AiFi: Delivering the Retail Store of the Future. Today.
Reaction Catalyst - Ying Zheng and Dan Haarmann of AiFi
Reaction Catalyst is an event series that connects the worlds best innovators, promoting solutions with global potential, with a global community of leaders, offering the influence to realize it.
Inside Loop - one of AiFi’s fully autonomous stores
AiFi is the scalable, affordable, and accurate solution to autonomous retail.
The company’s mission is to bring a unique, autonomous shopping experience to the retail marketplace and has reached a new peak in their expansion.
Nicolas Sauvage, Reaction Founding Member and Chair of Reaction’s Financial Leaders, spoke with Ying Zheng, Co-Founder and President, and Dan Haarmann, CFO, of AiFi.
Who are your customers?
We partner with both established and fast-growing companies that are as passionate as AiFi in improving the retail shopping experience through state-of-the-art technology. We have contracts with over 15 retail partners including Carrefour, Zabka, Choice Market and Wundermart. These partnerships present an opportunity to expand AiFi’s technology to more than 350 stores over the next twelve months.
Why is AiFi a more attractive solution compared to your competitors?
AiFi has developed a scalable solution to support customer growth expectations. This is done through our patented tracking technology which operates using a minimal amount of hardware to ensure both accuracy and affordability can be achieved at scale. These principles are at the core of our AAA promise:
Autonomous – AI system that tracks hundreds of shoppers and thousands of products.
Accurate – 99% receipt accuracy.
Affordable – Economically viable with the ability to integrate into existing systems.
How accurate is AiFi? Founder Ying Zheng takes on Reaction’s challenge.
What’s the Impact for retailer and store Unit Economics?
AiFi’s CFO, Dan Haarmann explained the company’s three main ways of helping retailers in their Unit Economics.
We aid our partners in their growth margins by expanding operating hours and we achieve margin optimization through pricing models with inventory management data. AiFi is also revolutionizing retail labor economics by freeing cashiers from registers and moving them to the sales floor. We also improve overall operations through a digitization perspective of creating an e-commerce environment to provide deeper analytics which have not been seen in traditional retail settings.
See the world’s largest autonomous store in action!
What are the advantages of going autonomous?
We are creating a unique marketplace for retailers and consumers. Our solution provides partners with inventory management data, cuts employee training time, generates promotions and coupons automatically, and provides shopper data for deeper analytics for product placement and sales.
One clear advantage in choosing AiFi is our seamless camera-only solution. This makes it faster, cheaper and simpler for retailers to integrate our system.
What sets AiFi apart from competitors is their scalability. Our solution can accommodate different store formats and sizes from a shop made from a 400-sqft to a 5000-sqft space. We also provide a hybrid solution which allows customers to continue their usual cashier checkout shopping habit or customers can scan in with AiFi to enjoy a faster, checkout free shopping experience. The hybrid solution has been growing in popularity with retailers because customers are able to gradually switch to autonomous shopping instead of having to shop fully autonomous from day one.
Fully autonomous nano store powered by AiFi
How is AiFi driving change?
AiFi is answering the call in providing a solution to Food Deserts across the world. A Food Desert is a community that is removed from traditional grocery distribution. This results in unhealthy food options and a lack of food diversity in communities across the globe. AiFi’s solution can provide optimized stores with the economic viability these communities need to provide healthier and more diversified grocery options.
How is AiFi going to positively change the labor market?
AiFi allows the retailer labor force to be upskilled by allowing staff members to step away from registers and trained as higher skilled sales associates, system maintenance workers, and customer service representatives. Automation is the future of retail and AiFi embraces this idea by training the current labor force of today for the future digital economy.
Why did Reaction choose AiFi as a catalyst of global change?
AiFi has already created significant value and is at an inflection point for future growth. AiFi has gone from one 200-sqft store to a 5000-sqft store in just two years. Annually, Americans spend 37 billion hours waiting in line, equivalent for a week of queueing per adult. AiFi can cut this number to zero and is the catalyst for safer, smarter and more convenient stores throughout the world.
For further information about Reaction please visit the Reaction website at reaction.global or contact the Reaction team at change@reaction.global.
About the Author
Samantha Allen is a Reaction Fellow from Chicago, Illinois.
About Reaction
Reaction is about creating exponential change. We are a global community of entrepreneurs, investors and executives who share a vision for a world where innovation can meaningfully change more lives in less time. Why now? Because more innovations will be created in more countries and more industries over the next decade than in the previous 50 years. Many will offer the potential to solve global issues. But will fail to reach the markets they could have benefited most. Reaction was founded by a global team of Stanford alumni who united to solve this problem together. Our mission is to measurably improve one billion lives, within a decade, by scaling innovations that will change the world.
