, leading to experts relabelling “Amazon using AI to allow customers to Just Walk Out” as “Amazon using An Indian (AI) to allow customers to Just Walk Out” .