By Brad Rees, CEO, Mediacells
A Tesco self-checkout area in Bristol recently was cordoned by emergency yellow barricade tape and defended by vigilant floor staff, acting more like crime-scene marshalls than grocery retail ushers.
In the white heat of this regional retail meltdown comes Tesco’s universal plans to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to personalise how people shop.
The plan was announced by CEO Ken Murphy at the prestigious Financial Times Future of Retail 2024 conference, this week (September 17, 2024).
According to Mister Murphy, Tesco ‘could use Clubcard data to nudge customers towards healthier choices’.
AI could be applied to online and in-store experiences to ‘nudge’ customers into healthier choices, he claimed.
Mediacells applied our developing machine learning bot to monitor how online newspapers reacted to the Clubcard AI ‘Nudge’ news within the first 24 hours.
The event host, Financial Times, suitably gushed in its reportage at both News and Opinion level.
Left-leaning rags, The Independent and the Mirror, focused on the ‘healthier choice’ themes in the story – as did Scottish Television (STV) News, heralding ‘AI to change your diet’.
It didn’t take long for our bot to pick up negative and sometimes scornful tones in certain newspaper coverage.
The MailOnline initially reacted with a light-hearted, ‘unhealthy item in the bagging area!’ tabloid banter approach, before weighing in with a flash reader survey, proclaiming ‘82 per cent of MailOnline readers say they are against the Tesco Clubcard health scheme.’
Elsewhere in the MailOnline, Mister Murphy came ‘under fierce criticism’ from ITV Good Morning Britain co-host, Richard Madeley, who said he doesn’t need to be told how many ready meals he has bought – because he is ‘clever’.
North of the border, The Scotsman pined for a nostalgic past where an ‘exciting future of jetpacks for all has been replaced by robots that nag us about our diet.’
South of the Pennines, the Manchester Evening News claimed, “Tesco shoppers vow to ‘ditch’ Clubcards over supermarket’s ‘creepy’ new plans.”
A final word surfaced from popular red-top UK tabloid, The Sun, which railed against how Tesco plans to ‘scold them (customers) if their shop is unhealthy choices.’
Meanwhile back in Bristol Tesco, digitally-savvy shoppers were having to renegotiate the convoluted product-to-basket-to-checkout-to-bag-to-trolley-to car-to home-to-cupboard behaviour.
Customer movement in store was as sluggish as a Walking Dead set piece, when I sauntered gingerly passed a disgruntled old-school shopping couple in the Poultry aisle – I could have sworn I heard them growling.
Perhaps the tidal wave of Tesco emerging tech needs to catch the digital shopping basket surfers earlier before wiping them out with spooky AI warnings, at point of sale, that ‘your sodium salt content is 250% of your daily recommended allowance’.
