AI • IOT • NETWORK EDGE

Christina Cardoza: Hello, and welcome to “insight.tech Talk,” where we explore the latest IoT, edge, AI, and network technology trends and innovations. As always, I’m your host, Christina Cardoza, Editorial Director of insight.tech, and today we’re joined by Autocanteen to talk about AI-powered self-service solutions. But before we get started, let’s get to know our guest, Sergii, from Autocanteen. What can you tell us about yourself and the company?

Sergii Khomenko: Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Christina, for the invite. Yeah, Autocanteen is an AI-powered self-checkout solution. And so our solution mainly caters for food-service industry, and we use computer vision and machine learning to identify meals or retail items very, very quickly and efficiently.

As of today, we process millions of transactions for guests per month, reducing first of all the queuing, because it’s a very fast experience and very fast checkout, and that empowers staff members. We pretty much give the team more eyes, if you like, to do the job, and processing power. And Autocanteen terminals are fully localized and live in the UK, and Ireland, and Canada, US, Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Estonia. So that’s our brief introduction!

Christina Cardoza: Great. I love how you guys are focused on the food-service industry, because when we talk about self-service solutions, sometimes we’re thinking retail, to self-checkout in healthcare, self-check-in—things like that. But I haven’t really seen it too much in the food-service industry. And this is not going through the drive-through and having AI talk to you through the drive-through; this is something that if you’re online buying food, it’s recognizing the food, it’s using all this technology to help make the food-service industry run a lot more efficiently.

So that’s where I want to start the conversation today—talking about the challenges that are facing food-service operators in terms of the efficiency, labor cost, customer experience—why self-service solutions was a great opportunity for this space.

Sergii Khomenko: Self-service solutions—they help to obviously maximize and enhance the capacity of teams during peak times. And previously it wasn’t—before an AI self-service solution like Autocanteen—it wasn’t possible to do self-service for transactions within hospitality because those products, they’re not labeled and there are no barcodes on them. But with the technologies of computer vision and machine learning it’s possible to identify them very, very quickly in a very similar fashion that human beings do and present the total and to automate that process.

The food-service operators, they face the challenges, because like I said that operationally the main challenge is that people tend to get hungry at a very similar time, and they all turn up for lunchtime or for breakfast all at the same time and it’s hundreds or thousands of people. And obviously the challenge here, you need to serve them quickly with food, with meals, and then also to transact very quickly so that the food doesn’t get cold and people don’t waste time.

So that’s the challenge, number one. And also imagine if you’re short on stuff that day and then it might be even challenging to cater. We can talk about the labor costs as well, but it’s always a present factor for any operation, for any team, but it’s important to think how you can utilize that capacity in the best possible way to enhance the speed and customer service. So that’s, I think, the main challenges that the food-service operators, they tackle, during service times, and we, with our solution, we help them to remove some of that load on their shoulders and help them to get through that service quicker and more efficiently.

Christina Cardoza: So, to set the stage—because we’re talking about sometimes in retail environments there’s no barcodes in some of these items that people are picking up—so, I’m thinking it’s lunchtime, I run into a store to grab a sandwich. I make myself a salad or grab a cup of soup; there’s no barcodes or anything on that, and then I go to checkout and pay for the meal that I just created and having to tell the food-service operator at the end what is it that I’m eating, how much of it have I got, and that will bog up the line for other people then. It doesn’t make it a quick grab-lunch-and-go type of situation. Is that correct?

Sergii Khomenko: Absolutely; that’s exactly the process that you described. And actually, like the traditional, manned checkout points—we know these metrics because we measure them—and traditional checkout points, they take up to 30 seconds per transaction, and that is not very fast. So that means you get two customers per minute checking out via one checkout point. And we can do it with an automated solution times faster. So it’s three- to four-times faster; we can see that one checkout point will process four to six customers per minute.

And that’s where the automation really, really shines, and that’s where the Autocanteen solution really can bring the benefit, because otherwise it’s tricky to get the same speed and efficiency. If we talk about the times and if we talk about the performance, our terminals, if we look at the transaction, they will identify everything within a second. So as you place the tray or retail items, the algorithm will take the inputs and within a second it’ll prompt you the total on the screen. And then there is a couple of seconds to acknowledge the total and then pay for it. So, a few seconds to process transaction and so on, and we end up with a sub-10-second transaction from start to finish and with the receipt. It’s the components within that transaction time.

And some of the sites that we support, they process 2,000 people—or, sorry, not “process”; they cater for 2,000 people—and imagine what kind of operation it is to feed everyone within one hour or two hours for that sort of capacity, and on those sites we can see 20 to 30 people checking out per minute with our terminal. We can see that 20 to 30 transactions land within the minute at peak time, and to achieve the same speed of service it would require a lot more manned till points. So the numbers just talk for themselves.

And also another point of view here and additional benefit is that the customer experience in this journey is if you can get through the checkout process so much quicker, it only increases your satisfaction, because you do it in a very quick and efficient way and your food doesn’t get cold and it’s a nice magic—as some people see it—magic machine that processes your transactions and the friction in this way. So that’s definitely a benefit to the customer service in there. From a staff point of view, imagine how powerful they can feel when previously they could only process two people per minute, but now they’re just keeping an eye on the process that actually processes 20 to 30 people, and they can do it all by themselves, just keeping an eye on the flow. So there are multiple benefits of such implementations.

Christina Cardoza: Absolutely. I can imagine if I wanted to grab something to eat and it took a long line for me to get my food, next time I grab something to eat—especially when you’re coming for lunch on a rush hour and you have limited time—I’m probably going to go somewhere else if it takes too long at one place. So I can see the benefits, both from the customer side and both from the business side: the customer getting their food in a timely manner, in a manner that it’s not cold by the end of it, and then the business being able to retain those customers for their next purchases.

So that definitely sounds like a great solution in the food-service industry. I’m wondering if you can tell us about some of the technology that’s implemented in the Autocanteen solution that makes this automation possible.

Sergii Khomenko: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that question. We rely fundamentally on, like I mentioned, computer vision and machine learning. And so computer vision feeds the input into the algorithms and then we do the analysis, the decomposition, and then classification and learning, and so on. And the terminals, they are all interconnected—I mean, within the same site, within the same account—and once you’ve taught one machine, your other machines obviously follow the same knowledge. And all the terminals, they’re managed via a web-based admin panel, so you can make any changes to add products, pricing amendments, or view reporting, see how your sales are going—that’s all available at your fingertips, and you get the information synchronized pretty much instantly. That’s how the technological offering looks like, and those are fundamental components of the offering.

Christina Cardoza: How do you work with technology partners in the ecosystem to make this happen? And I should mention, “inside.tech Talk” and inside.tech as a whole, we’re sponsored by Intel. But I’m curious how—because I know Intel has done a lot of work when it comes to being able to bring AI into these different solutions, and their hardware is making it possible to do this all in real time, make sure that it’s high performant, high efficiency. So, what is the value of leveraging partners and technology from partners like Intel?

Sergii Khomenko: Yeah, we are super thankful to Intel and to this partnership, because we have been relying on their components within our software and hardware. And one of the components that we use is OpenVINO; it’s blazing fast, and we can pretty much make decisions and those computations on the fly, and it really shows the difference, comparing it to other—this toolkit, OpenVINO toolkit—to other frameworks that we tried before, and we can only recommend it highly. So, yeah, OpenVINO has been an integral part of our solution, for sure.

And apart from this partnership, we have others that help us with payment processing, and on the hardware side work we with vendors such as Elo Touch they have also great products and a great platform that we run on, which also has Intel processors, and we prefer to run our applications on those processors. So, yeah, this Intel partnership has been super helpful during our journey.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, that’s great to hear. One thing that I love about the partners that you just mentioned is that they’re always looking at what’s on the forefront, so they’re always staying on top of the latest trends. This AI-technology space is changing so fast that they’re always making sure that they’re providing technologies and capabilities that allow their customers or their partners to future-proof and to scale and be flexible to any innovations that are happening in the industry.

I’m wondering if you can share any customer examples with us that highlight how Autocanteen works in the food-service industry. You don’t have to name any names if you can’t, but just to give us a picture of the real benefits and the value and the impact that it’s brought to industries and to customers.

Sergii Khomenko: Yeah, absolutely; I can share some case studies. So, one site, for instance, in central London, it processes about a million pounds a year and serving hundreds of thousands of customers, and that site alone showed the dynamics, like I said before, that it processes 20 to 30 customers per minute. And also it saved a lot of labor efforts needed for the transactional function so they can focus on better customer service or be really helping elsewhere apart from being on the tills and doing their routine job. And also we can confidently say it was measured that the queuing—so the solution saved thousands of hours in queuing time. So, yeah, that’s a great KPI that we also rely on.

And in terms of case studies and names, actually I would be proud to share the name and also the award they won. So, Restaurant Associates, part of Compass Group, and they are a great partner in the UK, and they have just won awards at the Cateys, a prestigious award ceremony in the UK within the food-service industry. And the award was “Best Use of Technology” by a food-service operator, and that was for the implementation of Autocanteen and of our solution. So that was fantastic recognition, obviously, for within the industry, and it was the best solution on the markets.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, all the benefits that we’ve been talking about, all the improvements, it’s no surprise to me that they would win an award for best use of innovative technology, because that’s something that’s really solving a problem in their industry, solving pain points. We see so many times companies try to implement technology for the sake of implementing technology, and this is more of implementing technology for the sake of easing pain points and improving customer experiences. So that’s great to hear. Congratulations to Restaurant Associates and Autocanteen as well for making that happen.

Sergii Khomenko: Thank you, thank you, Christina. Yeah, that was great, great news for all of us, for sure, and we just welcome those awards to keep coming.

Christina Cardoza: So, how do you envision then, this food-service industry changing? How will you continue to stay up on any of the latest trends and bring more innovations to the forefront that these awards and these innovations and these recognitions just continue on your journey?

Sergii Khomenko: Well, the food-service industry—I mean, if we look at it through the prism of automation and what’s going to happen in the next years and how these things are going to be optimized, of course we cannot say that every function is going to be automated. Because hospitality, it cannot run without people and it shouldn’t; I’m a big believer about it. However, those functions that are very repetitive and are monotonous, where they can be automated, they will, and we are bringing this for the function of transactional functions and we’re bringing automation, and we can also see these efforts already in the kitchen, back of house.

So, for example, for analysis for waste management. And there is actually some robotic companies that are challenging, not only challenging, but already offering the solutions how to make meals and prepare pizzas and so on. So the repetitive tasks, they will be automated, for sure, but to a certain extent technology is not going to replace people in hospitality, that’s for sure.

Christina Cardoza: Yeah, I think that’s a really powerful statement too, because hospitality and these experiences, we still need that human element and that human interaction, but this is just enhancing those experiences to make the outcome and the solution better. So it’s all exciting things.

I know you were talking about how this technology is being used in the back of the house too, and some robotic company is trying to figure out how they can use technology to make meals, but I’m curious, beyond food service, are there any other industries that Autocanteen’s self-service capabilities are going to be applied to or any other areas that we can expect to see Autocanteen automate some of these tasks?

Sergii Khomenko: Absolutely, absolutely. We are already helping on some sites within retail and micromarkets to also enable, first of all, either fast transactions or just enable 24/7 capability for unattended transactions. So, for example, micromarkets where you just have some products around you, and there is a couple of terminals that people or guests, customers, can always use, and those are the environments that we also help, that we bring the benefits with our solution.

Our journey, it started in 2020, and it was during pandemic year, and we started working with Aramark, and they, at the time, they were looking for a fast and touchless AI self-checkout solution, and we had just that. Fast forward four years, and our terminals, they’re helping operators such as Compass Group and Dussmann and Delirest and others to enhance their food service—within banks, insurance companies, Ministry of Defense, factories, warehouses, entertainment parks to handle peaks—and I think that’s 24/7 capability and it impresses customers. So it’s been a great journey.

Christina Cardoza: Great, well I can’t wait to see how Autocanteen continues to transform other industries, as well as see some of this technology come—see it out in the wild and come to my own stores and retail places. So, exciting to see you guys continue your journey. I recommend our listeners visit the Autocanteen website; get in touch to see how they can help you solve some of the pain points that you’re having.

This has been a great conversation. Before we go, I just want to throw it back to you one last time, if there’s any final thoughts or key takeaways you want to leave our listeners with today.

Sergii Khomenko: Oh, I just wanted to say thanks to Intel for the support on the journey and for being such an amazing partner and to contribute to our solution in a way. So, thank you.

Christina Cardoza: Great. Well, thank you for joining us and for giving us some insight into Autocanteen and how you guys are serving up the future of the food industry. So appreciate your time. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in with us. Until next time, this has been, “insight.tech Talk.”

The preceding transcript is provided to ensure accessibility and is intended to accurately capture an informal conversation. The transcript may contain improper uses of trademarked terms and as such should not be used for any other purposes. For more information, please see the Intel^® trademark information.

This transcript was edited by Erin Noble, copy editor.