Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology is touted as an AI-powered checkout system at its Fresh grocery stores, but new reports claim it uses 1,000 people in India to monitor shoppers.
The company is now on its own abandoning the technology that promised an innovative alternative to cashiers by using cameras and sensors to scan each item and switching to a self-checkout shopping cart called the Dash Cart.
An Amazon spokesperson told DailyMail.com: “(Amazon) has people annotating video footage,” which is necessary to continually improve the underlying machine learning model that powers Just Walk Out technology.
“Associates can also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual’s purchases.”
Amazon is discontinuing its Just Walk Out technology in the 27 Amazon Fresh stores it uses in the US.
Amazon Fresh is replacing Just Walk Out with Dart Cash, which has a scanner and screen in shopping carts to allow customers to track their spending.
Information first reported that Amazon’s AI technology alone meant outsourcing hundreds of jobs overseas to workers who can watch you shop in real time.
Amazon has referred to Just Walk Out as “a combination of sophisticated tools and technologies that add items to a shopper’s ‘virtual cart’ when they take it off a shelf and remove it when they return it to its place.”
According to your placeBy adding the technology it wasn’t eliminating employees, it was just “changing” the way they spend their time helping customers, stocking shelves, and answering questions.
However, new reports claim that Amazon has added workers in India to watch the cameras in Amazon Fresh stores and even add the shopper’s items to their virtual cart.
Amazon spokesperson Sarmishta Ramesh vehemently denied the allegations in an email to Dailymail.com, saying that human staff in India annotate video footage, including training AI-powered algorithms to recognize objects in the image. screen.
Reports claim that Amazon has 1,000 employees in India monitoring shoppers through cameras in its Amazon Fresh stores.
Amazon denied the allegations and said its employees were only annotating the video footage.
Ramesh said annotating the videos “is necessary to continually improve the underlying machine learning model that powers Just Walk Out technology.”
He added that associates “can also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual’s purchases.”
When it launched the technology, Amazon said it was “a combination of computer vision, object recognition, advanced sensors, deep machine learning models, and generative artificial intelligence.”
The ‘Just Walk Out’ feature will be discontinued in the company’s 27 stores that host the technology – there are 44 Amazon Fresh stores in the US.
As the company repurposes its Just Walk Out technology in its Amazon Fresh stores, it is introducing smart shopping carts, called Dash Cart, that allow shoppers to purchase their items using a built-in scanner and screen.
Ramesh said Amazon is moving to Dash Carts to give customers “the ability to easily find products and deals nearby, see their receipt while they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping in the store.”
Customers previously complained about Just Walk Out, saying they were charged incorrectly or that it took hours after leaving the store to receive their receipt.
Some shoppers were also concerned that the company was using shoppers’ biometric data despite assurances from Jon Jenkins, vice president of Just Walk Out, that the technology does not collect or use biometric information.
Amazon had previously been accused of failing to inform customers that it was using its cameras and sensors to measure each person’s body shape and size as they entered the store.
The biometric data was reportedly used for identification and tracking purposes and led to an arrest in New York. class action lawsuit by customers who said Amazon violated the state’s Biometric Identifier Information Act.
Under the law, companies must inform customers if they are collecting their biometric information.
Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said The Seattle Times that “Amazon owes its customers an explanation of how it operates these systems before people come in, so that people can decide for themselves whether they want to provide measurements of their body size and shape as a condition of purchasing a sandwich.”
Although Just Walk Out will not be offered in Amazon Fresh stores in the US, it will still be available in Amazon Go stores and smaller Amazon Fresh stores in the UK.