The tech giant has launched their grocery system that allows customers in store to "Just Walk Out" of their supermarkets without queuing up or checking out but bosses have admitted that it was a challenge to see what consumers were buying in the first place.

Chris Broaddus, Applied Science Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior manager, said: "Figuring out the ‘what’ and how many items were taken by a shopper is a challenging AI problem to solve. For example, the system needs to accurately recognise how a shopper’s hands interact with the shelves—are they picking up a product, returning it, or just rummaging within the shelf?"

Just Walk Out associates a shopper with their payment method at the entry gate to figure out the “who” part of the “who took what” equation but it does not use biometrics-based technologies like facial recognition to identify shoppers.

A new AI system implemented by the tech giant simultaneously examines multiple inputs and prioritises the most important to determine the variety and quantity of items selected accurately.