The battle for cashier-less shops is not yet over: after Aldi, Amazon is closing the doors of three more supermarkets with ‘Just Walk Out’ technology. Why is it not working (yet)?
Army of AI controllers
Only half of the once-promising Amazon Go stores (without checkouts and theoretically without staff) remain standing: in the United States, 17 remain, having closed one after another in the past two years. Three more stores are now closing in New York.
In May this year, Amazon admitted that its ‘smart camera recognition’, which uses AI to recognise which products customers take off the shelf, was not so smart after all. A whole army of IT staff had to monitor the system from India and check individual transactions to further train the algorithms.
A few months later, the e-commerce giant went back on those statements: artificial intelligence is now much more advanced and by combining cameras with sensors, it was suddenly feasible again. Even the stores now closing in New York were performing well, Amazon reassures. So why are the stores closing?
