the month’s big deals and deployments at a glance — Retail Technology Innovation Hub

M&S

Marks and Spencer says that it has reduced workplace incidents by 80% just 10 weeks after introducing AI driven health and safety technology from Protex AI to its distribution centre in Castle Donington.

Protex AI uses CCTV systems to provide health and safety teams with technology that autonomously captures unsafe events and flags them to health and safety officers.

By increasing visibility of these incidents on-site, it helped the M&S HSE team to catch patterns in unsafe behaviour and take proactive action, providing focused training to staff to correct issues.

Kingfisher and Google Cloud

Kingfisher and Google Cloud have announced a five-year strategic partnership.

The former, whose brand portfolio includes B&Q, Castorama, Screwfix, Brico Dépôt and Koçtaş, will tap Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform services, and artificial intelligence solutions, Kingfisher.

It says that benefits will include greater website uptime, better forecasting, more seamless customer centric experiences, improved personalisation, and engineering support from Google Cloud.

Kingfisher is one of the largest SAP enterprise users in Europe and is migrating on-premise legacy workloads to Google Cloud.

Aldi Nord

Aldi Nord has announced a partnership with autonomous stores firm Trigo.

This builds on a tie up in Utrecht with Aldi Nederland where the pair are working on a checkout-free test store, Aldi Shop & Go.

“To successfully lead discount retail into the future, technology and business must go hand in hand,” says Sinanudin Omerhodzic, Chief Technology Officer at Aldi Nord.

“Our close partnership with Trigo unites exactly that and brings together two true experts in their field. The cooperation in Utrecht has shown that we share the right values and that together we can develop quick solutions with an eye for essentials, always focusing on customer benefits.”