90% of the goods lost! A staff member of the unmanned shelf said while withdrawing the point. "The early stage is okay, everyone is not familiar with it, but until now, we rarely pay, we can see it in the background." From the vent to the ruins, the unmanned shelves fell from the altar and took only a few months.

Two illusions on the tuyere

If there are two outlets for business now: new retail and artificial intelligence. In these two outlets, people may have the same two illusions, one is overestimating human nature, and the other is overestimating artificial intelligence.

The overestimation of human nature is well known on unmanned shelves. The expectation of artificial intelligence makes people full of cinematic romantic imagination.

There is a big new and old split in the retail industry today. Inefficiency and high cost are indeed important issues that people call old retailers; but people's imagination of new retail and artificial intelligence seems to be overstated, regardless of the current retail issues, and looks forward to using advanced scenes. Layout, cool technical imagination to create a beautiful new world, two relative, but it is actually some, one side of the sea is the feeling of flame.

Some people say that retail is entering a new phase of intelligent drive driven across supply chain drive and social change, leading to the commercial application of artificial intelligence.

If face recognition and voice robots do have the potential to break through and apply, artificial intelligence is still at a lower stage, weak artificial intelligence is not mentioned, and scenes are not too full. In a wide range of commercial applications, In fact, there is not a mature application environment to support. At this time, some people even claimed that the retail unmanned vehicle had been commercialized, and some were irresponsible.

Service stability: the scene of the innovative sword of Damocles

Ensuring the stability of services is not only the core of scenario innovation, but also an important factor to consider in technology applications.

Retail is actually a traditional and bitter industry, because retail is directly facing the end consumers, facing specific people, but people's behavior is often the least stable. This kind of instability is not only manifested in human nature. In many commercial applications of smart devices, once the purchasing habits and operating habits do not meet the design expectations, the user experience will be greatly affected.

According to an unmanned shelf staff, although they removed the unmanned shelves, they will also add new unmanned containers. Scanning code can open the container. If the payment operation is not carried out, the next purchaser cannot open the container, and the information will be fed back to the shelf dealer, and the staff will also go to the door. When the author asks if someone will operate maliciously, the other party's answer is that under the same roof, there should be very few people doing this. If there is, it can only be solved by technology.

Although the obvious loss of goods may be effectively avoided, how to prevent malicious behavior and how to make the experience instability do not affect the shopping experience has become an urgent problem for new retail and artificial intelligence enterprises.

Over the past decade, labor costs across the service sector have risen five to eight times, and offline retailing has been constrained by rents and rising labor. The days on the line are not so good. It is said that the average customer cost of an e-commerce has reached as much as 140. Thus, whether it is the traditional retail that has been circulated for thousands of years, or the Internet stars of the past, everyone has fallen into the same cost quagmire.

New retail is first of all service, then it is transformation

New retail is first and foremost a service, and then it is a transformation, not a simple reinvention.

If the empowerment of the new retail enterprise is to make the empowered party miserable, then the company is afraid that it will at least be subject to conscientious blame.

At this stage, to serve the retail industry and do a good job in new retail, we cannot talk about the future from the cost. At this level, ensuring the stability of the service is also responsible for the empowered party.

The author learned from the new retail company Gan Lai, that its machine has been landing for two years, through the disclosure of the service data of a B-end customer, Gan Lai helped customers increase sales by 30% after the scene construction and service. The management cost has dropped by 15%, while the average replenishment time of a single vending machine has dropped by 20 minutes.

To some extent, in the face of artificial intelligence, the company's two steps in landing, taking a step back and restraining the application, may be the most responsible and even most effective approach.

The seedlings will help to eventually make the grain of the field unrecognizable. Lack of mature soil, new retail can not be done overnight.

Just like in 1946, the computer was born, but from a large host, it became 14 inches or even 10 inches. During the period, if there is no Internet popularization, no speeding up, etc., it will not form today. Look like.

In other words, the new retail enterprises are also the same. On the way of reducing costs and improving efficiency, if there is no stable service, no mature market experience, and no long-term commercial landing, then this business model is yet to be tested.