In pictures: Go fully contactless shopping at this new Dubai store

UAE’s retailers have already brought in the robots to their stores and warehouses. Now, they are ready with AI-backed features to make it easier for shoppers.

That’s what the Carrefour City+ store is promising, where any item picked up by a customer will get automatically added to a ‘digital’ shopping basket.

The sale then gets completed by the simple process of the shopper walking out. That’s right, and that is what the AI-enabled store promises to deliver.

The shopper goes through the entire buying experience without any form of contact with staff.

How does this work? At the Carrefour City+, customers use their smartphones to access the store and then pick up whatever they came in for. Store access and shopping payment is enabled via the current MAF Carrefour App.

“Carrefour City+ has been designed to make life easier by using technology to remove friction and enhance the retail experience,” said Hani Weiss, CEO at Majid Al Futtaim Retail. “The store represents a huge leap forwards for retail in the UAE and region as Carrefour continues to innovate to meet the needs of the present whilst anticipating future shopping trends.”

This is how AI helps - the technology identifies thousands of products, thus improving inventory management and helping out customers. Carrefour City+ stocks 1,300 plus items. The store is near the entrance of the Mall of the Emirates Metro Station link.

UAE retail groups have speeded up “contactless” processes at their stores, initially by doing away with the need to queue up at the cash register. As of now, only select stores have such features, but wider deployment is only a matter of time once retailers and their shoppers get used to it.

After a year of the COVID-19 and with safety-first shopping habits to remain in place, the rollout of more contactless stores is a cert. Coupled with the gradual removal of contactless payments, this could well be the retail trend at brick-and-mortar stores in the next two to three years.

As is the case with much of retail these days, Amazon has been the frontrunner, deploying such technology at their Go stores in the US. Now, UAE shoppers are getting their sights of what the future of retail will look like right now.