Its commitment to“ naked” products – items sold without any packaging – is brilliant for the planet but created challenges at checkout.
Without barcodes, staff had to memorise hundreds of products and manually put them into the till. But bringing the smarts from its popular Lush Lens app – which lets customers scan products on their phones – directly to store tills, all powered by Google Cloud, fixed the problem. Using Cloud Storage to house over half a million product images and Gemini via Vertex AI to train the recognition models, Lush tills now instantly identify any unpackaged item held up to the camera – turning a memory test into a split-second scan.
The system has also saved 440,000 litres of water by cutting down on product demos, made onboarding new staff far simpler – and tightened up both billing accuracy and stock management.
Examples like this show that for businesses weighing up AI strategies, computer vision offers something rare: a practical starting point with results you can measure. aimagazine. com 227