Autonomous Checkout Shopping Cart aka Smart Cart in Retail Stores

This is my first Business Class from D'Amore-Mckim School of Business AKA Northeastern's loved child! All that I remember most people I met, tired to teach me business all my life. But this particular course is very close to my heart particularly the way it was taught, thanks to Greg Collier, and secondly this course helped me understand how companies make money and how do they sustain businesses for long time. Although I am more into early stage startups, scaling is a bit new to me. Name the industry from SaS to Cloud, e-commerce to B2B, Hotel Restaurants to Organic Japanese tea shops, Slack to Whats app you name the industry -- Now I know how the Economy works(Strictly Business) at least I think I do. 

This particular project did not come in handy for me as I wanted to do validate an Augmented Reality app business model (Not so typical studying innovation - If I were to name the class differently it will be 'How the World works' for sure)  but my project partners decided and voted me against to do that - yes voting system! to pick up a Smart Cart in Retail Store product which allows you to 'Scan, Pay and Go" (Value Proposition) in retail aka pick up items and go to your car directly. No standing in line concept like Amazon Go but this product stands in between GO and traditional cart. But I started to see this whole industry which is nothing but exploring consumer behavior. I ll ask you guys one question, what's the best way to get you to buy more grocery items and try new ones in the market? I think it is a step by step approach from traditional marketing to digital marketing to in store product placements to enticing pictures(IN Store). Then I deep dived into why these products are placed in a particular place with a stand hanging next to it for example chips section has dip's section right next to it, in an assumption that people who enjoy tortilla chips or Nachos want a dip for sure(They are 30% right - the number depends on what store you are in whole foods, Stop and Shop, Safeway etc) but this is magic. The companies are doing their best to get the customer purchase as much as she or he and they are succeeding. 

My roommate once told be Boston tap water is something that he does not trust, it stuck in my mind and from time on wards I started to buy water from nearest grocery and recently when I went to the place they said that water company was basically filling tap water inside this bottle without a purifier in place and that company stopped selling and these guys are now asking me to buy water from a better competitor after FDA has taken out the earlier company's license. When a consumer enters a retail grocery store it means they trust you with their life, really water!!! 

Coming back to AI powered smart cart project, when I started to read the retail industry and the technologies being it, one company caught my eye,  NCR Corporation, which is dominating the industry in self check out and software solutions, scroll down to see our competitive analysis. So, I took sometime to decide if this is the project I am going to do in this class, after reading quite a lot about it, I started to like the product.. And yet I kept an open mind to learn and I enjoyed my class with 90% MBA students. 

Here is a small presentation we have done at the end of the class, hope you guys find it useful!