Throughout the UK’s food retail sector, organisations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to meet the industry’s toughest challenges.
Supermarkets are embracing AI as a way to gain better visibility into their operations, supply chains, and customers. AI is ostensibly helping them create efficiencies, improve their quality of service and, most importantly, save money. The technology is even providing a glimpse into the changing diets of their customers. AI advocates believe the technology has the potential to transform multiple areas of the UK’s food retail sector—already the country’s biggest industrial sector. It employs 7.7m people with a total estimated Gross Value Added (GVA) of over £240bn.
AI for efficiency, cost-reduction, and customer experience
The first UK retailer to go “all in” on the technology is Sainsbury’s, which announced a five-year partnership with Microsoft last month. The partnership will see the food retailer use AI and machine learning capabilities to accelerate its strategy to become the UK’s “leading AI-enabled grocer.”
Reportedly, Sainsbury’s wants the tie-up to improve its store operations. With AI tools in the hands of its employees and managers, Sainbury’s expects to operate its stores with greater efficiency and provide shoppers with more efficient, higher quality service.
It plans to use generative AI to make its online shopping experience more interactive. Customers could potentially receive recommendations from an AI-powered personal-shopper-style chatbot, or recommendations for ingredients that pair well with ones already in their cart. Whatever it looks like, the goal is to improve customers’ search experience to make shopping more “efficient and engaging.”
Sainsbury’s also wants to “empower” its in-store staff by providing them with real-time data and insights for key processes, including smarter shelf replenishment processes. AI tools will use data from cameras and stock information. It will then guide staff members to the shelves that need replenishing. This process will allegedly save valuable time and ensure sales opportunities aren’t missed due to missing stock. On the back end, Sainsbury’s plans to also integrate existing data with Microsoft 365 collaboration tools, generative AI and machine learning capabilities.
While added capabilities and customer experience is likely a part of Sainsbury’s two-footed leap into AI, the primary driver is most probably the company’s need to cut costs. Sainsbury’s is undergoing an ambitious cost-cutting initiative, which will see as much as £1 billion slashed from its expenditures over the next three years. For organisations looking to reduce labour costs, AI is quickly emerging as the number one justification for layoffs.
A-Eyes everywhere
Another retailer, Morrisons, has partnered with Focal Systems, a Seattle-based AI company, to use cameras for monitoring shelf availability in its supermarkets.
Focal Systems’ technology, trained on over two billion labelled images from more than 200,000 cameras can stock movement and spoiled produce hourly. It feeds this data to applications that identify restocking needs. If an item is out of stock but available in the backroom, the system lists it for restocking; if not, it orders more products.
More controversially, the cameras are also being paired with facial recognition technology to increase security surrounding alcohol isles. Focal Systems stresses in their literature that no identifiable customer or employee data is retained.
AI that lets you read the future
UK supermarket Waitrose and US AI firm Blue Yonder recently announced that they would extend their collaboration with Waitrose’s implementation of Blue Yonder’s AI-enabled forecasting solutions. The new move marks the first significant introduction of AI into Waitrose’s forecasting. The company hopes it can use the technology to improve stock availability across its stores.
Rather than relying on historical sales data and human intuition, the AI forecasting capability – part of Blue Yonder Demand Planning – reportedly focuses on customer behaviour, analysing “‘why’ customers bought what they did rather than just ‘what’ they bought.”
“Whether we are planning for a major sporting final or the first cold snap of the winter, there can be multiple factors affecting what our customers buy,” said Alison Maffin, Waitrose Supply Chain Director. She added that the ability for the Blue Yonder solution to learn from previous experience and help Waitrose predict demand shifts more accurately will help Waitrose be “confident we have the stock our customers want.” She notes that the AI-enabled forecasting will also allow Waitrose to “produce a much more accurate forecast” for the company’s suppliers and logistics partners, as well as resulting in less wastage.
Bug salad?
The Co-op is leveraging AI for a more forward-looking purpose. The company recently released a report detailing their predictions for the ways food could change in the UK over the coming decades. Their data predicts that meals eaten in the UK in the next 30 years could include cricket salads, lab-grown steaks and azolla burgers.
The report used generative AI imagery that paints a not-wholly unappetising picture of bug salads and futuristic meat cubes.
Partnering with experts from FixOurFood and the University of York, the Co-Op’s report predicted that the nation’s food tastes could change radically by 2054. British classics, including the traditional Sunday roast, could allegedly look radically different. Or, they say, replaced entirely by more “adventurous options.”
- AI in Supply Chain
- Sourcing & Procurement
