New Jersey retailers, from big-box stores to supermarkets, are adopting AI

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You enter a grocery store with a shopping cart, as you have done countless times before.

But there is a difference. This shopping cart has a computer screen. On the computer, you can go through a short tutorial. Or you can start shopping.

If you choose to take the tutorial, you will be shown how to scan your purchases, add products, access special offers and checkout after shopping.

A green light surrounds the shopping cart, indicating that you have successfully placed your purchase in the digital shopping cart. You don’t have to keep an eye on your items. The shopping cart, which is based on artificial intelligence, does it for you.

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This technology is being used by grocery chain ShopRite in a handful of stores across the state – in Bloomfield and Sparta in North Jersey, and in Spotswood and Byram.

From chatbots for customer service to smart shopping carts, inventory management and marketing, retailers in New Jersey and across the country have quickly adopted AI technology.

AI, and more specifically generative AI, is a technology that processes data from the Internet like a human brain to create content – text, images, videos, music – based on users’ instructions.

Its development has meant that people who are not computer scientists and do not know how to write code can make their computers perform tasks in seconds that would previously have taken them minutes, hours or days: responding to emails, writing advertising brochures, designing a magazine cover.

The pioneer was OpenAi, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2015 with the goal of creating a publicly accessible platform for generative AI.

Its backers include Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft. The company has also introduced ChatGPT, which generates text, and DALL-E, which generates digital images, with new versions increasingly producing human-like responses.

“It’s like the Wild West,” Aaron Price, executive director of Tech United, a trade group for New Jersey’s high-tech industry, said in an interview in April.

Experiments by hypermarkets, grocery stores and fast-food chains

Major supermarkets like BJ’s, Walmart, Home Depot and Target use artificial intelligence for a variety of purposes, as do grocery chains like ShopRite and Stop & Shop and fast-food restaurants like Taco Bell.

Target announced in June that it would begin deploying an AI chatbot called Store Companion, which would be available on associates’ handheld devices to help them answer customer questions.

Home Depot announced it would use Google Cloud for inventory management, while Taco Bell is using AI in its drive-thru stores.

At ShopRite, the grocery chain is experimenting with AI-powered smart shopping carts called Caper Cart by Instacart, including at ShopRite of Brookdale in Bloomfield, which allow customers to scan their items as they are placed in their cart. The technology also offers recommendations and allows a person to check out directly from their cart.

Stop & Shop now uses artificial intelligence with Marty the Robot, a goggle-eyed assistant who is responsible for tracking inventory on the shelves – a task normally done by human workers – and who enables it to “speed up restocking and price corrections” as well as detect any hazards on the shelf, said spokeswoman Caroline Medeiros.

The robot will be used at more than 300 locations in the northeast, Medeiros said.

Shopping with voice commands in a Walmart app

Walmart announced last October that the company would use AI to improve online shopping search capabilities and help customers make complex purchases.

The major retail chain is also experimenting with AI-powered, voice-assisted, hands-free shopping technology – a phone app that allows customers to shop via voice command, “communicating back and forth with the assistant and booking pickup and delivery times.”

Klarna, a global payments company known for its buy now, pay later model, said it was able to do the work of 700 full-time employees with the help of an AI assistant.

Grocery stores could use AI to recommend products to customers that they would be more likely to buy based on their shopping history, says Madhavi Chakrabarty, assistant professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School.

“People forget and make mistakes,” she said in an email. “Having an ally in their shopping platform that can remind them when they need to reorder or renew makes it easier for shoppers.”

Facial scanning technology in North Jersey malls?

Triple Five, which owns the American Dream mega-mall in East Rutherford, is already using AI in another of its properties, the Mall of America in Minnesota.

In June, the Canadian company announced that it would use artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technology for its security system at the country’s largest shopping mall.

The system is being developed by CoreSight. It scans the mall’s video surveillance and matches all faces to those in the “person of interest” database maintained by law enforcement.

Critics criticized the technology as an invasion of privacy and warned that it could lead to false alarms.

An American Dream spokesperson said the mall does not use these devices, but did not say whether it is being considered or whether it might be possible at the East Rutherford mall in the future.

Representatives of Simon Property Group, which owns Rockaway Townsquare in Morris County and The Ships at Riverside in Hackensack, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did The Mall at Short Hills. Representatives of Garden State Plaza did not say whether the mall uses the technology.

According to mall officials, Bergen Town Center in Paramus does not use this technology, nor does Willowbrook Mall in Wayne or Paramus Park in Bergen County.

Gaps in technology, loss of customer trust

According to Forbes, Target employees have complained about the use of the AI chatbot, saying the technology is frustrating and more distracting than useful.

In April, Amazon Fresh abandoned its “Just Walk Out” technology, which uses cameras, artificial intelligence and sensor trackers to measure which products are taken off shelves, allowing customers to literally take the products and walk away, as long as they have already provided a credit card or other payment method when entering the store.

According to media reports, Just Walk Out’s technology allegedly relied on over 1,000 people in India watching the videos, labeling them and manually adding up the items as customers made their purchases. Amazon has denied these claims, according to The Verge.

“When introducing automation technologies, employees are afraid. They wonder if their jobs are in danger,” says Tom Taulli, author of Generative AI: How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Will Revolutionize Business.

The data processed could be confidential, Taulli added, “so strict safeguards must be put in place.” And the cost of AI technology could be enormous, he said.

And when it comes to using artificial intelligence in customer service, the technology can complement human employees but should not replace them, Taulli said.

The possibility that their data could be sold, misused or otherwise misused may make consumers wary, says Chakrabarty of Rutgers University.

“In order for them to share more personal information, they have to trust the platform,” Chakrabarty said. “Any misstep leads to a loss of trust that is difficult to restore.”

Keep it to yourself

NorthJersey.com and The Record reached out to nearly 40 New Jersey retailers to ask if and how they use AI. Some declined to comment. Most simply didn’t respond.

“Some people may be silent about AI because the programs may still be in their early stages and the results are being evaluated,” says Taulli, the book’s author.

“I can understand why companies are hesitant, especially when they are still in the early stages of implementation,” he continued. “You shouldn’t overpromise.”

Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record.

E-mail: [email protected]; Twitter:@danielmunoz100 and Facebook