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NEW YORK — Trax, a leading provider of computer vision solutions for retail, and Google Cloud have partnered to bring Trax’s breakthrough image recognition and machine learning capability to retail stores, allowing retailers to take advantage of real-time shelf insights at unprecedented speed and scale.
Trax’s Retail Watch on Google Cloud Platform uses Trax industry-leading image recognition engines and Trax Shelfie Cameras – IoT cameras, affixed to the shelf, custom-designed to cover the entire store, and paired with the speed and security of Google Cloud and Edge computing capabilities – to produce actionable, time-sensitive data about every SKU on the shelf.
Retailers deploying the Trax Retail Watch SaaS solution, powered by Google Cloud, will leverage advanced artificial intelligence to be able to rapidly identify missing SKUs, confirm planogram compliance and take other critical steps toward optimizing retail execution inside the physical store, all with the ultimate goal of increasing shelf availability and improving the shopper experience.
Trax, headquartered in Singapore, currently works with two-thirds of the world’s leading CPG companies.
Two leading global retailers have moved forward to the next stage of deployment of the Trax Retail Watch solution, expanding both the number of stores and the number of shelf products they are digitizing. These moves follow pilots that have highlighted the accuracy and reliability of a system that allows for replacement of costly, time-consuming manual processes – increasing overall SKU availability, reducing out-of-stock duration and generating marked sales uplift.
“At NRF 2019 in New York this month, we’re excited to be demonstrating how Google Cloud and Trax provide our retail customers the ability to ride the wave of increased cloud capabilities, advanced machine-learning algorithms and reduced imaging-sensor costs to digitize the shelf and create new powerful applications: for increasing product availability, better management of in-store inventory, and creating new customer experiences, such as augmented-reality (AR) guided shopping,” said Mark Cook, Trax’s vice pre for retail, based in San Francisco.
Cook continued: “Google Cloud provides the secure computing power to capture tens of thousands of SKUs across an entire store within milliseconds and produce real-time insights with our image recognition engines that can rapidly address any out-of-stocks or other shelf-execution gaps.”
Joel Bar-El, Trax’s chief executive officer and co-founder, added: “About 90% of shopping worldwide is still done in physical stores. It’s our mission to provide ‘eyes in the store’ on every SKU. Working with Google Cloud, we can help retailers leverage image recognition to transform their overall operations: to improve on-shelf availability, forecasting, click-and-collect processes, and, ultimately, to modernize the shopping experience as online and offline converge.”
“In today’s ever-changing industry, retailers must evolve quickly to get ahead of customer expectations,” said Pravin Pillai, global head of Retail Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “We’re delighted to partner with Trax on its Retail Watch solution, which will help to digitally transform the retail industry.”
A demonstration of Trax’s implementation of Google Cloud, image recognition and Trax Shelfie Cameras can be seen at Trax booth #4855 and Google booth 4255, both located at level 3 of the show. In addition to its Retail Watch shelf-management solution, Trax will also be demonstrating its shopper in-store navigation application at its booth.
