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Retailers lose an estimated $1.75 trillion a year globally due to out-of-stock, misplaced, or mispriced items. Some, including BJ’s Wholesale Club, are deploying a solution: Simbe Robotics’ Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that helps with the task of inventory management. Tally 3.0, the newest iteration of the tall and slender bot, moves up and down aisles, reading RFID tags—smart barcodes that identify a product—and capturing images. That data is then sent to the cloud where an algorithm processes the information and alerts stores to items that need restocking or that are inaccurately placed or priced. And unlike human clerks, Tally never gets bored.
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