A supermarket chain has become Britain's first to return to fully-staffed checkouts after axing most of its self-service tills after its boss said: 'We like to talk to people.' Booths - which has 27 stores in the North across Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Cheshire - has been finding the machines to be'slow, unreliable and impersonal' and decided that'rather than artificial intelligence, we're going for actual intelligence'. Staff at the upmarket firm, dubbed the'northern Waitrose', added that they wanted to ensure customers were served by people with'high levels of warm, personal care'. The move by Booths, which was founded in 1847, has provoked much debate on the benefits of self-checkouts as retailers continue to battle a shoplifting epidemic. The British Independent Retailers Association said there could be a'reality check with the current level of retail theft and self-service tills becoming an expensive risk'. All but two Booths stores will put staff back on the tills - with the exceptions being in the Lake District at Keswick and Windermere which can become very busy at times. Booths managing director Nigel Murray said staff at the northern chain'like to talk to people' Booths managing director Nigel Murray told BBC Radio Lancashire today: 'Our customers have told us this over time, that the self-scan machines that we've got in our stores they can be slow, they can be unreliable, they're obviously impersonal.

Under fake pink cherry blossom, guests sipped House of Suntory cocktails and picked at plates of chicken karaage, prawn gyoza and cauliflower tempura from a kaitenzushi-style conveyor belt … This was the London launch of Waitrose's new Japanese range. But without knowing it, and even if you live hundreds of miles away, your food choices may have had a hand in shaping the supermarket's 26-dish Japan Menyū range. That is because it was developed with input from Tastewise, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that analyses menus, social media and online recipes to pinpoint food trends. While many businesses and individuals are concerned that AI is going to eat their lunch rather than set the menu, the technology is becoming more prevalent in the food industry, with its use doubling since 2017, according to McKinsey's 2022 Global Survey on AI. This is probably because it offers under-pressure retailers and food manufacturers an understanding of what fickle shoppers will want to buy in the future. It takes a year to perfect a new food project, but even so most of them miss the mark, and in recent times, companies have instead been forced to play catch-up with trends that have exploded on social media.

Ocado's warehouse in Erith, 15 miles east of London on the Thames estuary, is staffed by 1,050 "personal shoppers". Outnumbering them are 1,800 robots the size of small washing machines. You see them by climbing to the top level of the vast warehouse – at 564,000 sq ft, it is more than three times the size of St Peter's in Rome – where a sign tells you that photography is strictly prohibited. The online supermarket is paranoid that rivals will glimpse the technology it believes to be revolutionary. From the viewing platform you can watch these metal cubes endlessly whiz around, moving thousands of plastic crates as if they were playing an enormous game of chess. You occasionally sight bottles of bleach or rosé, packets of noodles and dog biscuits, before they are sent down to a lower level. "I find it quite mesmerising, like robotic ballet," says Mel Smith, CEO of Ocado Retail, the UK arm of the business. "The day I decided I wanted this job was when I went to [the warehouse] and thought, this is absolutely the future."