In 2012, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was asked by TV host Charlie Rose whether his e-commerce company would ever venture into brick-and-mortar stores. Bezos said shoppers were well-served by existing physical retailers and that Amazon wasn’t interested in launching a “me-too” product.
“We want to do something that’s uniquely Amazon,” Bezos said. “If we can find that idea, and we haven’t found it yet, but if we can find that idea, we would love to open physical stores.”
Six years later, Amazon landed on a revolutionary retail concept that it hoped would transform how people shop in brick-and-mortar stores. The company launched its first Amazon Go convenience store featuring a new kind of technology, called “Just Walk Out.”
In practice, customers would be able to load up their cart and exit the store without standing in a checkout line. Amazon soon brought cashierless checkout to its Fresh supermarkets and two Whole Foods locations. In 2020, the company began licensing Just Walk Out technology to third parties, signing on retailers in stadiums, airports and hospitals.
But the company has since taken a sideways turn.
In April, Amazon announced it was removing cashierless checkout from its U.S. Fresh stores and Whole Foods locations, a move that coincided with CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to rein in costs to meet rapidly changing macro conditions.
In place of Just Walk Out, which typically requires ceiling-mounted cameras, shelf sensors and gated entry points, Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods supermarkets will feature Dash Carts. The carts track and tally up items as shoppers place them in bags, enabling people to skip the checkout line. Amazon continues to use Just Walk Out in its grab-and-go marts and UK Fresh stores.
A woman uses a dash cart during her grocery-shopping at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart shopping carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, United States on February 25, 2024. The smart shopping cart makes grocery shopping quicker by allowing customers to scan products right into their cart as they shop and then skip the checkout line.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
The main challenge for Amazon and other startups working on autonomous checkout is the need to scale it to enough locations and retail categories that it becomes a natural part of in-store shopping, said Jordan Berke, founder and CEO of retail consulting firm Tomorrow.
“Until that’s the case, it’s an uphill battle,” Berke said. “These technology providers, Amazon included, are going to have to subsidize and continue to invest to train the retailer, train the consumer, train the market, that this is a mainstream experience that we can all trust and not need to think about as we walk in and out of a store.”
‘The hardest problem to solve’
At one point Amazon saw Just Walk Out becoming a core part of the experience of shopping in its physical stores. The company in 2018 planned to open as many as 3,000 Amazon Go stores within a few years, Bloomberg reported at the time, citing people familiar with the plans.
Bezos had assigned top talent from across the company, including a longtime Amazon executive who built the original Kindle e-reader, to work on cashierless checkout. The technology was considered a key ingredient in Amazon’s long-running pursuit to become a giant in the $1.6 trillion U.S. grocery market.
When Amazon debuted Just Walk Out in January 2018, it was a “quake moment” for the industry, causing Walmart and “almost every other retailer” to leap into action and consider developing their own vision-based checkout systems, said Berke, who previously led Walmart’s e-commerce business in China.
Amazon and other retailers soon learned that automating the checkout process is “the hardest problem to solve,” Berke said. Cashierless checkout systems require a hefty upfront investment to blanket a store with overhead cameras and hire staff to label and review shopping data.
“It meant a store had to dramatically increase its sales in order to pay off that investment,” Berke said.
Walmart teams found as part of a cost analysis in early 2019 that it would run a retailer between $10 million and $15 million to create a similar computer vision-based checkout system for a 40,000 square foot supermarket, Berke said.
Just Walk Out became an expensive project for Amazon, too. In 2019 and 2020, the company shelled out roughly $1 billion per year, including research and development costs and capital expenditures, to “learn and scale” the technology, Berke said. He said those figures are based on discussions with a former Just Walk Out executive who left Amazon to join Walmart.Amazon didn’t provide a comment on the figures.
Many retailers have since moved on from computer vision in favor of simpler methods like mobile checkout through an app, Berke said.
While it’s no longer featuring Just Walk Out as prominently in its own stores, Amazon says it has inked deals with a growing list of customers. More than 200 third-party stores have paid Amazon to install the cashierless system. The company expects to double the number of third-party Just Walk Out stores this year, Jon Jenkins, who previously served as vice president of Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, said in a recent interview. Jenkins departed Amazon in late September to become technology chief of electric bike and scooter startup Lime, according to his LinkedIn page.
Jon Jenkins, Amazon’s former vice president of Just Walk Out technology, gives a tour of the mock convenience store where the company tests its cashierless checkout system in Seattle, Washington, on August 22, 2024.
CNBC
Jenkins disputed characterizations that Amazon’s phasing out of Just Walk Out from its own supermarkets represents a setback or a sign of the technology’s demise. He said Amazon proved through tests in its own grocery stores that the technology is “incredibly capable,” noting it deployed the system in large supermarkets with “600 people in the store at the same time.”
Other startups such as AiFi and Grabango have developed autonomous systems for supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers, but widespread adoption has been slow, as the technology remains costly and challenging to operate in large store formats.
Inside the lab
Amazon is still fine-tuning its Just Walk Out technology.
In August, CNBC got the first on-camera look at a mock convenience store where Amazon tests the system before deploying it in third party retailers and its own stores.
The testing lab, which it calls “beverage base camp,” is located in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. It has faux gates that mimic the experience of scanning your smartphone or credit card to enter a Just Walk Out store. The walls are lined with shelves of typical grab-and-go products like Milky Way bars, pita chips and gum, and there are coolers stocked with Coke cans and other beverages.
Amazon sets up Just Walk Out stores by first creating a 3D scan using LiDAR machines or iPads that help it determine where to place cameras so they have the clearest view.
“The goal is to have the fewest number of cameras possible, so we optimize the camera placement so that we can get enough coverage on each fixture to see what is happening in the store,” Jenkins said.
The system determines what shoppers purchased using several inputs, including the 3D scans, a catalog of product images, the video footage, and weight sensors on the shelves. Amazon in July updated the AI system behind its Just Walk Out technology to handle all the inputs in a store simultaneously.
The new “multi-modal” system can generate receipts faster by more accurately predicting which items shoppers have picked up and put back on shelves. The company said these changes should make it “faster, easier to deploy and more efficient” for retailers who install the system in their stores.
Amazon’s “primary focus” is selling the technology to third-party businesses and deploying it in small to medium-sized store formats, where the system “tends to generate a little better [return on investment],” Jenkins said. Earlier this year, Amazon also began selling its connected grocery carts to third parties.
Amazon in September announced several new third-party Just Walk Out stores at universities and sports stadiums.
CNBC
At one Just Walk Out store, inside Seattle’s Lumen Field, home to the NFL’s Seahawks, the company said it boosted sales by 112% last season, with 85% more transactions during the course of a game.
“It was awesome that we had our own stores as the laboratory to sort of build and launch this,” Jenkins said. “But over time, like many things at Amazon, the success of this project and the product will depend on third parties adopting the technology. There will always be more third-party stores in the world than there will be first-party stores.”
Amazon has used a similar playbook in in the past. Amazon Web Services, the company’s wildly successful cloud-computing unit, originated from the company’s need for IT infrastructure to support its fast-growing online retail business. And in recent years, Amazon has leveraged its logistics and fulfillment network to provide services for third parties.
With Just Walk Out, Amazon faces the challenge of convincing retailers that they can trust one of their biggest competitors with handling valuable shopper data.
In 2022, Amazon moved the team behind Just Walk Out from its retail organization to AWS. It marked one of the clearest signals yet that Amazon is serious about selling the technology to other retailers, and could help ease some fears among rivals.
“They’re clearly in sales mode,” said Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester Research, in an interview.
Kodali said Amazon still has a “long way to go” before the technology is ubiquitous. Getting there will require patience from Amazon investors and data that shows both retailers and shoppers are embracing the technology.
“There’s almost a viral effect that will occur over time,” she said. “It’s just going to take a long time because you’ve got to cycle through everybody in America having this experience, and for the most part, it’s just Amazon fighting this fight right now.”
It was a terrible start to November on Wall Street. The tech-heavy Nasdaq sank just over 3% in its worst weekly performance since early April. The S & P 500 fell 1.6% for the week. Both stock measures broke three-week winning streaks.This week’s market decline, which followed a strong October, can be chalked up to two reasons. First, investors grew concerned about the eye-watering valuations of stocks tied to artificial intelligence. Case in point: Nvidia lost its $5 trillion market cap designation in a weekly loss of 7%. The weakness in Nvidia was exacerbated by the realization that China would not be opening back up in a meaningful way for the powerhouse of AI chips. While management has not included China sales in its outlook for months, many investors still thought it could happen. Still, we maintain our long-held “own it, don’t trade” thesis on Nvidia. .SPX .IXIC 5D mountain S & P 500 and Nasdaq weekly performance Second, there were emerging signs that the government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history, was starting to harm the economy. Job cuts last month reached their highest levels for any October in 22 years, according to Thursday’s reading from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A day later, the latest monthly consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan registered nearly its worst reading ever. These reports from private organizations have taken on added importance since the shutdown, which started on Oct. 1 and has delayed most government economic data. During this week of market turmoil, we executed three trades. On Monday, we added to our Starbucks position. The stock has taken a beating with other restaurant names on fears of a weakening consumer. In this case, we think the decline is overblown. After all, the turnaround story under CEO Brian Niccol remains strong. “With shares trading back to their ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs lows in early April, we see this recent weakness as an opportunity to slowly scoop up more,” Jeff Marks, the Investing Club’s director of portfolio analysis, wrote in a trade alert. “Niccol has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring back the coffeehouse atmosphere and fix its stores through a new operating and staffing model called Green Apron Service . It’s taken a few quarters, but the turn has finally started.” The Club also snapped up more Boeing stock Tuesday. Shares dropped significantly after the aircraft maker’s earnings report last week, caused by a larger-than-expected charge on its 777X program. Yes, the quarter was a frustrating setback. But the decline presented a great opportunity for long-term investors like us. “The turnaround under Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is still progressing nicely, driven by better execution on its 737 program,” Marks wrote in a trade alert. “With production moving from 38 airplanes per month to 42 — then eventually 47 and 52 under FAA guidance in the future — Boeing’s ability to make and deliver more planes will lead to strong free cash flow generation in the years ahead.” The market’s pullback Thursday gave us a chance to buy more GE Vernova stock. Shares have tumbled as AI-linked names have been scrutinized for their valuations. That’s because GE Vernova is one of the world’s largest producers of gas-fired turbines, which are used to create electricity and electrification products found in data centers. The company’s sales heavily benefit from the insatiable demand for more energy due to the frantic AI infrastructure race. “We are using this downturn to buy more shares since we still have a positive long-term outlook on the need for increased electricity investment,” Marks wrote in another trade alert. Eli Lilly made headlines this week. President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a GLP-1 pricing deal with Lilly and rival drugmaker Novo Nordisk that would lower prices for certain weight-loss treatments in exchange for coverage in Medicare and Medicaid programs. This was huge news for Lilly because it can expand access to Zepbound, increasing the blockbuster weight-loss drug’s total addressable market. Eli Lilly is also behind GLP-1 Mounjaro, but it was not included in the deal. That’s not the only piece of good news for Lilly. Management announced positive mid-stage trial results for its experimental amylin obesity drug. The once-a-week shot called eloralintide was shown to help patients shed pounds while maintaining muscle mass. Shares of Eli Lilly were up 7% for the week. this week. Quarterly earnings and spinoff news were also in focus. Eaton delivered a mixed third-quarter report Tuesday morning, which beat on adjusted earnings per share (EPS) but missed on revenue and organic sales. Although the headline results were uneven, the Club still found bright spots in the release. Overall segment profit and profit margin, for example, beat expectations and reached new quarterly records. DuPont posted a beat on the top and bottom line Thursday morning — less than a week after the spinoff of Qnity Electronics. Shares of DuPont slipped right after because of noise around quarterly numbers due to the split and divestiture of its Aramids business. Still, the underlying fundamentals for the new DuPont look strong, and the stock was our biggest winner on the week, up 16.5% to nearly $40. The Club downgraded shares to our 2 rating . We also adjusted our price target to $44. Solstice Advanced Materials, which recently split from Club name Honeywell , reported earnings on Thursday with no major surprises. There was a 7% topline growth, which was provided when Honeywell posted its own results just two weeks ago. Plus, it was all fairly consistent with what was said at an investor day last month. Texas Roadhouse shared a mixed earnings report Thursday night, posting better-than-expected comps despite concerns of softening consumer spending. However, higher beef prices caused the steakhouse chain to raise its commodity inflation outlook, which has weighed on Texas Roadhouse’s profitability for some time. We’re not giving up on the Club stock yet. Wall Street heard from Qnity on Thursday night, too. Not earnings, we learned about those numbers when DuPont reported, but management delivered a business update after the close, which made us hopeful of the company’s position to keep growing from secular trends like AI in the years ahead. The Club issued a buy-equivalent 1 rating on the stock and a price target of $110. Qnity stock has been volatile and closed Friday just over $92. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
State Street is reiterating its bullish stance on the artificial intelligence trade despite the Nasdaq’s worst week since April.
Chief Business Officer Anna Paglia said momentum stocks still have legs because investors are reluctant to step away from the growth story that’s driven gains all year.
“How would you not want to participate in the growth of AI technology? Everybody has been waiting for the cycle to change from growth to value. I don’t think it’s happening just yet because of the momentum,” Paglia told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week. “I don’t think the rebalancing trade is going to happen until we see a signal from the market indicating a slowdown in these big trends.”
Paglia, who has spent 25 years in the exchange-traded funds industry, sees a higher likelihood that the space will cool off early next year.
“There will be much more focus about the diversification,” she said.
Her firm manages several ETFs with exposure to the technology sector, including the SPDR NYSE Technology ETF, which has gained 38% so far this year as of Friday’s close.
The fund, however, pulled back more than 4% over the past week as investors took profits in AI-linked names. The fund’s second top holding as of Friday’s close is Palantir Technologies, according to State Street’s website. Its stock tumbled more than 11% this week after the company’s earnings report on Monday.
Despite the decline, Paglia reaffirmed her bullish tech view in a statement to CNBC later in the week.
Meanwhile, Todd Rosenbluth suggests a rotation is already starting to grip the market. He points to a renewed appetite for health-care stocks.
“The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund… which has been out of favor for much of the year, started a return to favor in October,” the firm’s head of research said in the same interview. “Health care tends to be a more defensive sector, so we’re watching to see if people continue to gravitate towards that as a way of diversifying away from some of those sectors like technology.”
The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund, which has been underperforming technology sector this year, is up 5% since Oct. 1. It was also the second-best performing S&P 500 group this week.
Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative AI.
A recent study from the UK’s Department for Business and Trade found that neurodiverse workers were 25% more satisfied with AI assistants and were more likely to recommend the tool than neurotypical respondents.
“Standing up and walking around during a meeting means that I’m not taking notes, but now AI can come in and synthesize the entire meeting into a transcript and pick out the top-level themes,” said Tara DeZao, senior director of product marketing at enterprise low-code platform provider Pega. DeZao, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, has combination-type ADHD, which includes both inattentive symptoms (time management and executive function issues) and hyperactive symptoms (increased movement).
“I’ve white-knuckled my way through the business world,” DeZao said. “But these tools help so much.”
AI tools in the workplace run the gamut and can have hyper-specific use cases, but solutions like note takers, schedule assistants and in-house communication support are common. Generative AI happens to be particularly adept at skills like communication, time management and executive functioning, creating a built-in benefit for neurodiverse workers who’ve previously had to find ways to fit in among a work culture not built with them in mind.
Because of the skills that neurodiverse individuals can bring to the workplace — hyperfocus, creativity, empathy and niche expertise, just to name a few — some research suggests that organizations prioritizing inclusivity in this space generate nearly one-fifth higher revenue.
AI ethics and neurodiverse workers
“Investing in ethical guardrails, like those that protect and aid neurodivergent workers, is not just the right thing to do,” said Kristi Boyd, an AI specialist with the SAS data ethics practice. “It’s a smart way to make good on your organization’s AI investments.”
Boyd referred to an SAS study which found that companies investing the most in AI governance and guardrails were 1.6 times more likely to see at least double ROI on their AI investments. But Boyd highlighted three risks that companies should be aware of when implementing AI tools with neurodiverse and other individuals in mind: competing needs, unconscious bias and inappropriate disclosure.
“Different neurodiverse conditions may have conflicting needs,” Boyd said. For example, while people with dyslexia may benefit from document readers, people with bipolar disorder or other mental health neurodivergences may benefit from AI-supported scheduling to make the most of productive periods. “By acknowledging these tensions upfront, organizations can create layered accommodations or offer choice-based frameworks that balance competing needs while promoting equity and inclusion,” she explained.
Regarding AI’s unconscious biases, algorithms can (and have been) unintentionally taught to associate neurodivergence with danger, disease or negativity, as outlined in Duke University research. And even today, neurodiversity can still be met with workplace discrimination, making it important for companies to provide safe ways to use these tools without having to unwillingly publicize any individual worker diagnosis.
‘Like somebody turned on the light’
As businesses take accountability for the impact of AI tools in the workplace, Boyd says it’s important to remember to include diverse voices at all stages, implement regular audits and establish safe ways for employees to anonymously report issues.
The work to make AI deployment more equitable, including for neurodivergent people, is just getting started. The nonprofit Humane Intelligence, which focuses on deploying AI for social good, released in early October its Bias Bounty Challenge, where participants can identify biases with the goal of building “more inclusive communication platforms — especially for users with cognitive differences, sensory sensitivities or alternative communication styles.”
For example, emotion AI (when AI identifies human emotions) can help people with difficulty identifying emotions make sense of their meeting partners on video conferencing platforms like Zoom. Still, this technology requires careful attention to bias by ensuring AI agents recognize diverse communication patterns fairly and accurately, rather than embedding harmful assumptions.
DeZao said her ADHD diagnosis felt like “somebody turned on the light in a very, very dark room.”
“One of the most difficult pieces of our hyper-connected, fast world is that we’re all expected to multitask. With my form of ADHD, it’s almost impossible to multitask,” she said.
DeZao says one of AI’s most helpful features is its ability to receive instructions and do its work while the human employee can remain focused on the task at hand. “If I’m working on something and then a new request comes in over Slack or Teams, it just completely knocks me off my thought process,” she said. “Being able to take that request and then outsource it real quick and have it worked on while I continue to work [on my original task] has been a godsend.”
