AI Is Coming to a Grocery Store Near You

Walmart's Intelligent Research Lab, or IRL, is both a technology testbed and a fully functioning store covering 50,000 square feet. The store is filled with sensors and cameras and can automatically alert store associates when a product is out of stock, shopping carts need collecting or more registers are necessary to quell long lines. There's enough cable in IRL to scale Mt. Everest five times, and the store has enough computing power to download 27,000 hours of music per second.