Enabling Future Retail With Technology YI Tunnel Leads the Fourth Wave of AI
BEIJING, May 3, 2018 (Newswire.com) - The 2018 Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC2018) as one of the largest and most influential mobile Internet conferences in the world as well as a wind vane for innovation took place in Beijing during April 26-28, 2018. The theme of this year’s event is "AI Genesis". Designed to take artificial intelligence (AI) to a new level, GMIC2018 served as the starting point for a new AI era.
Yili Wu, founder and CEO of China’s extremely business-savvy AI firm YI Tunnel, was invited to attend the Mobile Age Retail Summit of GMIC 2018 and participate in the roundtable session called “The Technical Force of the Scene Age” as a speaker. He talked with other speakers about the application of AI in retail.
The high-speed development of the mobile Internet has accelerated the upgrade and transformation of consumption patterns, and the explosive growth of AI has also triggered people to think about its application in retail. Kai-Fu Lee said that "we’ve seen the penetration of deep learning and related technologies in various areas over the past five years, and especially, computer vision has achieved an even wider application."
Wu said that both top international IoT experts and retail experts believe image recognition will have a tremendous future and will also generate tremendous changes to the future of retail. What YI Tunnel wants to do is to make retail convenient, automatic and intelligent, and AI will definitely play a major role in this, according to him.
Publicly available information shows that YI Tunnel already has AI solutions for three retail scenarios, including the smart vending machine, the self-checkout robot, and the unattended store Super YI. YI Tunnel is upgrading traditional retail to make it smart by using deep learning, computer vision and other AI technologies based on the Convolutional Neural Network algorithm and a dynamic pure-vision solution. This can dynamically recognize the actions to take items and put them back. The accuracy rate of merchandise recognition is over 99 percent. The machine doesn’t need the RFID tags or weight sensors to recognize standard and non-standard items, and one can take multiple items in one hand or in both hands, so it’s really a “take and go” experience. Meanwhile, the company also provides powerful operation management and maintenance platforms as well as other valuable resources such as the massive transaction data for business customers.
The recognition entirely relies on several cameras, Wu added. It looks simple, but actually, a powerful algorithm team is needed to support all this behind the scene.
Although YI Tunnel has solved several major pains of traditional retail based on its dynamic vision technology, has partnered with multiple leading retail customers, and has even accumulated marking information for over 10000 SKUs of merchandise, throughout the retail industry, people still don’t have a clear or accurate understanding of technology in general and AI in particular, of the power of technology, or of the potential of AI.
The innovation of AI in retail should focus on three things—cost, efficiency, and experience. YI Tunnel is the only company in this market to really put this philosophy into practice and really use AI to build commercially viable products.
Even today, many players in this space are still combining RFID tags, weight sensors and static recognition technologies to retrofit vending machines or even unattended stores. Maybe they are still quite uncertain about the power of technology, about the boundary of AI enablement, and about what issues it can solve.
According to Wu, many vending machine operators in China would define a half bottle of water put back by consumers as a damaged item, as they believe that it’s impossible to regulate people’s conduct with technology. But for YI Tunnel, this is not a problem. YI Tunnel analyzes people’s conduct through cameras. When someone opens a bottle of water or puts an empty bottle back, this can be very clearly defined through operations research at the data intelligence level, and it’s completely possible to avoid such a behavior through an analytical algorithm via AI and form a closed-loop of data.
Lee once said from the application point of view that AI application can be summarized into four waves: the first wave is the Internet AI, the second wave is the commercial AI, the third wave is the new data application, and the fourth wave is the autonomous and automatic AI. And the fourth wave will fundamentally disrupt our habits.
Today AI companies represented by YI Tunnel are using image recognition and other technologies in commercial and business activities, to lead the fourth wave of AI, to monetize data, to create the real commercial value, and to provide a smooth shopping experience for consumers and smart machines that can reduce customer’s OPEX to the maximum extent possible. Eventually, the company’s smart retail solutions based on dynamic vision technologies will drive changes across the traditional retail industry.
Source: YI Tunnel
