How Google Cloud and Trigo are partnering to power autonomous stores

Editor’s note: To kick off the new year, we invited partners from across our retail ecosystem to share stories, best practices, and tips and tricks on how they are helping retailers transform during a time that has seen tremendous change. We hope you enjoy these series of guest blogs from our partners.

At Trigo, we are building the digital infrastructure for the future of retail with our computer vision and AI-powered technology. It is currently enabling our frictionless checkout solution, EasyOut™, to retrofit existing grocery stores for some of the world’s largest grocery retailers. Over the past few months, we have opened our first fully operational and autonomous stores integrated with EasyOut™ in the UK and Germany. From the beginning, we have been working with Google Cloud to provide the best product for our retailers, and our partnership is more important than ever as we scale with more retailers and stores in the pipeline over the next year.

Opening new stores

Trigo’s computer vision and AI-driven technology creates 3D models of the stores, working behind the scenes to capture shoppers’ movement and interactions with thousands of SKUs. The amount of data - at least ½ billion images per day - that needs to be processed and analyzed requires a robust technological infrastructure to support these functions. We chose Google Cloud because of their offerings that can keep up with the pace at which we create, analyze and then utilize data. Google Cloud BigQuery has been instrumental in helping us improve our performance, specifically basket accuracy and time to receipt. We leveraged BigQuery to manage and process all of the data and queries that we inputted, which allowed us to improve our accuracy.

Each new store we open requires additional processing capabilities to sustain the massive amount of data being fed into our system. We plan to dramatically grow the number of stores we have already opened within the next year, so our cloud partner must have the technological capacity to handle our scale goals. One of these goals is global expansion, which will require our system to be able to communicate effectively with its cloud backends from any of our activity regions - North America, Europe, the Middle East, and more. Google Cloud has servers present in all of these regions, so the latency time for receipts and other data is thus shorter for all of these stores. This will allow us to deliver a better service and an overall better experience for our retailers’ shoppers, which will encourage our scale goals for existing retailers as well.

Beyond cloud services 

Part of the EasyOut™ deployment process includes the installation of an off-the-shelf sensors kit. While our core business is developing the most cutting-edge technology for frictionless checkout, it is also choosing the right hardware partners to maximize the potential of our algorithms and software. Google Cloud has been proactive from the start in connecting us to their vast network of partners, giving us access to hardware providers that can improve the accuracy of our product.

Google Cloud has also been very hands-on in gaining a deep understanding of our systems. Our teams regularly collaborate to do a deep dive into the internals of our system and the Google Cloud team provides us with their professional insights. They also give us access to their experts in AI, big data and machine learning that find the right tools to help us solve complex problems in our system.

Looking ahead

As we continue to grow into new regions and with new retailers, so will the products and services that we offer. Our upcoming StoreOS™ suite of products, powered by our proprietary 3D engine, will provide retailers with a range of additional solutions, including predictive inventory management, pricing optimization, security and fraud prevention, planogram compliance, and event-driven marketing. Google Cloud has been invaluable in paving the way for this expansion, whether through their extensive data storage and analysis capabilities or by providing support and insights from their internal experts. Google is at the forefront of innovation, creating cutting edge solutions that have the potential to elevate our technological capabilities. We look forward to continuing our partnership as we continue in our quest to re-invent the in-store shopping experience by bringing all the benefits of the online to the physical stores.