A trip to Walmart is now even more likely to include a robot sighting.
The massive retailer announced Monday it is expanding its partnership with San Francisco-based Bossa Nova Robotics, a technology company with offices in the Strip District that makes robots to work in retail stores.
The bots — which move autonomously around the store, scanning products and alerting employees of anything from low inventory to mispriced items — will be in 1,000 Walmart stores by the end of the year.
“The ultimate end goal is to map the retail world,” said co-founder and chief technology officer Sarjoun Skaff. “We want to tell retailers what’s happening within the four walls of their store … And they would use that information to meet the demand of today’s shoppers, who expect to buy any product at any time, any way they want.”
As the company deploys more robots, it will get more information about how retail stores operate, Mr. Skaff said, ultimately improving how the technology works in every store.
“We have a learning system, and the more we see, the better it gets,” he said.
There will be one robot per Walmart store in the program, Mr. Skaff said.
Bossa Nova, founded as a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2005, has five offices in the United States as well as one in the United Kingdom and employs more than 100 people in Pittsburgh.
The tech company started partnering with Walmart in 2014, before the market for retail robots existed, Mr. Skaff said.
In 2017, Walmart placed 50 Bossa Nova bots in 50 stores. In April 2019, it added 300 locations. Now, it is adding robots to 650 locations to reach the 1,000 milestone.
Bossa Nova’s robots still aren’t a guaranteed sight in Walmart stores though — the retailer has more than 11,000 stores in 27 countries.
In addition to the shelf-scanning robot Bossa Nova provides, Walmart also has invested in several other futuristic employees — autonomous floor-cleaning robots, automated unloaded systems and Pickup Towers for customers to get online purchases in store, according to a July 2019 article from the National Retail Federation, a trade association based in Washington, D.C.
Bossa Nova and Walmart’s latest announcement comes at a time when people are wary of robots, artificial intelligence and other technology advancements disrupting the workforce.
Those fears are often heightened for the retail industry, where automation could have a higher impact than other fields according to a study from the McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economic research arm of McKinsey & Co.
Half of the activities in retail can be automated using current, at-scale technology, according to the May 2019 report. But only 5% of all jobs can be fully automated, leaving the possibility that worker’s responsibilities will shift, rather than be totally taken over.
Robot unit orders were up 5.2% in the third quarter of 2019 for North American companies compared to 2018, according to data from the Robotic Industries Association, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Mich. That quarter, companies ordered 7,446 robots, valued at $438 million.
Tech companies like Bossa Nova are adamant that robots will not replace human workers, but rather take over the parts of work that no human wants to do, like walking the aisles of a retail store to see what products need to be restocked.
In an earlier interview about the future of work, Mr. Skaff said the robot acts as a “productivity tool” that has “infinite patience.”
The expansion to more retail locations also meant an expansion of Bossa Nova’s partnership with Atlanta-based NCR Corp., Mr. Skaff said. NCR, a retail technology provider, handles deployment and maintenance of the robots.
In November, Bossa Nova unveiled a new version of its robot — the Bossa Nova 2020 — that has a slimmer design to make it easier to navigate the narrow aisles of a smaller store and look deeper into shelves. Mr. Skaff could not disclose when the new design will be available or if Walmart’s new bots would be the newest model.
Lauren Rosenblatt: lrosenblatt@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.
First Published: January 13, 2020, 6:11 p.m.
