Retailers Rush to Implement AI-Assisted Shopping and Orders (msn.com) 73
This week Google "unveiled a set of tools for retailers that helps them roll out AI agents," reports the Wall Street Journal,
The new retail AI agents, which help shoppers find their desired items, provide customer support and let people order food at restaurants, are part of what Alphabet-owned Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Major retailers, including home improvement giant Lowe's, the grocer Kroger and pizza chain Papa Johns say they are already using Google's tools to help prepare for the incoming wave of AI-assisted shopping and ordering...
Kicking off the race among tech giants to get ahead of this shift, OpenAI released its Instant Checkout feature last fall, which lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft announced a similar checkout feature for its Copilot chatbot. Soon after OpenAI's release last year, Walmart said it would partner with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products within ChatGPT.
But that's just the beginning, reports the New York Times, with hundreds of start-ups also vying for the attention of retailers: There are A.I. start-ups that offer in-store cameras that can detect a customer's age or gender, robots that manage shelves on their own and headsets that give store workers access to product information in real time... The scramble to exploit artificial intelligence is happening across the retail spectrum, from the highest echelons of luxury goods to the most pragmatic of convenience stores.
7-Eleven said it was using conversational A.I. to hire staff at its convenience stores through an agent named Rita (Recruiting Individuals Through Automation). Executives said that they no longer had to worry about whether applicants would show up to interviews and that the system had reduced hiring time, which had taken two weeks, to less than three days.
The article notes that at the National Retail Federation conference, other companies showing their AI advancements included Applebee's, IHOP, the Vitamin Shoppe, Urban Outfitters, Rag & Bone, Kendra Scott, Michael Kors and Philip Morris.
Kicking off the race among tech giants to get ahead of this shift, OpenAI released its Instant Checkout feature last fall, which lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft announced a similar checkout feature for its Copilot chatbot. Soon after OpenAI's release last year, Walmart said it would partner with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products within ChatGPT.
But that's just the beginning, reports the New York Times, with hundreds of start-ups also vying for the attention of retailers: There are A.I. start-ups that offer in-store cameras that can detect a customer's age or gender, robots that manage shelves on their own and headsets that give store workers access to product information in real time... The scramble to exploit artificial intelligence is happening across the retail spectrum, from the highest echelons of luxury goods to the most pragmatic of convenience stores.
7-Eleven said it was using conversational A.I. to hire staff at its convenience stores through an agent named Rita (Recruiting Individuals Through Automation). Executives said that they no longer had to worry about whether applicants would show up to interviews and that the system had reduced hiring time, which had taken two weeks, to less than three days.
The article notes that at the National Retail Federation conference, other companies showing their AI advancements included Applebee's, IHOP, the Vitamin Shoppe, Urban Outfitters, Rag & Bone, Kendra Scott, Michael Kors and Philip Morris.
Who wants this? (Score:5, Insightful)
More AI features no one is asking for. This AI bubble is looking more and more like the dotcom bubble.
Please burst already.
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Re:Who wants this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm starting to hear people complaining about "customer support" AI "agents" failing to solve simple problems and effectively preventing you from getting in touch with a human who could. I can tell you who asked for this right away.
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I'm starting to hear people complaining about "customer support" AI "agents" failing to solve simple problems and effectively preventing you from getting in touch with a human who could.
You say that like you believe that's and unintended consequence.
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Only if you remove the context ;)
Re: Who wants this? (Score:2)
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It isn't "old man stuff", it is abysmally bad service. If you were able to get out of it without too much trouble, great.
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I'm starting to hear people complaining about "customer support" AI "agents" failing to solve simple problems and effectively preventing you from getting in touch with a human who could. I can tell you who asked for this right away.
Having dealt with some phenomenally bad carbon based phone support who's sole purpose was to get you off the phone or charge you for something extra (*cough*Lufthansa*cough*), this sounds like it's deliberate.
It's nothing new. Companies who are only interested in meeting the legal bare minimum have long been outsourcing their customer support to the cheapest bidder which usually hires anyone who claims they can speak English. Companies that want to maintain a standard pay extra to keep contact centres in
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Yep, it is just that with "AI" it is a lot cheaper for them to shaft you. So the game against the customer is upped once again.
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It does have that dot-com feel doesn't it. The script kiddies are back in town! :)
Re:Who wants this? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also reminiscent of the "we must have cloud everything" frenzy. It didn't matter if any value was created as long as everyone knew it was "cloud first" or (worse) just lift and shift the lot to (insert public cloud provider) until the inevitable hangover occurred when lack of governance and strategy resulted in huge ongoing cloud provider charges with little in the way ROI to show for it.
Re:Who wants this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Retailers do. The goal is to push customers into buying more stuff, so they want to use AI to push more products in front of you.
Upsell widgets usually are limited in what they can show you (you know because when you check out, you get a screen saying "Check out these special offers!" with more products).
The goal is to get AI bots to inundate you with products so you get the Costco effect where you only wanted one item but leave with dozens more items.
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Retailers do. The goal is to push customers into buying more stuff, so they want to use AI to push more products in front of you.
That is, at best, a secondary goal. Their goal in this is to get rid of employees, which are the second biggest cost in a retail operation.
And they'll regret it, because it will drive people away even faster than the poorly trained employees pushing "this month's special" too hard. When you scream at employees, they stop. AI won't. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, even after you're dead!
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LLM-AI enabled robots flipping burgers, and saying the order is fine, even though the burger is barely even warm, has a pound of lettuce on it, and is missing the bun, and because AI says it's right, you can't get a refund.
If I have to use an automated phone thing, I've found that repeatedly requesting 'talk to a human' gets a human on the line.
Re: Who wants this? (Score:2)
They are in a difficult position. If they don't invest in it and it does turn out to be a hit, then they will be far behind. Doesnt mean it isn't all speculation at this point.
Re:Who wants this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree. I’m at a tech firm and all product groups have been instructed to add AI into their products. It doesn’t matter in which way. Any way. We just need something to say and look like we are doing something. So, get cracking.
I have had a single customer mention AI in the past year, and I’ve been on about 75 roadmap calls.
Re:Who wants this? (Score:4)
Facebook rebranded themselves "Meta" and dumped tens of billions into the "metaverse", a concept that few people are interested in and show no sign of ever being interested in.
Companies can and do make dumb decisions that don't pan out and double-down on those decisions all the time. Why is AI different to you? What does the investor class know that we don't know or can't read for ourselves?
The promise of AI is "AGI", an ill-defined concept that will supposedly replace hundreds of millions of expensive workers with relatively cheap computers that never tire out, don't demand raises, etc.
AI has made some great advances over the last few years, but it's nowhere near the point at replacing anyone except maybe the lowest-level customer service agents who are only allowed to read from scripts. AI has been used as an excuse for companies laying people off, but only to paper over the poor performance of the company, not actual AI replacement of workers.
AGI will come, eventually, but it likely won't be like the LLMs of today. Investors will likely grow impatient with AI companies and pump the breaks on investment long before that happens, and demand something more concrete before showering AI companies with billions again.
Re: Who wants this? (Score:2)
This is inevitably the outcome of every bubble, but you forget that the higher it goes the harder the fall. And the "AI" was unsustainable when it was 10% of what it was before the trump pump last year.
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Who wants this? The competitors of anyone using it. Because the more our competitors use crap like this, the more of their customers will come to us.
This past year has been rough for retail (which is why so many companies are looking to cut costs with magic AI pixies like this), but we've doubled down on real customer service, and my end of year bonus was a month and a half's pay (on top of the quarterly bonuses that have average about half of that each)).
So I sincerely hope that all our competitors hitch t
.com's sold real goods/services, AI only sells AI (Score:2)
More AI features no one is asking for. This AI bubble is looking more and more like the dotcom bubble. Please burst already.
One major difference is everyone wanted the dot com offerings,they just didn't want to pay how much it actually cost. No one wants AI customers service and intrusive ads. People loved pets.com, eToys.com, webvan, Kozmo.com, etc. They just didn't have a sufficient line of sight to profitability without tons of VC cash.
Also, the dot-com bubble was inflated by the y2k bubble. People knew they needed to spend tons of money to update their software, so they were doing web-based overhauls of key systems.
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Have you tried shopping Amazon or other big sites, for something specific? For example, a rectangular bathroom mirror of a specific size, with rounded corners? Traditional search engines are terrible at this kind of thing, because so many sellers game the search parameters to make sure their product shows up in any search results remotely resembling what you're actually looking for. If AI can help solve some of this search spam, I'm in.
keep it real (Score:2)
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For now. You do know that farm equipment and street maintenance and janitorial will be on the "adding AI to everything list".
Your tractors will go out and harvest everything themselves 24/7, street maint trucks will roam around endlessly fixing stuff, and janitorial will be a group of Roomba-type things that mop and scrub hallways, a thing that can scale a window to clean it, some kind of 'bot that can patch walls and paint... factories will be entirely automated (just half a dozen engineers to make sure t
Re: keep it real (Score:2)
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So where are the people? There is more to life than tech.
The broligarchy doesn't believe that, and they have the money, which equates power, to enforce a "life is digital" outlook on the governments of the world, which will enforce that view on the rest of us, whether we like it or not. While they can't take away going for a walk or bike ride, they're desperately trying to make those digital experiences as well. You must allow digital tracking of your route, your amount of climb, your calories burned, your distance traveled, etc. Because if you don't allow all th
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You mean the people glued to their favorite AI chatbot working to solve a problem at work? Or the kids having "relationships" with chatbots?
This is the final push for OpenAI (Score:5, Interesting)
They have to make some serious progress towards not being a huge pile of burning cash in the next year, and this is one of the many increasingly desperate ways they will try to do that.
I expect it to end with begging and bribing the goverment to foot the bill, but the politicans of today are already piling up way more debt than ever before, so they might not want to bail out openAI. But the AI bubble is propping up the economy, in that sense its too big to fail, and we can't let china get ahead, right? Right guys?! I mean we just let them get ahead with electric vehicles and solar power so THIS time we're not going to!
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Amazon made demonstrable progress towards the goal of dominating e-commerce with consumers. AI hasn't made any demonstrable progress towards achieving AGI. LLMs aren't the vehicle for AGI.
The bubble is going to pop.
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It didn't take decades at all. Amazon could have made a profit much earlier but it chose not to, instead pouring as much cash as it could into growth. Open AI is doing this too, except it couldn't make a profit if it wanted to.
Amazon wasn't losing money very much money when it wasn't profitable most of the time, it was just not making money either.
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A customer cries in the wilderness, does any retailer hear them. Nope, however an AI bot does and immediately offers anti-depressants from the Drugs-Are-Us online retailer and who.....
BLAM: A commercial: Do you suffer from anxiety over your neighbor pulling your weed and leaving you with no grass. With our new Anti-Neighbor Anxiety Cannon you can fire Roman cannon balls at his backyard hammock. Watch it go up in multi-colored flames!! This is a limited time offer, get one while
Good luck with that (Score:2)
We want to help YOU! To spend your money .. (Score:2)
.. more of your money, because what we like most of you IS YOUR FREAKIN MONEY!
Re: We want to help YOU! To spend your money .. (Score:1)
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Yes but have you seen a shop owner stuffing things into your bag that you are supposed to buy?
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I'm cautiously optimistic about some of this (Score:2)
A few weeks back I called a BBQ restaurant in Vero Beach FL to order dinner. A very pleasant woman answered the phone and asked for my order. It took about 15 seconds to realize I was speaking to a bot (bonus points, it was the first day of roll-out) and I'm thinking 'here we go, gonna be another '11th floor elevator' sketch'. TL;DR, it worked perfectly for my order. Nothing I said was misinterpreted and the final order was exactly as I ordered. I spoke to another customer while I was waiting for my pickup
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Why did you have to figure it out? Why didn't the bot identify itself?
That is a great question and, upon reflection, think that systems should identify as a bot and offer an option to speak to a human somewhere in the Q&A process. As I said, my order was bog standard but it's possible I could have asked for human assistance if I needed to change something from non-standard. Systems should make it clear that human help is available and how to get to that person.
FWIW, non-LLM automated answering systems (press 1 for , 2 for and none of them are what I really need) have suf
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I used to build automated voice systems and chatbots for a large retail organisation, this was in the days of traditional NLU but before LLM stuff.
I mandated every bot and automated journey we deployed had to have a number of things in place to prevent this problem--really trivial stuff like "if there 2 or more failure states in succession (error or customer says something like 'no not that', offer a human agent.", or if a human agent is requested but no automation was attempted, encourage the customer to t
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This is 75% speech recognition and maybe 25% AI.
If the menu is known to the system and you order based on the items as they are named in the menu, a simple speech recognition program with simple heuristics will likely work most of the time.
The AI comes into play when you deviate from the menu in any way or need to ask it questions. This is a good application for LLMs. There's not much "thinking" and it's mostly pattern recognition.
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- Good luck with that.
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Well, if that happens, then no, not what I want. I'll evaluate every instance of LLM assisted shopping experience. If it works, hey, happy day for me. If not, then I just don't deal with that merchant again.
I've been on the end of badly implemented LLM answering service too. Called a medical center and needed to connect to a specific department. Turns out there are two similar departments, each dealing with different body parts and the LLM directed me to the wrong one. Not just me, but everyone who called.
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Yes, I'm with you. I've run into one of these AI front desk agents for an air conditioning repair company. The bot actually did a great job, answered my questions, and got me on the schedule as I requested. For businesses that have trouble sparing people to answer the phone, AI could be a good thing.
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Stores to avoid shopping in.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You aren't likely to know if the business is doing this unless they advertise it.
Many stores already have interior and exterior video surveillance cameras. The "A.I. start-ups" can simply analyze the existing video streams, no need for a special camera. And if the video is being recorded, which is often the case, they could work off of the recordings.
Re:Stores to avoid shopping in.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Stores with self-checkouts are already using it to detect theft. I know for a fact that both Walmart and Home Depot employ this. It uses both cameras and data from the self-checkouts to find behaviors such as concealing items or deliberate mis-scanning to cheat the system.
Home Depot's AI system falsely labeled me as a shoplifter when I was checking out. I bought some simple plumbing fittings and made the "mistake" of scanning one item twice (because I had two) and putting the other item in the bag without scanning it individually. It thought the second item was something else that I was trying to steal.
As soon as I made it to the exit, klaxons went off, orange lights flashed, and the shopping cart even locked up so that I couldn't push it out the door.
A receipt and bag check confirmed that I paid for everything in the cart, a terse apology was issued, and I was on my way. At least he didn't accuse me of theft, just wanted to check the bag because the system told him there was a potential discrepancy.
There are stories like this at Walmart, but with poorly-trained "Karen" employees who think the system is infallible and immediately start accusing shoppers of theft in front of other customers which has resulted in hurt feelings and threats of law enforcement over nothing. It has resulted in nationwide "re-training" of self-checkout employees.
Now I just get side-eye from the self-checkout hall monitors who stare at me when I'm checking out, sometimes getting into my personal space to look at my items as I'm checking out, but no outright accusations of theft.
The whole experience doesn't feel particularly friendly and the system doesn't seem like it's doing anything other than making customers feel "watched" and employees on edge for shoplifting that is false alarms most of the time.
I don't want AI assistants... (Score:4)
Standard search (Score:3)
If they go back to the old days of showing "there are no results for your search" instead of the standard infinite scrolling of today, that would be nice.
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They really, really want you to stay on their sites.
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I can pronoun.
Why Philip Morris? (Score:2)
So that you can hook people younger?
Or do they mean in terms of production process, management, etc?
Oh hell no (Score:2)
"in-store cameras that can detect a customer's age or gender" ....and adjust the prices accordingly.
Are you a person of color? Automatically update the e-ink tags on every aisle they're in to add a 4% "ethnic fee".
Are you female? Increase all the prices of feminine products by 7% automatically anytime they enter an aisle with tampons, makeup, etc.
Are you a dude with a beer belly? Awesome, automatically jack up the beer prices by 10%, then have the e-ink tags advertise that beer is 'on sale' and lower the pr
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Sure, there will be stores that adjust prices in this way. This is why it's important to shop at stores that don't jerk people around. Jerking people around is as old as...stores, and it has nothing to do with AI. A store that would jerk people around before AI, is the kind of store that would try to jerk them around even more, *with* AI. The point is, it's not AI that's the villain.
as long as AI does the checkout (Score:2)
It will be ubiquitous (Score:2)
“Our candidates are talking to Rita,” said Rachel Allen, 7-Eleven’s head of talent acquisition. “They love Rita. Even though we say Rita is an A.I. assistant, they still want to meet her.”
In the near future everyone will have a Rita, who will be well aware of your habits, your inclinations, your previous choices, your favorites. Your travel history, your bank accounts and credit score, marital status, health records, dietary requirements, sleep history. Your personal goals, you
I tried to find the movie (Score:2)
'One battle after another' and the ai agent asked 'is that a movie?'
I'll take "things that no one wants for $800". (Score:2)
More crap being forced on the world that no one is asking for. This is just another futile attempt to find a use for all this AI BS. Funny thing is though, there just isn't enough workforce optimization (ie layoffs) or increased sales to be had that could possibly offset the insane and unsustainable levels of spending we're seeing on this front. Trying to milk a rock.
Imagine Amazon's enshittified version (Score:2)
Right now, I get all kinds of irrelevant shit when I use Amazon search for "#2 x 1/2 slot head wood screws". Think about what the new-and-improved AI enabled Amazon search will return. "You asked for #2 x 1/2 slot head wood screws. We have populated your shopping cart with 3/8" lag bolts, #5 torx screwdriver, a sexy bra, and 5 books of chick-lit (where 'screw' is used as a verb)"
Re: Imagine Amazon's enshittified version (Score:3)
1929 called, it wants their customers back. (Score:3)
Jokes on all of them. We're so poor we can barely afford anything they're selling. AI isn't going to change that.
Nada (Score:2)
Back to Brick & Mortars (Score:2)
I've already reduced the amount I buy online, having canceled by Amazon and eBay accounts. This crap will just push me even harder to shop in person at real stores staffed by real people.