Yeah, but there are a bunch of extra costs here besides the workers in India - the local hardware and network and maintenance of both by employees being paid substantially more than the replaced cashiers were, for instance…
I don’t know if it’s an economically feasible, but at Amazon scale, they may have a network engineer handling 10 stores, and more support/technical staff in India or another country with lower wages. Startup costs would of course be much higher than a conventional store, but if they’re paying minimum wages going forward, they may think it’s lucrative. As AI advances, they’ll start firing people.
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That they’re ending the program suggests not. Also, those 1000 workers were for… 40 stores? So you have 25 workers in India for every store, replacing a couple checkout staff. Given that the stores have to have staff working there for everything else, even if it works, and the hardware and its maintenance doesn’t add much cost, you’re not really saving money.
Yeah, presumably that was the model with this and Waymo - the large number of human hires are there to train the AI until it’s “good enough.” But the AI never actually gets there, because even though it gets better, it was so far from working to begin with… This whole thing always felt like a stunt rather than a serious attempt to reduce costs.
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Countdown til we start seeing articles, “Shopper charged $1200 for a carton of milk and a half-dozen eggs” (and had to spend 11.5 hours on the phone over three sessions to resolve).
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