Artificial Intelligence

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, retail changed in a fortnight. Extra safety precautions, panic buying, fights over the last toilet paper rolls and understaffed stores – this is the new grocer reality! In these difficult times retailers are turning to AI solutions to support operational continuity.

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, retail changed in a fortnight. Extra safety precautions, panic buying, fights over the last toilet paper rolls and understaffed stores – this is the new grocer reality! In these difficult times retailers are turning to AI solutions to support operational continuity.

Drones are an important part of the contemporary industrial landscape. From large UAVs, to microdrones, they are simplifying the tasks of aerial inspection and object detection. Drones are a great asset when it comes to inspect tall structures, vast areas or other places which are hazardous to oversight for human workers. In the last few years they made inspection safer, faster and cost-efficient.

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, retail changed in a fortnight. Extra safety precautions, panic buying, fights over the last toilet paper rolls and understaffed stores – this is the new grocer reality! In these difficult times retailers are turning to AI solutions to support operational continuity.

Nobody likes waiting in lines. According to research, people spend from 3 to 5 days per year queuing up. That might add up to 6 months of waiting for things during a person’s lifetime! Long queues at the supermarket cause shopper fatigue, decrease customer experience and result in shopping cart abandonment.

In my 20+ years in retail I learned one thing: retail loves precision! Retail managers are obsessed with key metrics: sales per square foot, average transaction value, year on year sales and many more to evaluate your store performance. However, there is a key problem with this approach - the tracking is done on the store level. Sure, you can compare performance with other stores. But it gives little insight on what needs to be changed to improve performance. 

The age of perfect customer experience is upon us. Although many shoppers turned online, physical stores are still the best way to convey the brand's message and present your products. Top level brands invest a lot into carefully crafted ‘retail experiences’. So why does shopping at an Apple store or Nike shop makes you feel good?

With closure of several big box and department store chains, it became all too familiar to call brick and mortar retailing doomed. But despite a paradigm shift towards e-commerce, online retailing is still dwarfed by sales numbers from physical stores.

Computer vision is changing the way businesses operate. From retail to warehousing, from manufacturing to urban planning, the technology allows to measure and analyze real life objects and create a quantifiable data level on top of them.