Robots, Tablets and Avatars on the Shop Floor: What In-Store Sales Assistants Hand Over to AI

What the job asks of a person

O*NET, the US Labor Department's occupation database, lists 14 core tasks for retail salespersons. The most important are greeting customers and working out what they need, helping them find or obtain merchandise, taking payment, preparing merchandise, and answering questions about the store and its stock. Below those come knowing current promotions and policies, demonstrating and describing products, ticketing and displaying goods, counting stock and handling exchanges and returns.¹

It's a large job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, as shown on O*NET, counted 3,998,100 retail salespersons in the US in 2025, at a median wage of $17.03 an hour, and projects "little or no change" in employment from 2025 to 2035, with 520,600 openings over the decade.¹ That projection covers every cause, not AI alone, and it isn't a forecast of what AI will do to the role.

The tasks split cleanly into two groups. Some are information work: where is it, what does it do, what's the policy. Others are physical or social: showing a product working, judging what a hesitant customer actually wants, sorting out a return. The AI now on shop floors has gone after the first group.

Two kinds of AI on the shop floor

The biggest deployments by store count don't face the customer at all. They sit on the handheld devices staff already carry. Target said in June 2024 that it would bring Store Companion, a generative AI chatbot it built in-house, to its nearly 2,000 stores by August, after piloting it in about 400; staff ask it questions such as how to restart a register after a power cut.⁷ By December 2024 Target described it as introduced "over the summer".⁸ Walmart says more than 900,000 associates a week use its conversational assistant, sending more than 3 million queries a day, and that it built a real-time translation feature in 44 languages for conversations between associates and customers.⁹ Lowe's launched Mylow Companion, built with OpenAI, to all associates across its more than 1,700 stores in May 2025, giving them product details, project advice and inventory information on their sales-floor devices.¹⁰

Tools like these assist the salesperson rather than replace a step: a person still asks, reads the answer and talks to the shopper. The customer-facing kind is different. In August 2026 The Home Depot made its Magic Apron assistant available in all of its 2,000+ US stores, reached through the app's Store Mode or by scanning a QR code on in-store signs. Shoppers can ask by text, voice or photo, get the aisle and bay of a product on a store map, check stock and ask whether a product suits their project.⁴ When a shopper does that, no associate is involved in the exchange, which is why the scorecard marks locating products and answering questions as tasks AI does in production. Home Depot's executive vice president of interconnected retail, Jordan Broggi, said in the announcement that "our associates remain at the center of the shopping experience".⁴

Robots that came and went

Robots on the shop floor have a longer and patchier record. Lowe's announced LoweBot, a NAVii robot from Fellow Robots, for 11 San Francisco Bay Area stores in phases from September 2016; it was meant to answer simple questions, guide shoppers to products and scan inventory.¹⁵ Lowe's Innovation Labs now describes LoweBot as "a prototype" that "was introduced within a handful of stores in the Bay Area".¹⁶

Walmart ended its relationship with Bossa Nova Robotics in November 2020, removing shelf-scanning robots from about 500 stores. The Associated Press reported that Walmart said it had learned "a lot" over five years, and cited The Wall Street Journal's report that Walmart found human workers could get similar results.¹² Shelf scanning has carried on elsewhere: Schnuck Markets announced in 2021 that Simbe's Tally robot would go to all 111 of its stores, checking stock, prices and promotions up to three times a day; Simbe and Schnucks stated it detected "14x more addressable out-of-stocks than manual scans".¹¹

The best-known humanoid of the last decade, SoftBank's Pepper, was offered to Japanese businesses in 2015 for ¥55,000 a month with apps for "approaching potential customers".¹³ Reuters reported in 2021, citing sources, that SoftBank had stopped producing Pepper the previous year, that only about 27,000 were made, and that SoftBank had propped up sales by placing the robot in its own mobile phone stores.¹⁷

Avatars, kiosks and robot-run shops

Japan's Lawson convenience chain shows a third model: a screen in the store showing an avatar, voiced live by a person working remotely. Lawson began avatar customer service with the avatar company AVITA in November 2022, and Ryutsuu News reported in July 2026 that it was a trial in 78 stores, with about 70 operators working remotely, including from home and from Sweden. One operator can serve several stores at once, guiding shoppers and explaining the self-checkout.¹⁴ These avatars are people, not AI, so the scorecard doesn't count them; Lawson credits them with a rise in self-checkout use of 15% or more.¹⁴ In September 2024 Lawson and AVITA also opened an Osaka store whose eat-in corner has an AI-driven avatar that reacts to customers' behavior.¹⁸

Fully robot-run shops are newer and small. In September 2026 Galbot, a Beijing robotics company, opened three 24-hour stores in Hong Kong run by its G1 humanoid, which speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and English and sells snacks and drinks; RTHK, reporting with Reuters, said Galbot already operates about 200 retail stores across nearly 50 mainland cities.² A Hong Kong 01 report describes the robot taking an order by voice, picking the item, handing it over and leaving the customer to pay by QR code or card, with no staff controlling it remotely, and calls the mainland sites about 200 "points" of Galbot's capsule-store format.³ Galbot opened its first such capsule in Beijing in August 2025, and its founder said one needs as little as 9 square metres of space.¹⁹ Those details come from the company side and haven't been tested independently. One shopper told RTHK the robot might not know how to handle sudden or unexpected situations.²

Checkout-free stores take payment off the counter. Amazon says more than 175 third-party retailers use its Just Walk Out system, in which cameras and shelf sensors work out what each shopper took and charge their card on the way out.⁶ Hudson's airport store at Chicago Midway, opened in June 2021, works this way, yet its own announcement says shoppers are still "greeted by a Hudson team member" who answers questions and restocks shelves.⁵

Costs and benefits, as stated

None of the large operators publish what their in-store AI costs. Benefits come almost entirely from the operators themselves and are usage or efficiency figures rather than independent measurements. Lawson reports higher self-checkout use and about 1.5 hours or more of register work saved per store on average, without saying over what period.¹⁴ Walmart reports usage, and says team leads and store managers estimate its AI task tool cut shift planning from 90 minutes to 30, though that tool started with overnight stocking, not selling.⁹ Home Depot cites positive shopper feedback from its pilot, without figures.⁴ The only list price on record is old: Pepper for Biz at ¥55,000 a month in 2015.¹³

What's still human

The tasks left for people are the hands-on and judgment-heavy ones. We found no store where AI or a robot demonstrates how a product works for a customer, and none that handles an exchange or return on its own; the closest is Walmart's announced plan to answer staff questions such as how to process a return without a receipt.⁹ The operators' own descriptions keep a person in the loop: Target pitches Store Companion as freeing staff to spend more time with guests,⁷ Lowe's says Mylow Companion helps associates "confidently assist customers",¹⁰ and even a checkout-free Hudson store keeps a team member at the door.⁵

The pattern across these cases is that AI has taken over the lookup layer of the job, finding the product, quoting the policy, translating the question, while robots that tried to roam full-size stores have mostly been withdrawn or reclassified as prototypes. Robots do run whole shops, but so far only small kiosk-style ones.¹⁹