Japanese retail tech firm Retail AI and Toshiba are integrating their products to combine in-store retail tech with a unified commerce platform. The aim is to improve shoppers’ experience and streamline retailer operations.

Retail AI markets a retail digital transformation product combining AI technology with physical brick and mortar technologies called ”Smart Store Technology”. The company’s Smart Shopping Cart is its main solution, a retail self-checkout system.

Through the integration of the Smart Shopping Cart with Toshiba’s ELERA, a unified commerce platform with modular microservices, both companies aim to deliver increased convenience for shoppers and more efficient operations for retailers.

The Smart Shopping Cart currently has 9,115 units installed and was used by 1.8 million customers of all age groups during the month of August 2022. Retail AI’s Smart Shopping Cart has unscanned item prevention technology and an in-house developed AI recommendation and promotion engine, which improves store profitability and enhances the customers’ shopping experience.

Toshiba’s ELERA unified cloud commerce platform is designed to allow retailers to rapidly reimagine, create, and scale experiences for their customers.

Through a microservices-based, API-first approach, ELERA enables smarter, faster, and more flexible deployments by using advanced technology such as AI and computer vision to transform the physical store and merge it with the digital world. As a result, retailers experiment with unifying and scaling store functions, and interconnect them with their digital commerce capabilities.