Some of the best new retail technologies created by sophisticated sensor hardware and AI designs are helping stores to manage their customer traffic in the wake of coronavirus pandemic changes.
One of the key provisions that retailers are using to keep people safe is counting the number of people in a store – including where they are in the store, in order to promote social distancing.
This raises questions about how stores are supposed to enforce the distancing – sending employees to count customers? But many concerns about manual management of customer traffic have been eliminated by new smart floor sensor systems that will automatically keep track of the positioning of individual customers throughout their whole journey, from the moment they step inside, until they are processed through the point of sale and exit the building.
“On the surface things look normal when shoppers walk through the doors of Metcalfe’s Market, but it’s what’s underneath that is different,” reports Amelia Jones at WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin. “Sensor tiles were installed to count the number of people who walk in.”
Point-of-sale monitoring was already being worked on before COVID19, but it was mostly for marketing research purposes and business insights. Now it’s a critical way to promote public health and safety, and a means for retail businesses to comply with a governor’s state orders.
Other components of COVID19 shopping restrictions are much more low-tech – for instance, having a simple piece of plexiglass at the cashier’s stand does wonders to protect both workers and customers.
Wearing masks is important, and washing your hands after touching things is also a keystone of coronavirus precautions, but the smart sensor floors will make the monitoring component a lot more effective using some of the newest and most dazzling applications that we’ve built from elegant machine learning models. This is an excellent illustration of how AI can do more than just help people sell. It’s also helping to keep us safe.
