Say goodbye to the days of just grabbing what you want and walking out of an Amazon Go store, then waiting hours to get your receipt to make sure you were charged correctly. Six years after announcing it was launching physical stores that didn’t have cashiers, Amazon has decided to roll back the AI-powered technology behind them.
Just Walk Out has reportedly been struggling to live up to its hype, at least behind the scenes. As of mid-2022, Amazon had more than 1,000 employees based in India working on Just Walk Out. A large part of their job was to double-check store footage to make sure that the AI system was correctly identifying what items were picked up by whom, as well as labeling images from videos to train the model.
This training wasn’t really improving the system, though; and because of this human review process, customers often waited hours to get their receipts after leaving the stores. So, Amazon will be switching to a different kind of cashierless system. The company will start using carts with checkout scanners built into them. Shoppers will scan items as they place them in the cart, and a built-in screen will display a running tally of what they’ve accumulated.
