This Startup Is Using AI to Help Keep Store Shelves Stocked

Shoppers are seeing more and more empty shelves, as stores around the world struggle to keep products stocked. The situation is the result of supply-chain issues caused in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. The product-unavailability rate increased from 5 percent to 15 percent during the past three years, according to the Consumer Brands Association.

To make it easier for stores to track inventory, startup Wisy developed an AI platform that uses image recognition to detect which products are out of stock or running low, as well as those that are available but haven't yet been put on display.

We are not only solving a customer-experience problem but also a sustainability problem," says IEEE Senior Member Min Chen, Wisy cofounder and CEO. All those products that are not sold because they were not displayed get thrown away. WisyAI enables store employees to quickly get information about the stock, reduce losses, and sell [products] more effectively."

IEEE Senior Member Min Chen is Wisy's cofounder and CEO Nicolo Sertorio

The startup, headquartered in San Francisco, won this year's CCU (Compania Cervecerias Unidas) Chile's Innpacta Global Open Innovation Challenge. The competition is for startups that have designed technologies for the consumer goods and retail industry. Wisy is piloting its AI platform with CCU. The company also is included in the startup portfolio for ChileGlobal Ventures, a startup accelerator.

Wisy currently has 16 employees, who work in Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, and the United States. Chen is based in Panama City.

Unreliable Cloud Services

Chen, a software engineer, founded her first company, Alcenit, in 2006. The consulting business worked with organizations to help them manage their IT department. One of Alcenit's clients was a supermarket chain that was having problems finding a reliable service to help track when products were running low or out of stock.

Chen discovered that the grocery store wasn't the only client struggling to keep tabs on inventory.

Founded
2016

Headquarters
San Francisco

Founders
Min Chen, Ricardo Chen, Nelida Gomez, Orlando Reyes

Employees
16

We had customers in the oil-and-gas industry, as well as construction companies, dealing with similar problems," she says. She and three of her coworkers decided in 2016 to launch Wisy to develop a solution.

Wisy decided to develop the technology for supermarkets, she says, because the tracking process they used caused problems that were big enough, repetitive enough, and complex enough to solve using AI."

To learn what the issues were, Wisy conducted on-site observations and interviewed employees about their process for tracking products.

Usually consulting companies do this," Chen says, but we felt it was important for us to do it as the platform developers."

They found that grocery-store employees manually tracked products that were in the store, using cloud-based platforms. Employees counted each product and recorded the information on a platform.

Manually counting the products and filling out the information was a slow process, and employees were prone to making errors, Chen's team found. The cloud providers that the grocery stores used often were unreliable, she says, and their systems were frequently down due to technical issues. Slow or unavailable Internet connections posed another problem, Chen says.

We are not only solving a customer-experience problem but also a sustainability problem."

If employees didn't have a good Internet connection, they wouldn't be able to see the results until the connection was reestablished," she says. If their connection was slow, then getting the results was slow."

Adding to the stores' challenges were worker shortages.

It is quite a challenge for our clients because they have a high number of vacancies, so they have to do more work with less people now," Chen says. Training employees on how to use certain platforms also takes time-even more so with high numbers of employee turnover."

Solving Supply-Chain Disruptions

Chen says she knew Wisy's platform had to be available, reliable, fast, and flexible." It also had to work for large companies as well as mom-and-pop shops, and without an Internet connection.

Wisy developed a platform that uses AI to process data regardless of whether there is access to the Internet. The service itself has the power to process data and produce results in milliseconds. WisyAI, which works on a mobile phone or tablet, was developed using Flutter, an open-source software development kit created by Google.

Images of each shelf and product, as well as their bar code, are uploaded to the platform. Employees take a picture of a product on display, and the AI records information based on the photo. It takes less than one second.

WisyAI uses software that companies currently employ to manage their supply-chain operations. It collects historical data about inventory, and it tracks the number of deliveries of individual products. Information collected on the store's previous product tracking platform can be integrated into WisyAI.

If there is a shortage of a certain product in the shop, WisyAI notifies a store associate. Should the platform detect that the product is out of stock or the inventory is running low, it prompts an employee to order more.

It also can track when products were delivered-which is helpful if a customer is searching for a specific shampoo, for example, but it isn't on the shelf. Employees can use WisyAI to find out whether the shampoo is in the store's storage area or is, in fact, out of stock.

The platform uses the data it collects to predict when items will be delivered and when they will go out of stock, based on their popularity.

In April Wisy released a pilot of the platform, which is being tested by 20 supermarkets around the world.

The subscription-based product is expected to cost US $20 per user per month; each item scanned into the system costs an additional $1.