alwaysAI Smart Checkout Offers Frictionless Capabilities to Create a Better Customer Experience and Drive More Revenue

It’s hard to remember a world before mobile phones, single-tap payments, and self-checkout. A world when customers flipped through magazines at checkouts with clipped paper coupons in envelopes. Waiting to purchase goods was both normal and tolerated. 

Not anymore. With great innovation comes great change. Convenience has become the driving factor in shaping consumer behavior. An explosion of online retailers has been capitalizing on offering the ultimate in convenience – shop for your favorite products, any time of day, without leaving your home.

Competing with online shopping presents some challenges, but it also presents opportunities. While 76% of adults shop online, 56% still say they prefer shopping in person. Nothing (not even shopping in pajamas) beats the ability to physically hold products in your hand, see the color and feel the texture. This presents a massive opportunity for retailers. 

If retailers can create a convenient in-person shopping experience, shoppers will come (and return again and again). But to do so, retailers need to understand what their customers really want (besides fabulous products).

What Matters Most to In-Person Shoppers?

Luring customers into your store with a clean layout, engaging displays, and friendly staff is a no-brainer. Keeping customers in-store is trickier. Long wait times, confusing store layouts, and low inventory are all frustrations that threaten retail businesses. Understanding what customers want is the best way to increase revenue. 

Arguably the most important differentiator for retailers is reducing wait times at checkout. According to Parcel Pending, 86% of retail customers have left a store due to long wait times costing businesses an estimated $38 billion in sales.  

Everyone can relate to the frustration of running into a store to grab a few necessities only to be slowed down by long lines. While we’d love to say that we use the opportunity to take a few deep breaths and enjoy the pause, waiting in line can feel downright tortuous – especially when you’re running late, have kids in tow, pets waiting in the car, or have a work deadline pending. (We also hope you don’t spiral into an existential crisis about the ticking minutes of life you’ll never get back. Wait, is this just us?) 

Bottom line: waiting in line stinks and in 2023, we shouldn’t have to.

It’s a Good Time to Be a Customer

Customers have more choices than ever before when it comes to shopping. They have more resources to compare prices, compare products or services, and research competitors. As a result, retailers need customers more than customers need retailers (and we all know it). 

Every retailer should be looking for ways to stand out and differentiate themselves. One of the best ways to do so is to focus on customer experience. This can mean investing in engaging digital displays or interactive screens where they can explore options and customize products. But what customers really want are digital payments and easy checkout capabilities. 

According to a recent Piplsay survey, over half of the respondents (57%) wanted more stores to adopt frictionless AI capabilities to improve their shopping experience. 

What is Frictionless Checkout?

Frictionless checkouts offer the ultimate shopping convenience. Simply place all your items on a tray at once, pay, and walk out. 

Unlike more ubiquitous self-checkout kiosks – that still require manual barcode scanning – frictionless checkout systems use advanced computer vision technology to immediately recognize each item and total them accordingly. Not only does this AI detection allow shoppers a quick and frictionless customer experience, but it also gives retailers the opportunity to reallocate staff from checkouts to other areas of the store where they can be more useful. 

In our fast-paced world where convenience is king, retailers need to embrace computer vision technology to better serve their customers’ needs. And they need to do so quickly. Experts at Oliver Wyman predict that by 2027, the number of frictionless stores will grow from 250 stores to 12,000 (that’s a 4,700% increase!).

How Does Frictionless Checkout Work?

With the number of self-checkout kiosks expected to surpass 1.1 million in the next 2 years, self-checkouts and bar-scanning alone are not enough to stand out from your retail competitors. Going beyond barcode scanning to truly frictionless checkout is the differentiator for superior businesses. 

Computer vision trains cameras to detect and interpret objects, people, and events in the physical world and provides real-time data about those detections so retailers can make better business decisions. 

Using techniques like object detection and image recognition, machine learning engineers can train computer vision applications to detect any number of products. Once the application is properly trained, it can be deployed to the cloud, on-premise service, or edge devices, then re-trained as new products are added or others replaced.

A camera equipped with computer vision can be trained to recognize a bottle of Coke from a bottle of Sprite making traditional self-checkout even easier.

Frictionless Capabilities With alwaysAI Smart Checkout

alwaysAI is a leader in advanced computer vision technology. Our computer vision platform and solutions were created to take the complexity out of computer vision making this ground-breaking AI detection accessible to any enterprise looking to work smarter. 

We’ve spent over 2,000 hours training and perfecting the alwaysAI Smart Checkout technology to create the most robust and agile frictionless software. 

We’ve built our software to work in the real world, taking into account all the variables that can affect the accuracy of the technology. After all, if it’s constantly giving users errors, your checkout system is neither quick nor easy. 

alwaysAI Smart Checkout automatically adjusts for changes in lighting and backgrounds. It’s also designed to work no matter how items are placed on a tray. (After all, people who are trying to get in and out of a store quickly, generally don’t take the time to neatly place items on a checkout tray.) Our proprietary software can account for even slight differences in sizing or labeling making alwaysAI Smart Checkout the leading frictionless software in the market. 

One of the biggest challenges of frictionless checkout is accounting for inevitable changes in inventories, product labels, and discontinued and new items. Therefore, we’re particularly proud of our robust catalog of pre-trained models which makes getting started and adding new items to your checkout systems easier than other frictionless software providers.

Other unique benefits of alwaysAI:

• Inference on the edge, the cloud, or an on-premise server for ultimate flexibility. 
• Place all items on the tray in any order or configuration, for immediate recognition without barcodes.
• Recognize all items in the checkout basin in less than 0.5 seconds.
• Reduce average transaction times to less than 25 seconds for 5 or less items. 
• Eliminate active attendants with 99.9% item accuracy.
• Process new items on site. Capture the data for new items immediately.

How Do We Do It?

We know making claims like 99.9% accuracy and reducing checkout times to under 25 seconds are bold. But we also know we have a product that has been tested and perfected to be able to back up those claims. 

The technology that drives alwaysAI Smart Checkout is some of the most powerful computer vision software in the market thanks to:

• Proprietary software for data collection, neural network training, post-processing, and deployment and inference.
• Proprietary synthetic data generation techniques that allows store staff to immediately capture new items on-site for maximum inventory agility. 
• Custom model architecture based on alwaysAI YOLO Static for unparalleled accuracy.
• Multi-camera setup supported with hardware acceleration on neural networks to enable item recognition in less than 0.5 seconds. 
• Post-processing that includes complex error handling, identification of item sizes, digital twin 3D mapping of item locations, and quality assurance. 
• API-based integration with POS systems, UI, and deployment management for production-grade deployments.

Benefits of Going Frictionless With alwaysAI

Improve wait times

Customers want an easy checkout experience. This means getting them in and out of lines quickly without errors. 

Optimize staffing

Less errors mean less staff is necessary at checkout lanes. Instead, managers could reallocate staff to areas that will have the greatest impact on bottom lines. 

Address complicated transactions with ease and accuracy

With alwaysAI, customers can place items in any order on the tray (even overlapping!) with unbeatable accuracy. This means less frustration for both customers and staff. 

Get started quickly and easily

alwaysAI has a robust catalog of popular items, the ability to quickly capture and process items easily on site, and the technical expertise to integrate with any POS systems so you can get up and running fast. 

Inference at the edge, the cloud, or on an on-premise server

No matter where you deploy, alwaysAI keeps costs down and the speed of transactions up so you can provide a truly seamless, frictionless checkout experience.

Gain a Competitive Edge

What makes retailers unique is not what they sell, it’s the customer experience. To stand out, retailers are turning to computer vision to employ frictionless checkout. Don’t be left behind. 

Ready to get started? Speak to an AI Expert today!