Robots in a Store Near You

Including interesting statement from Wal-Mart, which has now emerged as the leader in brick and mortar grocery robotics ....  Talk and link to transcription:

Groceries And Gadgets: The Robots Coming To A Supermarket Near You    in WBUR via O'Reilly

With Meghna Chakrabarti

Much more at the link, including a positioning statement by Wal-Mart.

There are robots roaming the aisles of Walmart and other grocery stores. Monitoring inventory, cleaning up spills and potentially replacing workers. Automation is coming to a supermarket near you.

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Guests:
Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Co-author of "Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital" and "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies." (@amcafee)

David Pinn, vice president of strategy for Brain Corp, which creates the software for Walmart’s autonomous floor scrubbers. Walmart is adding the floor scrubbers to 1,500 stores. (@braincor)

Erikka Knuti, communications director for The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents 1.3 million workers in grocery stores, retail and other industries. (@erikkaknuti)
... "

Wal-Mart AI Store of the Future Opens to Public

Good to see this, and new competition with Amazon in brick and mortar.  Look forward to learning about other technical details.  How about their Fresh Block chain?  More for now at the link.

Walmart unveils an A.I.-powered store of the future, now open to the public   By Sarah Perez@sarahintampa in TechCrunch

Walmart this morning unveiled a new “store of the future” and test grounds for emerging technologies, including A.I.-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store, a working concept called the Intelligent Retail Lab — or “IRL” for short — operates out of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, New York.

The store is open to customers and is one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market stores containing over 30,000 items, the retailer says, which allows it to test out technology in a real world environment.

Similar to Amazon Go’s convenience stores, the store has a suite of cameras mounted in the ceiling. But unlike Amazon Go, which is a grab-and-go store with smaller square footage, Walmart’s IRL spans 50,000 square feet of retail space and is staffed by over 100 employees.

Plus, in Walmart’s case, these A.I.-powered cameras are not being used to determine what items customers are buying in order to automatically charge them. It still has traditional checkout stations. Instead, the cameras will monitor inventory levels to determine, for example, if staff needs to bring out more meat from the backroom refrigerators to restock the shelves, or if some fresh items have been sitting too long on the shelf and need to be pulled. ... " 

Robots not the Answer

But to some challenges they are inevitable.

Robots are not the answer to store challenges    by Nikki Baird in Retailwire with expert input.

... Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research’s weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.

I love robots. In my spare time, I coach a high school robotics team. Robots are what will get us to Mars and on asteroids and inside volcanoes and to the depths of the ocean. They have an important place in industry too, accomplishing repetitive tasks with a high degree of precision and consistency.

But why do I keep hearing all these pronouncements about how robots are going to revolutionize the retail store – save it, even? Even before Amazon.com opened up its Go store and all the proclamations at NRF, lots of predictions heralded the rise of retail robots in stores. ... "

IKEA and Accenture Show a Tech Advanced Store

Again, IKEA looks quite advanced. 

IKEA asks, will virtual inventory be key to the new urban showroom?  by Matthew Stern in Retailwire.

The completely unique experience of shopping at an IKEA store is part of the brand’s appeal. But at World Mobile Congress, the chain gave a demo of a futuristic small-concept store that is far different from IKEA’s familiar labyrinth — and from other store concepts out there as well.

In partnership with Accenture, IKEA demoed a tech-enhanced store which, according to Retail Detail Europe, fits the chain’s entire expansive catalog into a small-format location. The walls are said to “double as screens filled with product information” and visitors can use an RFID-enabled version of the iconic IKEA pencil to make product selections, check out and specify if they will pick up the physical product or have it shipped.

A tweet by French tech journalist Simon Chodorge features a video of the demo. In it, the journalist can be seen tapping an RFID-enabled version of an IKEA pencil on active pads on tables near touch screens, which appear to be adding items to a shopping cart. The journalist then visits a central touch screen to check out ...... " 

Showrooms replacing Closing Stores

Replacing closing stores with Showroom stores ... ?  Implications for manufacturers?   Ability to do selectively more demonstration of more complex products, or products in context?  Use showrooms to introduce new products?

Showroom Stores
So, you're closing some stores this year. Here’s how to do it right. ....

With further expert opinion in Retailwire:

Baidu Understanding Crowds

In the CACM:   An approach that has been used to design retail environments.

" ... Baidu's Big Data Lab has devised an algorithm that can predict crowd formation, which researchers say could be used to help warn authorities and individuals of unusually large crowds that threaten public safety.

The algorithm correlates data from Baidu Map route searches with the crowd density of the places people search for to anticipate crowd formations at a certain place and time.

"Our algorithm is able to use crowd data from Baidu maps to predict how many people will be [at a certain location] in the next two hours," reports Baidu researcher Wu Haishan. ... " 

UX Design and Physical Retail

We built full scale physical retail labs to address and test this.

Will UX methodologies bolster retail's brick & mortar future?
By Ken Lonyai    

With the never ending concern over the ever changing role of brick & mortar retail and debates on how retailers can stay relevant in a world of continued e-commerce growth and rapidly ramping m-commerce adoption, a lesson from the user experience (UX) designer's playbook provides guidance to more engaging and fruitful consumer shopping experiences ahead. ... " 

See also the comments.

Online Retail Needs Instore Experience

Yes, apparently for at least some customers,  and for those customers, to achieve maximum revenue.  See also Herb Sorensen's take on this.   More here after his Amazon store visit.

Why Online Retailers Need Physical Stores to Improve Customer Experience by Shereen Dindar
It’s been almost a month now since Amazon surprised analysts by opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, Washington on November 3.

The online retailer is going head-to-head with small, independently owned bookshops by offering the personalized benefits of in-store shopping combined with the convenience of online shopping.

Amazon’s move represents a growing trend by online retailers to add brick-and-mortar locations to their businesses. It appears they now realize that online shopping will never offer a great customer experience. And in today’s marketplace, customer experience is everything. ... " 

Storeless Generation

How can the 'storeless' generation be won back?   Good thoughts important to retail.

" .... But can a big-box store truly be a third space in the classic Oldenburg sense? Recent research suggests yes, but stores need to make a strategic decision about what role they play in the lives of consumers: Are you merely a fulfillment center or do you have enough permission from consumers to turn your store into a third space again? If the answer is the latter, the pleasure of shopping and the social interaction the younger generation crave can take center stage again. It’s not too late. ... " 

Business Analytics, Past and Future

I have been a long time practitioner of business analytics, the use of quantitative methods to improve business processes. Starting at the Defense Department, where we built military simulation models, and ending up at P&G.  My first project there, when I arrived in 1977, was to improve warehouse efficiency using IBM's mathematical programming system: MPSX.  That followed with using the same mathematical optimization approaches for scheduling, supply chain siting and executive decision making.

So I was happy to see in the July/August Issue of Analytics Magazine an article by Arnold Greenland on the history and current state of business analytics at IBM.    This allows me to reflect on the growth and impact of analytical methods at IBM and elsewhere.  Since then the original MPSX package has disappeared, and has been replaced by the acquired Ilog/Cplex, which goes far beyond the original package, adding nonlinear methods as well.

Shortly after being introduced to MPSX, in 1980, we addressed the analysis of unstructured data, typically consumer comments in unstructured text, using recently developed methods called  'Content Analysis'.  These permitted the semantic analysis of multiple human languages.  An early attempt to look at and understand unstructured 'Big Data'.

During all of this time we also used a number of statistical methods throughout the enterprise to explore and improve systems.  SPSS and SAS were in frequent use.  A package called Clementine allowed us to use advanced logical methods, like artificial neural nets, to implement what were essentially statistical methods, to store and implement specific decision rules.   These methods could then be inserted in both software and hardware processes.  Clementine also permitted the structural exploration of the decision process.  Ultimately Clementine was acquired by SPSS, and were eventually absorbed into Modeler.

During the 1990's, a heady time for artificial intelligence, we implemented expert systems using a now defunct language called M1.  Which were successful for a number of complex industrial management processes.  Some of the same capabilities can be seen in JRules.  That work has been extended into recent AI explorations like that of IBM's Watson.

What is further interesting now is that many of these methods are now available to the small and medium sized business.  We live in a time where the tools are available,  just go out and use them.

Eye Tracking in the Aisle

In the WSJ:  Continued advanced usage of eye tracking to understand the shopping consumer.    Some very interesting detail is included in this article.   " ....  companies likeProcter & Gamble Co.,Unilever PLC and Kimberly-Clark are combining three-dimensional computer simulations of product designs and store layouts with eye-tracking technology. And that, in turn, is helping them roll out new products faster and come up with designs and shelf layouts that boost sales ... "

P&G Shaping the Store with Virtual Reality

In CGT, an excellent and fairly detailed article on Procter & Gamble's development of the virtual store concept within it's  innovation centers.   The first time I have seen this detailed publicly, including a picture of a life-size virtual store display.  This was previously mentioned in less detail in A.G. Lafley's book:  The Game Changer of a few years ago.

The development and use of virtual reality capabilities started in 1997 and have dealt with the construction of trials to improve the understanding of how shoppers shop.  Virtual reality allows shelves to be arranged and placed quickly in preparation for experiments to understand the nature and details of shopper shelf interaction with aisle, shelf and package in a retail context.  Real people or simulation models can be used to load the interaction for tests.


' .... “Together, we delivered a set of virtual solutions tools that better deliver on the needs of our businesses, customers and consumers,” says Bernard Eloy, associate director, Virtual and Modeling Simulations Services for GBS. “This enables P&G to go to market smarter, faster and more efficiently, and empowers internal collaboration and external connections to consumers and customers.”

Over the years, 19 more virtual solutions centers have popped up in P&G facilities around the world. These centers have life-sized screens backed by computer modeling, simulation and 3D technologies that present new P&G products as they might appear on store shelves. Consumers are then invited to view and assess these virtual product representations, which helps P&G to better understand their wants and needs. Meanwhile, sophisticated software helps P&G record consumer reactions to product placement, shapes, colors and designs.

According to Eloy, virtual solutions tools are now used in almost 80 percent of all P&G initiatives and have yielded critical capabilities in three key areas ..... '