I Tried Shoplifting in a Store without Cashiers and Here's What Happened

Say goodbye to the glitchy self-checkout scanners in your local retail store. Grocery buying is about to get a big boost from artificial intelligence. At a prototype store in Santa Clara, California, you grab a plastic basket, fill it up as you amble down an aisle packed with all kinds of things--Doritos, hand soap, Coke, and so on--then walk to a tablet computer near the door. The tablet shows a list of everything that's in your basket and how much you owe; you pay, and you leave. This store is actually the demonstration space of a startup called Standard Cognition, which is using a network of cameras and machine vision and deep-learning techniques to create an autonomous checkout experience. Standard Cognition cofounder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal says the company hopes to have it in a store--either a partner's or the company's own--in six months, most likely in the Bay Area.