The retail sector is one of the biggest sectors in the EU economy, with almost 1 in 10 people working in over 3.6 million retail companies (
https://ec.europa.eu/growth/content/strengthening-competitiveness-european-retail-sector_en(opens in new window)). Brick and mortar retail (Physical stores) still account for 89% of total sales volume in retail, but an increasing number of physical stores are closing due to the high operational costs and poor in-store experience when compared to e-commerce. Many retailers are struggling to keep their stores relevant in a constantly evolving market as today’s shoppers demand nothing less than an experience in the physical store that needs be as flexible and convenient as it is in digital channels.
Moreover, while Brick and mortar stores have lost 22% of their market value over 10 years, and digital giants such as Amazon has increased its market value by nearly 2,000% and is moving from e-commerce to invest in brick and mortar stores.
This market movements, mean that we are at the verge of a dramatic shift in the retail industry, one that calls for a fundamental rethinking of labour allocation, technology investments and new approaches to customer experience in stores.
The main goal of SENSEI is to empower the stores of the future to be PHYGITAL, id est to be able to merge the emotions of the physical store shopping experience and the efficiency of the digital e-commerce operators. Through an integrated system of cameras, sensors, and AI algorithms that capture shoppers’ in-store activities, analyses them in real-time Sensei offers a seamless shopping experience and the possibility to automate many of the store operations.
A striking aspect of SENSEI technology is that it enables the collection of business intelligence data about customers who visit physical stores, as retailers already collect about customers who are shopping online. For example, when a consumer shops on a website, the retailer can see which products they click on, which products they buy, what they remove from their shopping cart, how long they dwell on a product image, and many other behaviours. In physical stores, it is much harder to obtain such metrics.
For that, SENSEI technology uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to analyse anonymized images and video, making human-like judgments from them, enabling retailers to know what customers look for in a store, what they pick up and keep, what they put down, where they walk in the store, where they spend time standing and what catches their attention.
SENSEI provides retailers with a whole new concept of operating stores more efficiently that boosts the overall shopping experience for customers while eliminating the friction points in-store. This ambition is tightly aligned with the digital transformation undergoing in retail sector, which has been urging and preparing retail managers to understand the relevance and added-value of changing the paradigm of in-store shopping experience.
Sensei Project conclusions of the action and overall objective is for the SENSEI technology to be integrated into any chained retail store around Europe and globally. Just as stores have cameras anyway, we are aiming for stores to also have the SENSEI technology.
The overall conclusion of the action in Phase 1 is to further develop the project and apply for SMEi Phase 2, to make SENSEI the enabler of the concept of the 100% smart store. This means to a) scale up SENSEI for larger market adoption by adding further API’s with the largest ERP’s, supporting further sensor inputs and producing additional KPI’s and statistical models, b) to massively pilot SENSEI with potential clients, and c) to engage in communication and commercialization activities to guarantee the needed maturity for market readiness to launch SENSEI smart store enabler after the end of the project.
