4 Reasons Retailers Should Adopt Autonomous Checkout Solutions

Retailers across the world are struggling with staff shortages, theft, and disgruntled customers. Artificial intelligence solutions like autonomous checkout, smart carts, and scan & go solutions can help solve those problems.

Dive into problems facing retail and grocery stores, then learn how outsourcing the data annotation work can help you bring retail AI and computer vision solutions to life faster in our guide: Computer Vision & Smart Retail: Accelerating AI Innovation at Scale.

Here’s why you should prioritize autonomous checkout investments:

1. Long retail checkout lines are the worst.

The average American spends about 37 hours waiting in line each year and many shoppers will abandon their purchases after 5+ minutes in line. In fact, 86% of U.S. consumers have left a store due to long wait lines which cause retailers to lose an estimated $38 billion in potential sales.

Long lines add congestion to stores, divert employees from helping on the floor, and create a bad first impression for arriving shoppers. Streamlining and accelerating the checkout experience should be a priority for all retailers.

2. Staff shortages are a big problem.

Staffing the US’s 40K+ grocery stores is no small feat. In 2021, approximately 7.7 million people quit their retail jobs, up 24% from two years ago.

Cashiers typically account for about 28% of grocery staff so innovative retailers are combatting staff shortages by embracing automation and cashierless solutions like autonomous checkout.

There will always be a need for customer service, stock clerks, security, and other roles that ensure positive customer experiences in the store and behind the scenes.

3. Self-checkout isn’t enough.

80% of shoppers are interested in non-traditional checkout experiences but current retail solutions like self-checkout are risky.

20% of shoppers admitted to stealing in the self-checkout line. That leads to an average 4% loss — which is higher than profit margins for most retailers!

Artificial intelligence can help. Solutions like Scan & Go, smart carts, and autonomous checkout solutions help prevent theft by removing shoppers' anonymity and capturing purchase information with barcode scanners, computer vision cameras, or RFID.

4. Time is money. Checkout innovation can’t wait.

Industry leaders like Amazon, Kroger, Albertsons, and Circle K are already testing autonomous checkout solutions. Will you be next?

Can your team handle annotating thousands, even millions of images and videos to train AI models to ‘see’ the average 40-50K products in large stores.

What about regional and seasonal items? And refreshing annotations every time packaging, product lines, and store arrangements change? Accurate AI solutions require a lot of ongoing maintenance.

Wouldn’t it be nice to focus on retail innovation instead of data annotation?

Hi. We’re CloudFactory. We have over 10 years of experience providing data labeling for 700+ organizations across the globe. Our professionally-trained data annotation workforce is committed to delivering high-quality data to train, optimize, and refine your autonomous checkout and retail computer vision models.

Learn how retail AI solutions come to life and how partnering with a scalable data annotation team can help in this guide: Computer Vision & Smart Retail: Accelerating AI Innovation at Scale. We’re here if you have any questions!