That is what just happened to Amazon. They had these “Just Walk Out” retail stores where you could walk in, take what you needed, put it in your own bag and then just walk out. No scanning, no cashier. Easy.
They made us believe that this was fully automated, with camera’s and sophisticated AI that figured out what you put in your bag. I went in there once to check it out and could not understand how they were doing that. It was all very impressive and magical.
Well…. it turns out they weren’t. Or at least no AI was doing that. All the work was done by a large team of people (humans, remember those?) in India. Did they rush to market hoping they could get it to work later on?
Makes you wonder who else is faking it…
