The super secret exciting project that I spent days and nights slogging over when I was at Amazon has finally been announced – Amazon Go. A checkout-less, cashier-less magical shopping experience in a physical store. Check out the video to get a sense of the shopping experience that simplifies the CX around the shopping experience. Walk in, pick up what you need and walk out. No line, no waiting, no registers.
I’m very proud of an awesome team of scientists & engineers covering software, hardware, electrical and optics that rallied together to build an awesome solution of machine learning, computer vision, deep learning and sensor fusion. The project was an exercise in iterative experimentation and continually learning, refining all aspects of the hardware, software as well as innovative vision algorithms. I personally was involved in 5 different prototypes and the winning solutions that ticked all the boxes more than 2 years ago.
I remember watching Jeff Bezos and the senior leadership at Amazon, playing with the system by picking and returning the items back to the shelves. Smiles and high-fives all around as the products were added and removed from the shopper’s virtual cart, with the correct quantity of each item.
Needless to say there is a significant effort after the initial R&D is done to move something like this to production, so it is not surprising that it has taken 2 years since then to get it ready for public. Well done to my friends at Amazon for getting the engineering solution over the line to an actual store launch for early 2017.
Photo Credit: Original Image by USDA – Flickr