Amazon Shelves ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkout Program Monitored by ‘Low-wage’ Indian Techies
- The Seattle-based global retailer was was relying on more than 1,000 people who were manually reviewing the transactions and labeling video images to train its model.
Amazon Fresh is shelving its ‘Just Walk Out’ checkout program, which let customers fill their carts with groceries and skip the cashier, with their accounts charged later. The company is replacing ‘Just Walk Out’ with ‘Dash Carts’ instead, Tony Hogget, the company’s senior vice president of grocery stores, told The Information.
Ever since its launch in 2007, the Seattle-based retailer has been lauding the technology which aimed to transform the face of brick-and-mortar supermarket. It described ‘Just Walk Out as “a combination of sophisticated tools and technologies that added items to the shopper’s ‘virtual cart’ when they take an item off a shelf, and remove it when they put it back. “By adding the technology it wasn’t removing employees, it was only ‘shifting’ the way they spend their time by assisting customers, stocking shelves, and answering questions,” according to the Amazon website.
However, the company was relying on offshore Indians to work on the AI technology used for the program. According to a May 9, 2023 report from The Information, as of mid-2022, Amazon had more than 1,000 workers in India manually reviewing Just Walk Out transactions and labeling video images to train its model. “For every 1,000 sales, the technology required about 700 human reviews — much greater than an internal target of fewer than 50 reviews,” the report claimed.
Amazon spokesperson Sarmishta Ramesh told several news outlets including Politico that workers in India have not been watching shoppers live, but confirmed that humans “validate a small portion of shopping visits by reviewing recorded video clips.” However, “it doesn’t happen in real-time,” the statement insisted, adding that it only happens “in cases when the computer vision needed human input to accurately determine what people bought.”
As soon as ‘Just Walk Out’ was launched, skeptics called it “the latest sign of overblown AI hype,” Politico reported. When machine learning software engineer Emmanuel Maggiori first walked into an Amazon Fresh store in 2022, he told DFD that he “predicted that fully cashierless solution was too good to be true.” Entrepreneur and AI scientist Gary Marcus told DFD that the program “could maybe work 20 years form now,” but he thinks “computer vision is not as good as the field is trying to imply.”
(Top photo, courtesy of Amazon)