AI Shopping Carts Are Here (And These Stores Are Already Using Them)

Some use AI tools for coding, while many of us utilize the technology for more mundane tasks like text generation. Beyond the more conventional use cases, people have managed to find several weird ways to use AI tools, including using the technology to tell your fortune or find out which cattle in a herd are best for breeding. Now, the shopping carts that you push around in supermarkets are starting to get smarter, thanks to AI. 

Instacart's Caper has started supplying retailers with AI shopping carts. These baskets on wheels come with built-in cameras, weighing scales, and point-of-sale systems for payment. Image recognition allows you to scan items as you take them off the shelf and put them in your cart, which also updates the price as you go. According to Instacart, this reduces checkout times and overall creates a more seamless shopping experience. Of course, a lot of this depends on how well the AI image recognition works, and just how regularly a customer may have to rescan or manually enter products that may have been mislabeled. 

All of Geissler's locations across Connecticut and Massachusetts have adopted Caper's AI carts, as has Wegmans Dewitt in New York. They are also available in some locations of two stores in Missouri called Price Chopper and McKeever's Market & Eatery; all of the Davis Food & Drug locations in Utah; and other local and independent grocers in multiple locations.

Instacart isn't the only player in this industry: Amazon's Dash Carts offer a very similar system in which buyers can scan and weigh products in the shopping carts themselves. Then, when they are ready for checkout, they walk through a dedicated Dash Cart lane that automatically handles payments if the consumer is signed in with an Amazon store code. These carts are currently available at several Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods locations in the U.S. Other companies, like Shopic, offer clip-on attachments that convert any regular shopping cart into a smart one. This device comes fully equipped with computer vision for scanning products and POS systems for on-the-go checkouts. 

One quick look at the feature set of the Caper smart trolley makes it obvious that it brings just as much, if not a greater, benefit to the retailers that choose to adopt them in their stores. The image recognition and faster checkout times are just half the story. These AI shopping carts can also serve personalized recommendations to returning consumers, which could drive up sales for the retailer — similar to how ad personalization works on Android. Caper's promotional website talks about how the "gamification" aspect in their carts can encourage buyers by offering them coupons. All of the features could end up making the shopping experience smoother for shoppers — let's just hope we don't end up with shopping carts bombarding us with ads for products we don't need.