AI robots are roaming L.A. grocery store aisles. Shoppers and workers are worried
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Set us as preferred The robot takeover looks a lot different from what we see in Hollywood thrillers.Even as artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots dance, box and beat human running-speed records, the physical bots showing up in our daily lives in Los Angeles are less Terminator and more R2-D2.On a Wednesday afternoon at Ralphs on Pico Boulevard, a skinny, six-foot-tall tower of sensors rolled through the aisles.
It made low beeping noises, its lights flickering purple and green.A small screen on the top of the tower had two blinking eyes and a small line of text.
“Hi, I’m Tally!”“Robot! Robot!” a young boy yelled.Some adults looked confused; others laughed.
Ricardo Valadez, a 62-year-old real estate agent from Mid-City and Ralphs regular, said he felt like the robot was stalking him around the store but was reassured by an employee that it just checks the shelves to see what is missing or out of place.“I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?’” Valadez said.
“I don’t know why; I felt that it was following me.” Business Consumers from the Los Angeles region who order through Grubhub will soon have some of their orders delivered by four-wheeled robots.With a recent rollout in some L.A.
grocery stores, the inventory bot, built by Burlingame-based company Simbe Robotics, joins the other free-range forms of physical AI that are already a part of everyday life in L.A.such as food-delivery bots and Waymos.From inventory management to marketing and checkout, retailers are increasingly adopting automation.
The retail automation market could jump to $77 billion by 2034 from $28 billion in 2025, according to estimates from market research company Fortune Business Insights.Simbe says more than 3,000 of its bots have been contracted to monitor shelves worldwide.Kroger, the parent company of Ralph...