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I'm thinking, isn't the robot somewhat unnecessary? Can't it be done by software instead? Maybe connecting into the inventory management system / POS if the grocery store and do the AI processing in it.

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I thought that, but the inventory management gets out of sync when stock is removed without going through the POS (stealing)

Even for a warehouse (restricted access), there is a need for stock counting as mistakes can be made

Eventually, an AI that accounted for shrink would be more accurate than any number of cycle counts. Actually, it would not take long, most major retailers have shrink predictions down to two or three decimals, you would just need to train the AI to account for shrink. The most important role of inventory is knowing how much to re-order, which can be done by the AI more easily than any human analysts once you have enough training data. Source: worked in retail management, then inventory software.

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