BY: CLAIRE KIM
Macy’s is adopting Artificial Intelligence to enhance their customers’ shopping experience. The long-chain department store and IBM’s Watson have collaborated to create a new system for their shopping customers.
This new system that Macy’s is trying out involves a pilot program that will help customers to experience in-store shopping in a much more efficient and easier way. With the help of the robots that will be circulating all around the store, they can ask any question to the bots and will receive an answer according to the question.
What really sparks an interest in me about this procedure, is that the bots will be using natural language, instead of artificial language to engage with their customers. It’s not often we see this happening, especially in a department store.
IBM Watson technology’s main objective for their business is to create “a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy, and confidence”. This seems like a really interesting motive for them and also really captures what stores are looking for to even replace some of their employees.
This technology really makes a huge impact on society, especially for job employees. If this system turns out to be very successful and widespread among many other businesses, it may ruin the employment for us in the long run. I can already see drones taking over mail delivery services, self-checkout machines taking over cashier positions, and even driverless cars taking over taxi driver jobs. This is a really big issue for us. I mean it’s great and all that we are discovering new technology that will make work easier for us, but it will also harm employment for people who need jobs.
claire kim. 