AI
“This AI-first approach has delivered important employee experience improvements and faster time-to-value”
Mark Thomson Retail Strategy Director EMEA Zebra Technologies
Mark Thomson: Labour hiring, training and retraining are ongoing challenges for retailers. It’ s hard to hire enough workers, it takes too long to get them up to speed and there are high levels of churn, including departures to rivals offering a better hourly rate.
One retailer is addressing these issues with AI. This European supermarket chain hires lots of staff during peak seasons to meet higher shopper footfall and additional seasonal inventory. However, previous onboarding was fragmented and time-consuming to deliver and took time away from consumer-focused tasks.
With Zebra AI Knowledge Agent running on employee Zebra mobile computers, team leaders were able to provide updated and consistent onboarding and guidance to new hires. The AI agent is trained on the retailer’ s standard operating procedures, so new hires can quickly and accurately learn about the company, their role and policies to follow.
This AI-first approach has delivered important employee experience improvements and faster time-to-value – and team leaders recover time for other activities. It also instills confidence, as frontline staff are in a better position to do their jobs and help customers on an ongoing basis.
Jason Harvey: EBI Electric, a manufacturer in wood production, took advantage of a gap in the market to provide customers with an enhanced offering. It improved supplier relationships and generated over £ 500,000( US $ 670,800) in annual savings. Previously, its legacy technology and outdated operations led to false positives, and increased waste and labour hours spent on manual checks. Its leaders also noticed that competitors weren’ t offering upgraded packages to customers. This combination of human insight, operational change and the right culture resulted in a new deep learning and 3D sensing machine vision solution. The system plugs into production lines for consistent, reliable results under harsh industrial environments, and the AI continuously learns so precision and yield improve over time. Outcomes include an eightfold improvement in precision, reduced errors, six-figure cost savings and the confidence to expand its business into new global markets.
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