(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Most shoppers, after paying for their bulk products at BJ’s, Costco or Sam’s Club, oftentimes have to wait in line to exit the store while a store employee does a quick audit of their cart. This takes time and can be annoying.
The bulk retailers aren’t happy about having to do this either. Not only does it annoy their customers, but it incurs an extra cost and is far from a perfect procedure. But doing a quick check of people’s carts is a necessary evil in this business. Why? Because people steal. In fact, people seem to be stealing more than ever. Retailers are challenged with finding ways to thwart shoplifters.
Enter AI. Sam’s Club is rolling out a solution to the shoplifting problem using AI technology. So far it’s been deployed in about 120 stores. How does it work?
After a customer has paid and as they’re existing the store, a quick photo is taken of their cart’s items. The photo is instantaneously analyzed by AI algorithms and electronically verified against their receipt. If all is good, the customer can pass. Walmart says that this technology has significantly reduced the time it takes to exit the store and improved their customers’ experience. No employees were harmed in the process.
But does it really work? There’s reason to be optimistic, considering that — based on its tests so far — the company has said that it is rolling out this AI exit solution to all of its stores by the end of the year. And of course things will get better as the technology evolves. Shoplifting will never be eradicated. But technology can significantly help lessen the impact.
But this story isn’t just about shoplifting. It’s about real life AI solutions in 2024 and who’s really benefiting. The Sam’s Club shoplifting solution is typical of how AI is being deployed this year. For now, AI is entirely a big organization game.
A big company like Sam’s Club likely spent millions on an AI-leveraged solution in order to improve customer experience, make better use of their employees and, of course, lower their cost of shrinkage due to shoplifting. They probably had a team of developers working on the project and licensed someone’s large language model to train. They had to buy and install hardware. Then test and train and monitor. Small companies don’t have the ability to do this. But big organizations with deeper pockets are finding all sorts of ways to use AI in their businesses and they’re spending all kinds of money doing so.
For example, I previously wrote about Klarna, who’s AI chatbot can do the work of 700 customer service agents. But there’s also Xfinity, who’s using its in-house AI system to not only answer problems but literally fix a homeowner’s connectivity and service issues without human intervention. KFC, Taco Bell and Dairy Queen are using AI cameras to “monitor and analyze employees’ interactions with customers and allocates bonuses to those who are able to sell more.” Police departments are using AI cameras to capture events and then automatically write up reports. Walmart is using autonomous forklifts powered by AI to move items around their warehouses. Bank of America’s Erica AI recently surpassed 1.5 billion client interactions.
Recognize these names? Of course you do. They’re among the biggest brands in the world. These large organizations — and many others — are spending large dollars to develop internal applications and solutions leveraging AI to perform work previously performed by humans, which is not only fixing their labor shortage issues but overall increasing their bottom line.
That’s the 2024 AI story: big businesses spending on AI. But 2025? 2026?
That’s when these technologies will start filtering down to small and mid-sized businesses as the costs lower and the bugs are worked out to make them more commoditized. More software vendors and startups will begin copying what the big companies have been doing and offering their own solutions to the masses. It’s in the works already.
Which means that in the next 2–3 years it will be commonplace for grocery stores to take photos of items leaving their stores to check against shoplifting, independent retailers to better monitor how their employees are servicing (and selling to) their customers and smaller warehouse operators to quickly take inventories and move materials independently from one shelf to another.
AI is already having a significant impact for the largest of organizations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just wait.
