46: Jordan Fisher, CEO Standard Cognition

Autonomous vehicles have been all the buzz over the last few years. Not to be outdone, Amazon has quietly been applying this same technology to checkout. In 2018, Amazon announced "Go" - a grocery story with frictionless checkout. Since then, Amazon has been building and launching stores across the country. While promising from a technology perspective, retailers have fears of being locked in the Amazon ecosystem; we saw the same net effect play out with Instacart. As Amazon acquired Whole Foods retailers turned to Instacart to offset Amazon's delivery capability. 

Enter Standard Cognition (SC). SC is building autonomous checkout on the backs of ~$100M raised over the past 2 years. SC is focused exclusively on AI-powered checkout: SC enables autonomous checkout for brick and mortar retailers with an AI-powered computer vision platform. 

In this episode, I chatted with Jordan Fisher (Founder/CEO of SC) and we touched on a number of topics, including: (1) the future of retail analytics and in-store experience, (2) the challenges of selling technology in a low margin industry, (3) how his technology differs from Amazon/why Amazon didn't create Go in stealth and take out all of the oxygen out of the room, (4) the implications of autonomous technology for global privacy standards and job creation/destruction and (6) ancillary possibilities that could be created as a byproduct of the SC technology at scale.