No white fence, Golden Retriever, or Buick Skylark... Walmart's got something totally different going on in Long Island's Levittown (literal home of the suburbs). Thursday, it revealed its "Intelligent Retail Lab," aka IRL. In real life, this is an artificial intelligence-powered superstore of the future.
If you don't like FaceTiming... you'll hate this place. It's a spinoff of Walmart's "Store Number 8," the top-secret innovation lab where it's been cooking up ways to stay competitive against Amazon.
- The size: IRL is 50K-square-feet huge with 30K items for sale and 100+ humans stocking shelves or working check-out.
- The cameras: IRL stuck lenses and sensors everywhere. Walmart says data is deleted weekly, but you'll want to iron your shirt before arriving onto the stage/grocery store.
- The AI help: Those cameras watch shelves, informing human associates when something runs out, goes bad, or if there's a disturbance on aisle 6.
AI: Helping humans or replacing them?... Both. Amazon's taken a more openly anti-human approach with its person-free and cashier-less Amazon Go stores. Walmart claimed yesterday its AI helps humans operate more efficiently. That's a feel-good, PR-friendly take on how Walmart's handling the question of the century.