1,200 sq metre shop offers AI tech that will also cut down on theft
The first Continente Bom Dia shop operating with Artificial Intelligence technology, “which allows you to pay for products without having to register them manually”, has opened in Leiria.
It’s “a shop unlike any other”, says Luís Moutinho, CEO of the company responsible for the project, MC, stressing that “it’s the largest intelligent shop in the world” born “in a year in which Continente celebrates its 40th anniversary”.
The Bom Dia Leiria São Romão shop was built with an investment of six million euros, of which €1.5 million went to Sensei Tech, a Portuguese start-up.
The inauguration was attended by the Minister for Youth and Modernisation, Margarida Balseiro Lopes, who had the opportunity to see how AI shopping works.
Basically, it starts off like normal shopping, but when people reach the ‘smart checkout’ tills, they don’t need to take the products out of their baskets for scanning.
“The bill is displayed immediately – all you have to do is pay!”
“Our dream is to give customers the ‘wow’ effect, which is to get to the till and not have to do anything,” explains Luís Moutinho.
“From day one, we have believed in a hybrid shop, because we want the customer experience to be completely normal and calm”, he said, with the added twist at the end of the ‘wow effect’.
Of course, if shoppers are not keen on the wow effect, they can opt for a till with a human being on the checkout line. (The shop, with an area of 1,200 sq m, has six ‘smart’ checkouts, and two manual ones.)
A word for the Sensei technology – it has the ability to distinguish 12,000 different product references, says Sensei CEO Vasco Portugal. And by its nature, it reduces the chances of theft as all products collected by customers are recorded, and “if they are not paid for on the way out, they will be detected”.
Is this sounding like shops with less staff and less requirement for security guards? Apparently not: Luís Moutinho has stressed that the group is one of the largest private employers in Portugal, and means to stay that way. “MC employs 44,000 people and this shop has 28 new colleagues”, he told reports. “We don’t even want to reduce the social interactions we have with our customers, but we believe that digital is itself also a facilitator of our business”.
MC has 17 shops in the Leira district and employs 1,329 people.
Source material: ZAP/ LUSA
