Chinese AI Startup YI Tunnel Runs Cashierless Store at 5% the Cost of Amazon Go

BEIJING, December 21, 2018 (Newswire.com) - ​Amazon last year launched its cashierless store Amazon Go. The store immediately received extensive attention in the industry with its “take-and-go” futuristic shopping experience. But the Amazon Go store requires hundreds of cameras and sensors to detect who’s picking up what items, so merchants are daunted by its prohibitively high cost.

Standard Cognition, a new player in this field, recently opened its own cashierless store to challenge Amazon Go, and its store mainly relies on the vision recognition technology. But YI Tunnel, a Chinese AI startup, already used the same technology to open the world’s first cashierless store based on the same vision recognition technology for its client, the Hainan Airlines Group (HNA), in Hainan, China early this year. This was almost one-year ahead of Standard Cognition, and it costs only 5% of Amazon Go.          

This remarkable technology also enabled YI Tunnel to kick off its internationalization journey quickly. Fortune Global 500 companies have begun to collaborate with the company. For example, the company’s system recently has already been deployed for Etisalat in Dubai, for PepsiCo in New York City, and for SK in Seoul. But the cashierless stores of most other service providers are still in the testing stage, and it still takes time for them to empower outside retailers.         

Opening stores overseas would encounter various issues due to regional differences. YI Tunnel obviously has a lot of delivery experience in this regard, said a partner.  

In addition to cashierless stores, YI Tunnel already has an entire lineup of products covering various retail scenarios, including the AI cooler, the AI autonomous checkout machine, the planogram monitoring system, and the big data analytics system for SKU selection and supply chain forecast.  

Compared to other service providers who only have cashierless store applications, YI Tunnel can integrate more data to connect people, goods and stores for better sales prediction and supply chain optimization, to reduce costs and increase efficiency. This enables it to provide better solutions for customers too. 

Today, more and more traditional retailers have begun to pursue digital transformation while using technology to drive the improvement of consumer experience. YI Tunnel’s products have already been deployed in dozens of cities across 7 countries and regions of the world in cooperation with leading global retailers and brands. 

YI Tunnel founder Yili Wu says that, driven by market demand, the commercial deployment of YI Tunnel’s products is still accelerating across the globe. Apart from the United States, Japan, and Middle East where the products have already been deployed this year, the company will expand to other countries in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia next year. 

Source: YI Tunnel

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