According to sources from news agency Reuters, Microsoft is working on a technique that can track what people take off the shelves in a store. This technique would lend itself to application in shops without cash registers.
The news agency spoke to six people who stated that the technology is intended for checkout-free shops. It is a system that keeps track of what people take off the shelves in the store and put in their shopping cart. Microsoft is said to be showing the technology to stores around the world. Three sources claim that the Redmond-based company has spoken to the major American retailer Walmart in the past. Those talks were about a possible collaboration. It is unclear whether anything came of that.
The sources further indicate that the work on the technology mainly takes place under Microsoft’s Business AI department, in which a group of ten to fifteen people work on techniques for in stores. The company is also said to be working on adding cameras to shopping carts to keep track of the products people are carrying.
Microsoft would not be the first company to work on this type of technology. At the beginning of this year, Amazon opened a physical, checkout-free store in Seattle under the name Amazon Go. Sensors in the ceiling monitor which customers come in and what they grab, and then pay automatically via an Amazon Go app, which has a payment method linked to it.