Are Dumb Robots Standing Between Us and Better eCommerce?

July 26, 2017         By: Steven Anderson

Of all the things that might be a problem in ecommerce, like difficult user interfaces or sluggish payment systems or entering the same information over and over again, the intelligence of robots was probably not very high on most people’s watch lists. Recent developments suggest that robots may be about to get smarter, and that may mean some major changes to come in online shopping.

The latest word says that the big new development is a robot that can correctly pick up a toy and put it in a box. Right now you’re probably agape at that notion; that’s short work for any reasonably well-trained three year old.

For robots, however, this is the equivalent of discovering fire, and the necessary step to more warehouse automation. Automated it is; China’s JD.com and the Hudson’s Bay Co. are both testing automated systems, which can handle inventory about 50 percent faster than normal humans.

Given the pace of ecommerce advance, that’s no small help, and may have some worried. The good news—at least for now—is that the testing so far hasn’t sent a lot of workers packing to the unemployment lines. This is mainly due to volume expanding so rapidly that there’s enough work for robot and human alike.

The question is how long those conditions can hold. If one robot does the work of 10 men, and you have 100 men working in a plant, why not just get 10 robots and hire maybe five people to mind the robots? Cost savings are massive, like Hudson Bay senior vice president of supply chain and digital operations Erik Caldwell noted: “This thing could run 24 hours a day. They don’t get sick; they don’t smoke.”

They also, of course, don’t shop at Hudson Bay.

Online commerce represents one of our greatest advances, the ability to buy products at any time of day and in a much wider range than we’ve ever seen. Without people with jobs to buy these, though, the point is lost. Improvements like mobile payments make things easier for humans; total automation could doom those same humans.