Ocado is building an automated system for predicting orders and picking and delivering food with as little interaction from humans as possible.
“Ocado is a time travel business. We give back our customers the time that they would have spent traipsing around a supermarketand they can now use that time for doing what really matters for them,” said CTO Paul Clarke at WIRED Retail 2015 in London.
Already, recurring weekly orders mean “the right groceries arrive at the right time as if by magic without having to order”.
But in the future Ocado hopes to cut down human interaction even more, and is heavily investing in AI, machine learning, and robotics, developing a new gripper hand for picking up groceries as well as the SecondHands humanoid robot that learns maintenance skills by watching human staff.
Robots aside, Ocado is feeding its AI the “huge amounts of data” it collects on customers, from warehouses, deliveries and elsewhere to help with forecasting, analytics and to monitor performance.
Add in autonomous delivery vehicles — Clarke pointed to the prototype Starship delivery robot — as well as smart home appliances, smart packaging and more, and all of that working in concert will lead to a “smart grocery pipe”
