Robots have rolled into retail, from six-foot-tall free-moving machines spotting spills in Giant Foods Stores to autonomous shelf-scanners checking inventory in Walmart. At Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, a “LoweBot” in some stores can answer simple questions, such as where to find items, and can assist with inventory monitoring. These robots free up workers from routine tasks, presumably giving humans more time for customer interaction — but that’s only the beginning.
What Robots Can Do for Retail
Retail robots are promising to free up workers from routine tasks, presumably giving humans more time for customer interaction. But that’s only the beginning of what robots will do. The real benefit of retail robots will be the opportunity to capture more granular data about the products on the shelves and customer buying patterns, which can increase efficiency and accuracy in inventory management. The key is using retail robots as data-collectors within an internet-of-things (IoT), which is best thought of as a complex network of connected devices, objects, and sensors gathering voluminous data that is analyzed in the cloud or with edge computing. When combined with the advanced capabilities of AI and machine learning, IoT promises to change how we live, work, conduct business, and purchase the goods and services we want and need. The key to it all may very well be a robot roaming freely, bringing data from the consumer touchpoint in the store aisle into the data management system in the cloud.