Anyone who has stopped into a Starbucks over the past couple of years knows how exhausted the staff is. Headcount was quietly cut in the 2020s, stress went up, and the experience got worse for customers and baristas alike. (Six straight quarters of same-store sales decline will tell you exactly how that’s worked out for Starbucks.)
But under CEO Brian Niccol, who was appointed last year, the company is architecting a turnaround. And Starbucks just had its best week of sales ever.
Much of Niccol’s plan comes down to increasing its staff in stores while also making their lives easier. How? The latest example is a new time-saving AI tool that promises to free up tens of thousands of hours across the company every week as its baristas do inventory.
The new Starbucks AI inventory tool
Typically, inventory has been a by-hand process at Starbucks. A couple times a week, an employee will spend about an hour scanning through all of the milks, syrups, and other ingredients, marking down counts on paper so that more of whatever is needed can be ordered and replenished.
A new solution developed with NomadGo largely automates this work. Instead of counting by hand, baristas can simply aim a tablet at their stock, and AI-infused 3D vision processing will handle the rest. As items are accounted for, they light up on the screen.
How is it possibly accurate? Counting stuff is the sort of work AI can do these days, sure, but it also appears to help that Starbucks keeps its items organized in pretty predictable patterns so they’re more straightforward to analyze. According to early test stores, taking inventory with this system drops the task from an hour to about 10 or 15 minutes. (Though maybe disregard that the system does appear to miss one bottle in the video—the company is claiming >99% accuracy.)
Starbucks isn’t the first company to consider using vision-AI tablets to manage inventory (Walmart, for instance, uses an augmented reality app to help its employees find the right box on the shelf.) At scale, though, the impact appears significant.
If its early tests are any indication, Starbucks could save 45 minutes of labor, about twice a week, across the 11,000 North American stores that are adopting the system. Back of napkin math puts that at 16,500 hours saved a week. (Starbucks insists such barista efficiencies introduced under Niccol won’t be used to reduce headcounts, but to improve customer experience.)
In this case, Starbucks will be using a significant chunk of this time saved to simply do inventory more frequently—perhaps as often as daily, according to the company. Even at that frequency, Starbucks could still save nearly an hour a week in the fastest stores, all while ensuring its healthier menu with protein cold foams aren’t out of stock.
No comments