The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog
- Store Companion is the name of Target’s in-store chatbot assistant.
- This chatbot will assist employees and customers alike. It appears as an app on the employees’ hand-held devices.
- The rollout begins with about 400 stores, which is expected to grow to 2,000 by August of this year (i.e., 2024).
- Beyond the classic what-aisle queries, examples of tasks it can help with include fixing broken equipment.
- One of the more ambitious goals here is to make the in-store shopping experience feel like the more immediate and personalized online shopping sprees.
Welcome to Target, How May A.I. Help You?
In select locations of the massively successful supermarket chain Target, customers and employees will now have access to the wit and wisdom of Store Companion, a noteworthy high-profile AI implementation.
This chatbot will be available on the handheld devices of Target employees, those devices that look like cell phones but aren’t. So, you won’t see a little WALL-E bot in a red tee-shirt tugging at your pant leg or skirt hem, asking why you decided to put back that box of delicious Captain Crunch in Aisle 97. Instead, you’ll need to speak to an employee to interact with Store Companion.
At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive. Shouldn’t shoppers be able to interact directly with the chatbot via the Target app? A good question, but one that gets a sensible “no” when considering the controversies surrounding generative AI, like Google’s Gemini platform. By keeping the chatbot in the hands of employees, Target can manage potentially unpredictable responses and ensure a controlled rollout. Employees are likely receiving training on how to handle any “hallucinations” from the chatbot.
After this trial run, Store Companion might become a staple on the Target app or even integrated into those tricked-out screen-equipped shopping carts that aren’t quite catching on yet. If or when they do, Store Companion could be part of that future. For now, Target is taking a cautious yet innovative approach to enhance customer service with AI.
What Does This Mean for Retail in General
An autobiographical bit the writer of this blog believes could be relevant here is that the writer has worked in retail before. And not even a Target-sized outfit, either, but a local place that was pretty little before an expansion to a substantial mid size.
This bit of backstory is relevant because it is the basis for the personally gleaned insight that even in small-scale retail stores there can be just a ton of items that mostly management-level staff and seasoned-to-veteran employees know a good deal about.
So it is sometimes but not always the case that the rest of the employees—teens or college kids with summer jobs, the kinds of retirees that get bored and want just any kind of work to make the days feel a bit more purposeful, transient workers—may not be able to answer every question you put to them. And for good reason, this writer would argue; think about it, could you memorize every single item’s place in even a teensy cutesy mom-and-pop? the average human brain can only memorize so much….
The significance, then, of implementing A.I. into the retail setting is that it can help solve the problem of navigating the store easily for customers, and trying to keep an extensive mental map of the store. Less wandering around with your unwieldy cart trying to find the aisle with the kale, more just getting right down to the brass-tacks aisle.
So, yes, overall the push is toward what consumer societies have been pushing for for going on decades now, which is to achieve a level of convenience in both the working and buying process that you use less and less brainpower, which might, you know, make you more and more inclined to do easy tasks, and/or keep shopping.
But for now, if the Target in your area has Store Companion capabilities, you may want to check it out just to see what the experience is like. Especially if you are in retail, as it may point to what most future retailers will be doing.
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