Standard Cognition strives to improve everyone’s retail shopping experience by making shopping a seamless and more human interaction. Standard does this by developing an autonomous checkout platform for brick and mortar retailers that can change how people shop in the future. Their approach to autonomous checkout is unique because of their vision-first approach that identifies customers by shape and movement, rather than by facial recognition, and customers can shop in a Standard-powered store with or without their mobile app.

“Our system was very naive because it was still very early stage,” said Virginia Puccio, Standard’s Head of Data Operations. To improve the performance of their deep learning models, Standard’s team required a large and varied dataset. Despite this need, “we didn’t have a workforce to handle the volume of annotation tasks, nor did we have the tools,” she added. Puccio and the Standard team knew they needed a scalable data labeling solution.

The Standard Team selected Scale for their expertise in working with large data sets. “It was easy to get started with Scale AI because they had the platform and the people with the skillset to perform the annotation tasks we needed,” noted Puccio. “While we’re much bigger now and could potentially handle the volume of annotation tasks, why would we want to? … We believe we should leave data annotation to experts like Scale so we can focus on perfecting the retail shopping experience with regard to the use of AI,” Puccio concluded.

By working with Scale, the Standard team have been able to focus on other aspects of their business, such as the collection of data and offering more support services to their customers.

Those in the San Francisco Bay Area can experience the future of shopping at Standard’s flagship store in downtown San Francisco. As Standard expands its operations globally, more and more shoppers will be able to experience this new paradigm for themselves.