Retail giants have increasingly leveraged in-store technology that allows customers to buy products without waiting in line for the cashier. By marrying advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, cameras and sensors, and deep learning algorithms, these locations permit visitors to shop by simply picking up goods or placing products in their carts, nixing the need for a cash register altogether. The trend appears to be catching on across the retail industry . Kroger and Albertsons have partnered with smart cart startup Veeve for a pilot that has rolled out in select stores. Amazon Go stores began opening to the public in 2018.

The success and fast expansion of Amazon Go has led other retailers and venues to seek startup help ... [ ] for their own cashierless checkout-free stores. On Amazon's jobs site, a keyword search query for Amazon Go yielded 3,500 results, seeking to fill positions manning the cashierless stores and looking for a head of marketing for the concept and a wide variety of engineers and program managers. Meanwhile, six months after the first Amazon Go opened in New York in May, six stores are in operation in the city, including four located less than a mile from one another in Midtown Manhattan. Two more are scheduled to open soon in the city. Those job postings and the fact that Amazon Go is cropping up in busy commercial sections of New York are just the latest signal of the Seattle giant's ambition to further expand its Just Walk Out Shopping concept, which features in-house-built computer vision, sensor fusion and deep machine learning technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars.

Cashierless checkout technologies today are delivered in two iterations. The first takes the form of a typical mobile self-checkout -- a shopper scans products with a mobile device as they browse the aisles, then pays for the transaction via a mobile app without having to fumble through their wallet for cash. Consumers are warming up to the concept, with 48% of U.S. consumers expressing the belief that scan-and-go technology would make shopping easier, and 43% saying they would rather try scan-and-go than wait in a checkout line, according to data from GPShopper. The more recent iteration of cashierless has been heavily publicized with the openings of the first 10 Amazon Go stores. Most of the major players within this space have combined AI- and computer vision-based technology with in-store sensors.

Cyber retail giant Amazon is planning to add a checking-account-like product to their platform. Practically all of its profits come from its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Beyond that, Amazon has a growing advertising business, offers a variety of services to third-party merchants, and runs one of the biggest streaming video services in the world. Amazon is still concentrated on various retail efforts as well. It recently opened its Amazon Go store to the public in Seattle, and it reportedly plans to open up to six more across the country this year.