JD.com and Intel Team Up for Digitized Retail IoT Lab

JD.com and Intel teamed up to create a joint retail IoT lab to explore using IoT to create smart retail apps and solutions. The Digitalized Retail Joint Lab will use Intel architecture to develop IoT based vending machine, media, and advertising technologies and applications for store use.

“This lab will combine our collective strengths to develop cutting-edge solutions to bring the precision of online shopping to offline players,” says Zhi Weng, VP of JD.com and head of JD Big Data Platform.

The lab is the latest venture of the partnership between Intel and JD.com, China’s largest retailer. Intel’s RRI edge computing and OpenVINO computer vision architecture have already integrated with JD’s computer vision algorithms. They analyze customer traffic and purchasing habits. Those insights help store owners create a better and more personalized shopping experience for customers.

The lab accelerates JD.com’s vision of “retail as a service.” This approach includes sharing smart store technology and infrastructure with other retailers to improve global commerce. Their technologies include smart shelving and price tags, check out technology and more. The company wants to give customers the ability to buy whatever, whenever, wherever they want.

See also: Retail market for AI cloud could hit $8 billion by 2024

“As China’s most influential retailer and a leader in data-driven offline retail innovation, JD is an important partner for us to continue to develop a wide range of use cases for our latest technology developments. We are happy to take our partnership to the next level,” says Intel IOTG China GM and Intel VP Wei Chen.

Intel also has plans to partner with Alibaba for various projects, including an edge computing platform that integrates Intel’s software, hardware and AI technology with Alibaba’s IoT solutions.