NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon wants the public, and especially other companies, to know it’s not abandoning its Just Walk Out technology.
The company is eliminating its cashier-less checkout system at Amazon Fresh grocery stores, but plans to sell the technology to more than 120 third-party companies by the end of the year. Reaching this goal will mean doubling the number of non-Amazon businesses using Just Walk Out compared to last year.
“For us, making sure we can serve the third-party market reliably is the most important thing,” John Jenkins, vice president of Amazon’s Just Walk Out, said in an interview. “We have been reassuring people that we are in this for the long haul.”
Just Walk Out uses cameras, artificial intelligence, and sensor trackers to determine what is taken off the shelf, and when customers insert their credit card or another payment method at the store entrance gate, they get what they want. and then leave the area.
The company first began offering the technology to other businesses, such as sports stadiums, in 2020, two years after it began using it in Amazon Go convenience stores. These stores and some Amazon Fresh stores in the UK will continue to offer Just Walk Out. But Amazon announced this month that the technology would replace smart carts in its U.S. Fresh stores.
Smart Carts are already available in some Amazon Fresh stores and use sensors to identify items placed inside them, and feature a screen that allows customers to see nearby deals and grocery prices. ing. Customers can skip the checkout line by scanning and tallying their items with a camera.
The changes come as Amazon works to revamp its fresh food stores by combining technology with traditional grocery items to attract more customers. The company’s grocery brands include Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, and Whole Foods, the supermarket chain it acquired in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
But Amazon’s quest to become a giant in the U.S. grocery market hasn’t been easy. Early last year, CEO Andy Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders that he wanted to find ways to enable the company to have a greater impact in brick-and-mortar grocery stores. I wrote that I am working on it.
Mr. Jenkins insisted that the removal of Just Walk Out from Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. did not reflect a miscalculation on the part of the company. Rather, he described the decision as the result of an experimentation process to discover what works and what doesn’t for shoppers.
“What we found is that customers at large grocery stores want a shopping assistant to accompany them,” he said. On the other hand, “Shoppers in smaller store formats tend to be very mission-oriented. They want to get in and out quickly with as little friction as possible.”
Abandoning the technology in many of its stores could make it difficult for Amazon to sell Just Walk Out to other companies. But some experts believe the move could lead to wider adoption in smaller stores and locations similar to Amazon Go stores.
John Clear, senior director at professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal, said cashierless technology will become more common in grab-and-go shopping areas where human interaction is limited and labor is hard to find. . And companies are almost always trying to cut costs.
“We’re seeing a natural evolution of technology, expanding where it’s working and receding where it’s not working,” Clear said.
In an attempt to sell its technology to other companies, Amazon claims its checkout system is not a wonder of technology but is powered by Indian contractors who manually add items to their carts as customers. is trying to counter recent social media posts that I went shopping.
Vox, a business publication information and news website, has reported in the past that Amazon uses human reviewers in its technology, which the company has confirmed. Jenkins said the company employs employees to take video clips and label them so they can be used to train machine learning systems.
But the idea that “people in India are watching you shop live in the store and know what you buy” is completely inaccurate, he says. .
In some cases, Jenkins added, if the system can’t figure out what happened in the store, a human will watch snippets of video to ensure the receipt the customer received is accurate. He said such reviews would occur in a “very small number” of cases and declined to give an estimate.
Jenkins also declined to say how many people the company employs to review and label videos. But he said it was lower than the 1,000 figure cited in media reports.
