New AI Platform Inventory Store Shelf Stocks Faster and Accurately

Wisy, a startup company, created an artificial intelligence platform that utilizes image recognition to detect what product is out of stock or running low in stock, including those that are available but have not been displayed.

As specified in an IEEE Spectrum report, Min Chen, Wisy co-founder and CEO, and IEEE Senior member, said they are not just solving a customer experience problem but a sustainability problem.

He added all of these products that are not sold since they were not displayed get discarded. The technology called WisyAI allows store employees to quickly gather information about the stock, reduce losses and more effectively sell products.

Chen, a software engineer, formed Alcenit, her first company, in 2006. The consulting firm worked with organizations to help them handle their IT department.

AI Solution

One of the clients of Alcenit was a supermarket chain that was experiencing problems, discovering a reliable service to help track products if they were running low or out of stock.

Chen found that the grocery store was not the lone client that struggled to keep tabs on inventory. She said they had customers in the oil-and-gas industry and construction firms that deal with similar problems.

In 2016, she and three of her co-workers decided to launch Wisy to develop a solution. Wisy decided to develop the technology for supermarkets, explained Chen, since the tracking process they used caused problems that were "big enough, repeated rough, and complicated enough to solve AI."

Wisy conducted on-site observations and interviewed employees about their process for tracking products to find out the problems.

A Solution to Supply-Chain Disruptions

Also, according to Chen, she knew the AI platform of Wisy needed to be available, dependable, fast, and flexible. It also requires working for big companies and mom-and-pop shops and does not need an Internet connection.

The startup created a platform that uses AI to process data regardless of if there is Internet access. The service itself has the power to process data and generate results in milliseconds.

Furthermore, WisyAI, which works on a mobile phone or tablet, was developed using an open-source software development kit called Flutter developed by Google.

How WisyAI Works

WisyAI is using software companies are currently employing to manage their supply-chain operations.

It collects historical inventory data and tracks the number of individual product deliveries. Information gathered on the previous product tracking platform of the store, can be incorporated into WisyAI.

If a particular product is scarce in the shop, WisyAi notifies a store associate. If the platform finds the product is out of stock or running low, it prompts an employee to order more.

Moreover, the platform uses the data it's collecting to forecast when items will be delivered and when they will run out of stock according to their popularity.

In April, the company released a pilot of the AI platform, which is being tested by 20 supermarkets worldwide.

Related information about artificial intelligence in inventory is shown on Cogito Tech LLC's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Artificial Intelligence in Science Times.