Amazon pulled Just Walk Out technology from its grocery stores earlier this week. The company claims over 130 convenience stores, and some Amazon Go locations, will keep using the technology, but it’s killed off much of the internal development. “Nearly all” of the engineers building Just Walk Out were laid off on Wednesday, a senior team member who was let go tells Gizmodo, leaving a skeleton crew to sustain the technology’s future.
A handful of engineers and managers are left to maintain Just Walk Out, the former employee says. Amazon’s checkout-less shopping tech, first introduced in 2016, uses cameras and sensors to track which items customers are buying. The e-commerce giant laid off several hundred employees from its AWS unit and Physical Stores Team on Wednesday, first reported by Geekwire. Our source says dozens of Just Walk Out team members were impacted. The layoffs could spell an uncertain future for hundreds of Amazon Go convenience stores, sports stadiums, and third-party retailers that rely on the technology.
“Gizmodo’s story is wrong,” said an Amazon spokesperson in an updated statement. “We continue to invest heavily in our Just Walk Out team and technology, and have hundreds of employees working to keep up with the rapid demand.” Amazon disputes that this engineering team is now a skeleton crew, but did not clarify how many Just Walk Out engineers were laid off.
Amazon had been planning internally to pull Just Walk Out from Fresh grocery stores for roughly a year, according to the former Amazon employee. The technology was too expensive and too complicated to run for large retail locations but seemed good enough for small convenience stores. These smaller shops are less complicated as they involve fewer products and fewer customers, so they’re easier to automate.
However, the Just Walk Out team was blindsided when their unit was effectively dissolved. Amazon says they’ll open more Just Walk Out stores in 2024 than any year prior, but the team responsible for developing the technology is largely gone.
Amazon employees who were laid off Wednesday took to LinkedIn after the news. Gizmodo counted at least 15 Just Walk Out employees who are now “open to work.” One of the posts claims that half of their Just Walk Out team was laid off. A few of the team’s managers appeared to still be on staff.
Just Walk Out repeatedly failed at several internal metrics. Most glaring, it never became truly autonomous. The checkout technology relied heavily on a team of human reviewers to label and verify purchases that its computers can’t, the former Amazon employee says. An India-based team labeled videos for AI training, a common practice in machine learning, but also verified videos of purchases flagged as “low-confidence events.” Amazon confirmed this as well but disputes how many videos needed to be verified.
At the launch of Just Walk Out, almost all the purchases required human review. By mid-2022, The Information reported that 70% of purchases required review. Today, somewhere between 20% and 50% of purchases require human review, the former senior team member tells Gizmodo, though that’s still far higher than Amazon’s internal goals.
But there were other problems. Just Walk Out developed sensors that were more reliable than cameras for tracking purchases, however, they were way too expensive. Amazon had goals to bring the price of one sensor down to $100, but the engineering team could only bring it down to $350.
While Just Walk Out was slowly getting better, Amazon seems to have given up on many of its engineers, while continuing to run the feature at convenience stores around the country. Amazon disputes this and says the company is still committed to Just Walk Out.
“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo.
A Reckoning for Automated Retail
Amazon pioneered the automated retail space when it launched Just Walk Out in 2016. It was the biggest player then, and it still is today. Back then, this technology in grocery stores seemed too good to be true, and it still appears to be the case. Amazon now appears to be scaling back its aspirations.
“Fully unstaffed grocery is probably not the right path,” said Steve Liguori, who co-founded another automated retail company, Juxta. “At least, not with the technology that’s out there today. That’s not the application for this tech.”
Juxta focuses on small convenience stores, like most automated retailers in this tiny, but growing industry. The company claims to have a high degree of accuracy, but that’s partially because they ask customers to review their own receipts on a screen before they leave. It’s a more practical approach to automated retail, where the AI still has a low degree of confidence in many purchases.
“When you’re shopping in a small convenience store, the maximum amount of products you’re picking up is around five or six,” said Ankur Sharma, CEO of another automated retail company, Brysk. “In a supermarket, you could pick up over 100 items,” continued Sharma, noting that this amount of data can overwhelm early machine-learning tools.
So Amazon’s venture into large supermarkets with an automated retail system was always seen as bold. Most competitors play in small convenience stores, but even there, the tech does not always have a high degree of confidence. However, Amazon is big enough that it can afford to take those kinds of risks. Internally, Just Walk Out was seen as a startup that could reap huge rewards if successful.
While the company doesn’t see this as a failure, it’s hard to see the dissolution of its internal engineering team as anything else. Ultimately, Amazon’s automated retail systems never fully removed humans from the loop, albeit, many more popular AI systems today don’t either. Though Just Walk Out may live on in some form, it appears Amazon is giving up on the team that was making it better.
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