French retailer Auchan has opened its first autonomous convenience store in Lille using technology from Cloudpick, a Chinese provider of AI-based smart stores.

With more than 200 autonomous stores using its autonomous store technology worldwide, Cloudpick’s intelligent store system means a registered customer simply collects the items from the shelves and walks out. The intelligent store completes the transaction in the background. Harried commuters could just hustle out the door with a sandwich and a morning coffee.

In September, the company also opened a Catch & Go convenience store in the NTT Data office in Tokyo, Japan, serving customers with the speed and convenience demanded by professionals who are now getting used to not facing queues of customers scanning, paying for and packing their purchases during the morning peak hours.

The growing list of stores that use and benefit from Cloudpick’s technology reflects how its technology has helped retailers better understand their customers. Auchan Go in France and Catch & Go in Japan join Ahold Delhaize’s Lunchbox in Boston, USA, in a growing number of worldwide retailers to realise this vision of the future of retail.

Besides the fact that more shoppers can be served more efficiently with no bottlenecks at a checkout counter, the inherent robust analytics of an autonomous store improves store management dynamically.

Autonomous stores outperform traditional stores, but with the intelligent vision of the store cameras, the autonomous store’s 99.5% accuracy rate in tracking shopper activity and purchases is at the top of the autonomous retail industry.

Tangible benefits to retailers are even more evident in the improvement of stock control and customer management. With the near-flawless stock control of an automated store, retailers increase replenishment efficiency, improve accuracy and cultivate a skilled workforce.

Automatic customer shopping habits data also provide the manager with a detailed real-time report of the turnover of individual products to understand physical shopping habits in the store and to fine-tune placement and product selection accordingly.

Auchan and Cloudpick place a premium on sensitive identity information, and have worked in close collaboration with CNIL in France to ensure compliance with GDPR requirements. Computer vision doesn’t collect images or biometrics but only analyses movement through the store and records the items collected to link the customer to their account.

However, this knowledge alone proves valuable as the retailer knows its customers better and can efficiently and economically help them make informed choices without costly marketing campaigns. The app can even send personalised coupons and promotional codes for discounts and combo sales based on their shopping habits, encouraging customer loyalty.

In the past, implementations of intelligent technology have been criticised for replacing a human workforce. But a more convincing argument, says the company, can be made that modern technology elevates human endeavour, and that personnel can be better employed in more valuable capacities.

Cloudpick envisions that autonomous stores will be accepted as instinctively as the fact that modern elevators don’t need a human elevator operator to work effectively. Client facing staff, no longer limited to menial scanning and handling payment, can be upskilled to improve customer satisfaction.