That's the starting question Amazon asked 6 years ago, before building the most advanced shopping technology that uses a beautiful combination of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, sophisticated Computer Vision and Customer Experience.
When you take a product from the shelf it's automatically put into the shopping cart of your online account. There are no lines, no cashiers and no baskets or shopping carts. The invisible-to-human-eyes technology tracks your movements inside the store (without using facial recognition) and can see and identify every item you get from the shelves, without attaching a special chip to each product. All you need is a smartphone and the Amazon Go app.
After 11 stores throughout the United States, the brand new Manhattan (New York) store comes up with a new feature: customers are able to pay with cash. This the Amazon way of welcoming lower-income customers or those without bank accounts, cards or smartphones. You may be asking if there are human employees at all inside the store. The answer is yes. They are making food, stocking shelves and helping customers.
It shows all of us what collaborative teams with a human-centered design can do to improve services and craft innovative and stunning experiences. One question thou still (and always) needs to be answered: how can we use technology in a way that also improves human interaction?
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