Amazon Go: A.I.’s grim face?

Too Long; Didn't Read

I have been waiting since college on RFID’s failed promise to deliver a walk-away checkout experience, and Amazon finally made it possible. After reading my <a href="https://geekonrecord.com/2018/01/23/i-experienced-the-future-of-retail-amazon-go/" target="_blank">co-blog writer’s experience in the Amazon Go store </a>I had to check it out for myself and was excited for it. All my friend’s pictures were of long lines, but thankfully I am a morning person and there was no line when I got there. My goal was to pretend I had no idea what it was or how it worked. My experience overall was good, with the exception of the on-boarding process. I was greeted with a condescending “<em>oh, you don’t have the app</em>?” and was asked to stay aside. My T-Mobile reception was very poor so it took me a bit to get started. Once I downloaded the app and signed into my Amazon account everything was smooth. Mission accomplished! In this post, I’m not going to talk about the actual store (Ivan did a great job already) but about the implications of the first tangible and successful AI automated store.