Many of the biggest technology headlines in 2022 were about artificial intelligence (AI). Commercial and enterprise applications of generative AI such as ChatGPT are already making a big splash in 2023, but what about the retail industry? Here, the impact of AI is likely to widen and deepen this year. AI in particular may have an outsized impact on physical stores. It can be easy to forget that, amidst all the talk about e-commerce, most people still do the vast majority of their shopping in bricks and mortar stores.

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.

According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research, waiting in the checkout line is the top complaint among U.S. grocery, mass-merchandise, and convenience store shoppers. Mega-retailer Amazon and a quartet of well-funded retail technology startups -- Zippin, Standard Cognition, Grabango and Trigo -- believe they have the solution to the problem: Checkout-free stores powered by various technologies that enable shoppers to walk into the store, grab what they want off the shelves and just walk out. Autonomous checkout, another term for checkout-free, is becoming one of the hottest areas of retail investment today. It comes as the convenience expectations of today's Amazon-shopping, Grubhub-ordering, Uber-hailing consumers are ever-increasing, and informing their in-real-life (IRL) shopping demands. Brands are responding in kind, delivering digital services aimed at automating mundane tasks -- in this case, the checkout process -- so much so that the result is meant to feel "automagical," according to trend forecasting firm TrendWatching. Checkout-free retail has the potential to make shopping even more convenient, retail technology consultant Richard Crone said at this summer's National Retail Federation's NRF Tech 2019 conference in San Francisco.