Amazon withdraws Just Walk Out technology Purchased from the grocery store earlier this week. Amazon says 130 convenience stores and some Amazon Go locations will continue to use the technology, but a source close to the team told Gizmodo that Amazon has scrapped much of its internal development. “Nearly all” of the engineers working on building Just Walk Out were let go on Wednesday, senior team members said, leaving what they said is a skeleton crew to sustain the technology’s future. Amazon dismissed the characterization as a “fabrication.”
The former employee claimed that a handful of engineers and managers remained to maintain Just Walk Out. Amazon’s checkout-less shopping technology, first launched in 2016, uses cameras and sensors to track what customers are buying.The e-commerce giant reportedly laid off hundreds of employees across its AWS division and brick-and-mortar store teams on Wednesday geek line. Our sources say dozens of members of the Just Walk Out team were affected. The layoffs could lead to an uncertain future for hundreds of Amazon Go convenience stores, sports venues and third-party retailers that rely on the technology.
“Gizmodo’s story is false,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We continue to invest heavily in the Just Walk Out team and technology and have hundreds of employees to meet rapid demand.” Amazon disputed that the engineering team is now a skeleton staff, but did not clarify how many Just Walk Out engineers were laid off.
Amazon has been internally planning to pull Just Walk Out out of grocery stores for about a year, according to former Amazon employees. They say the technology is too expensive and complex to work in large retail stores, but appears to be good enough for smaller convenience stores. These smaller stores are less complex because they involve fewer products and customers, making them easier to automate.
However, according to our sources, the Just Walk Out team was caught off guard when they suffered layoffs. Amazon says it will open more Just Walk Out stores by 2024 than in any previous year, but fired team members say the team responsible for developing the technology has essentially disappeared.
Amazon employees who were fired on Wednesday took to LinkedIn after the news broke. According to Gizmodo, at least 15 Just Walk Out employees are now “willing to work.” One of the posts claimed that half their “Just Walk Out” team had been laid off. Some of the team’s managers appear to still be employed, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
The former senior team member claims Just Walk Out repeatedly failed on multiple internal metrics. Most strikingly, it never achieved true autonomy. Our sources say the checkout technology relies heavily on a team of human reviewers to flag and verify purchases, something computers can’t do. A team based in India flagged videos for AI training, a common practice in machine learning, but also verified purchase videos flagged as “low-confidence events.” Amazon confirmed this but questioned the proportion of videos that require verification.
According to our sources, when Just Walk Out launched, almost all purchases required human review.By mid-2022, information report, 70% of purchases require review. The former senior team member told Gizmodo that today, 20% to 50% of purchases require manual review; Amazon’s internal goal is to get that number closer to 5%, The Information reported.
But there are other problems. Just Walk Out has developed more reliable sensors than cameras to track purchases, but according to our sources, they’re too expensive. The former employee said Amazon aimed to get the price of a sensor down to $100, but the engineering team could only get it down to $350.
“We have identified a number of target areas in our organization that need to be streamlined in order to continue to focus our efforts on key strategic areas where we believe we will have the greatest impact,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo this week.
Automated retail liquidation
Amazon pioneered automated retail when it launched Just Walk Out in 2016. It was the biggest player then, and it still is now. At the time, the technology in the grocery store seemed too good to be true, and that still appears to be the case. Amazon now appears to be scaling back its ambitions.
“Completely unmanned grocery stores may not be the way to go,” said Steve Liguori, co-founder of Juxta, another automated retail company. “At least, not with current technology. This is not an application of this technology.”
Juxta focuses on small convenience stores, like most automated retailers in this small but growing industry. The company claims it’s highly accurate, but that’s partly because they require customers to view their receipts on a screen before leaving. This is a more practical approach to automated retail, and AI still has less confidence in many purchases.
“When you shop in a small convenience store, you can only pick out five or six products at most,” said Ankur Sharma, CEO of Brysk, another automated retail company. “In a supermarket, you can buy over 100 items,” Sharma continued, noting that such large amounts of data could overwhelm early machine learning tools.
Sharma and Liguori said Amazon’s move into large supermarkets with automated retail systems had been considered bold. Most competitors operate in small convenience stores, but even there there isn’t always a high degree of confidence in the technology. However, Amazon is big enough to take on such risks. Internally, Just Walk Out is viewed as a startup that could reap huge rewards if it succeeds, according to our sources.
Ultimately, Amazon’s automated retail system never completely removed humans from the loop, despite many of the more popular AI systems today Neither. While the company doesn’t consider it a failure, it’s hard to view the purported disbandment of its internal engineering team as anything else.