Your supermarket and department store know who you are, what you've bought and where you're shopping next. That may sound invasive, but if it allows you to check out faster and get the products you want cheaper, is it a fair trade-off? Ethan Chernofsky, VP of marketing at Placer.ai, one of the Israeli companies vying to change the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, says yes. Big stores like Target and Walmart already had access to this kind of data through less technical means such as reviewing Mastercard sales reports, Chernofsky tells ISRAEL21c. Emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning will have a strong "democratizing influence that levels the playing field."

Until this fall, Chintan Maniar managed nearly 200 employees at a Target store in San Jose, California. Now, after 20 years at the big-box retailer, he manages a much tinier storefront in San Francisco. It's staffed by many more cameras than people, and shoppers can walk in, grab a bag of Doritos or a pump-bottle of Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day hand soap, and just walk out. Standard Store, operated by a San Francisco-based startup called Standard Cognition, is open to the public and meant to showcase the company's autonomous checkout technology. When you enter, you use an app to check in.

Israeli computer vision startup, Trigo Vision, has won $7 million in a seed funding round by UK-Israel based Hetz Ventures and Vertex Ventures Israel. Trigo Vision's vision platform is designed for the retail market. It combines a network of ceiling-based cameras with machine vision algorithms to identify customers' shopping items, similar in principle to the Amazon Go store in Seattle, which doesn't have a checkout because it can track what customers put in their shopping basket. The funding will be used to grow the company's core R&D team and build new applications for its technology. 'The founding team has managed to assemble a world-class R&D team to tackle an enormous user experience problem in retail,' commented Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures.

Trigo Vision, an AI startup founded by former members of the Israeli army's special forces and intelligence community, just came out of stealth mode with a target in its sights: Amazon's Go store. When Amazon opened its cashier-less store in Seattle earlier this year, it was hailed as the future of brick-and-mortar shops. And even if the company follows through on plans to open half a dozen more, the locations will be little more than a novelty. There are more than 150,000 convenience stores and 40,000 grocery markets in the US alone. Amazon may have enough money to build sophisticated storefronts full of expensive hardware from the ground up with no regard for profits – the marketing alone is worth it for the juggernaut worth $900 billion – but most other retail chains don't.