In April 2019, IRL launched the Intelligent Retail Lab, a testing ground for AI-enabled processes, services, and experiences inside a Walmart Neighborhood Market. By choosing one of the busiest stores in the country, we have been able to test and learn at scale, in a real-world environment. After identifying key technologies that have improved customer and associate experiences alike, IRL graduated from incubation and was integrated into the broader Walmart organization.
To learn more about what IRL is doing, you can schedule a tour at the Intelligent Retail Lab in Levit Town, New York or visit Intelligent Retail Lab website.
I worked on this stealth project in collaboration with Jet, Walmart and Store Nº8. We tackled the two the largest points of friction with the grocery shopping experience, checking out and long lines. Customers would instead, walk into the store, grab their items and walk out. We used artificial intelligence and over 3000 sensors to properly identify the customers, their actions and the products they purchase. We then took everything we learned creating that experience to also improve asset protection and inventory management for other Walmart locations.
Role: Director of User Experience
Company: Walmart
Prototypes & Explorations
This projects required design work for 3 main internal tools.
Chaperones
Specially trained store employees that worked to improve and verify the quality of our systems.
Consumers
While the shopping would not need the aid of any screens. Costumers may still need to reference their previous purchases, ask for help, perform a price check and other needs while shopping. Therefore we created kiosks in the store, a website and a smart phone app.
Vision
Our AI system which handled processing the data for
– Product recognition
– People recognition
– Action recognition
– Human overrides via the Chaperone tool
Some of the designs for these internal tools are still under NDA, but check out some of these shareable prototypes and exploration.
Exploration for the kiosk bio-metrics on-boarding.
A user searching their previous receipts.
Early explorations for app on-boarding. This is also when we considered calling the experience Wam.
