How to digitize retail using AI-based image recognition

The task at hand is immense: the current data revolution can either be an advantage or a menace to the retail industry, and we will see winners and losers by the the end of the decade.

Either way, it is an opportunity than comes at a cost in term of human resources, money, and time, since retailers face high product turnover and mixed sources of information.

At QOPIUS we believe startups are key actors that have enough resources and agility to transform this opportunity into actual value.

To tackle the high product turnover of the retail industry, QOPIUS had to develop a cutting-edge IA bot management platform, so it can train very good IA agents really fast on a wide variety of products.

It can also intelligently infer relations between shelves entities (price + product matching, out-of-stock, etc.) …

… and thus address very specific needs that go far beyond traditional image recognition.

The IA behind this is backed by a team of computer scientists and IA specialists who leverage the latest technologies and research papers, so its performance remains at a very high standard.

If we would have to define QOPIUS in 3 Keywords :

IA | QOPIUS smart retail solution relies on QUBE®, a unique patented technology that can grow IA bots very quickly to recognize all kinds of products and entities on shelves, from price tags to out-of-stock spaces, to the lastest shampoo bottle. To achieve that, QUBE® is raised by a strong team of skilled AI researchers, who take advantage of the latest IA frameworks and hardware. The QOPIUS R&D team is keen on developing solutions to make high performance AI vision available to the whole retail industry.

Retail digitization | At QOPIUS they believe the current IA revolution should benefit all industries, and retail even more. The most recent Amazon Go is just a symptom of that critical change : the industry has to adapt to new, faster, better processes, that AI can provide. That is what QOPIUS proposes with a full dashboard solution. By mapping shelves nearly in real time they provide tools that standard retailers could only develop at high cost in time, money and people.

Smart monitoring | QOPIUS brings AI for retail services even further by developing a powerfull monitoring platform, combining cameras taking pictures in store with the QUBE® AI, so that brands and retailers can have a clear, vision of the shelf status in any store at any time. This brings actionnable KPIs to the people who need it most, quickly and at a lower cost. Example : price compliance, planogram placement, realogram generation, out-of-stock, etc.

QOPIU partnered with Logitech, a famous computer hardware brand, to monitor its shelves presence in more than 600 stores across Germany. To do this they had to analyze about 5 000 images of shelves in all imaginable conditions and retrieve KPIs, like share of shelves, for about 40 different mice SKUs. They significantly accelerated the generation of these statistics that were originally calculated by hand!

QOPIUS is a team of 6 people and the AI QUBE®, backed by scientists and researchers in computer science and artificial intelligence from the best schools in France (ENS, Telecom Paris, Supélec, UPMC, etc.).

They love AI and are passionate about democratizing it through kick-ass applications and services. We’d love to bring AI vision to the retail industry, as the needs and potentiality are immense. We started 1.5 years ago, have just completed our first round  and plan to recruit IA researchers, tech-devs and business-devs to our adventure very soon. We have a lot of cool projects in store for our IA QUBE to become the first and best of its kind in the retail industry.