Tesco AI Wearable R&D In-Store Trials

The use of wearable AI based tools was becoming more prevalent in the mid 2010's. Tesco wanted to be a front runner in testing this type of technology, as it saw the potential positive impacts for shop floor operations.

As part of Tesco's Technology R&D team I ran multiple AI tool trials within stores to understand whether they could supercharge productivity whilst not impacting the customer service colleagues could deliver.

View Theatro Website

Determining a Baseline

To ensure all of the trials I ran could be adequately assessed I spent over a month in store undertaking ethnographic studies. This included getting a full understanding of how shop floor operations currently ran, and also to run time studies on some of the key processes.

One of the tools I wanted to trial was an AI wearable called Theatro. This credit card size device was already being used in Walgreens in the USA, and Tesco was to be the first UK based retailer to trial it. Theatro's selling point was the ability to quickly connect shop floor employees through an ear piece, and over time to be able to answer customer queries based on a multitude of hosted data sets.

Understanding how much time certain shop floor employees spent finding other colleagues to answer customer queries throughout the day was therefore key. We determined that on average each shop floor employee wasted 20 minutes finding colleagues per shift. If we were able to reduce that drastically the productivity gains across the store would be huge.

Running Trials Effectively

As well as Theatro I also ran trials using high performance walkie talkie systems and AI based task management software. All trials were run rigorously and with care. After a certain trial period I would undertake a period of trial assessment.