Checking out the check-out free store from AiFi at Devils' Prudential Center

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The Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space. Previous iterations have included using Nextiles and Rapsodo for improved pitch velocity and physiological testing at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute.

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Nestled into a backlit corner of the Section 1-3 concourse area at the Prudential Center is a two-lane concession compound, stocked with canned beer, bottled beverages and packaged snacks.

But even beyond loud branding – “Pepsi Grab & Go” – this, it is immediately clear, is not your typical F&B stand.

Signage listing the arena’s alcohol policies and a card reader met me at the front. After tapping my payment method, an automated glass turnstile opened to a wall of coolers and shelves, with further instructions emblazoned on the wall.

Tap/Insert Your Card. Grab. Go.

Indeed, it was that simple.

Upon entry, I perused the three fully stocked fridges, opting for a bottle of Aquafina over a canned beer or hard seltzer. Easier to explain on the expense report.

Five steps later, a bag of Lay’s potato chips caught my eye among popcorn boxes, candy and other chips.

 
But with items in hand, no cashier awaited me at the end of the lane – just an arena attendant to dutifully unscrew my bottle (and verify my ID, had I chosen something alcoholic). A QR code promised to – digitally – lead me to a receipt.

From there, I was free to go. End to end, the process took about 45 seconds, and within five minutes, an itemized receipt landed in the web portal, which required I enter the last four digits and expiration date of my payment method, plus the date of my visit.

And if I wasn’t a technology reporter, I may not have even noticed the 34 cameras suspended overhead leveraging computer vision software to identify the objects I took.

This multi-faceted system is the product of a partnership between Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment – owner of the Prudential Center and New Jersey Devils – Verizon and autonomous shopping technology vendor AiFi, which Verizon Ventures invested in two years ago, catalyzing what has grown into an innovative strategic partnership. The store opened in October with only snacks and added alcohol in December upon receiving license from the state of New Jersey to do so.

Verizon and AiFi have combined to deploy similar shops at several US sports venues, including San Francisco’s Chase Center (Golden State Warriors), Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field (Philadelphia Eagles) and Sunrise, Florida’s Amerant Bank Arena (Florida Panthers). AiFi provides the computer vision software, and Verizon the 5G Ultra-Wideband connectivity that underpins the system.

Sports venues are just one element of AiFi’s business, but it is growing, with the company expecting to open 65 more stadium locations this year (including the LA Clippers’ forthcoming Intuit Dome), CEO Steve Carlin told SBJ.

Chief among AiFi’s selling points is the flexibility of its technology, which is primarily a software solution that can be cabled to off-the-shelf security cameras and an on-premise server. The exact configuration of the shopping space is generally at the discretion of the venue, with Verizon and AiFi providing design and construction assistance.

“You’re not limited by technology, you’re limited by the physical space you have,” said HBSE CTO Sasha Puric. “[Pepsi Grab & Go] is a store where we made it more of a single lane… but this technology can operate in a completely open concept. We can make this entire concourse completely frictionless.

“The technology is not that expensive,” he later added. “Building that infrastructure… can get pretty expensive. You don’t need to build a dedicated store, you can literally take any [space with] an eight-and-a-half, nine-foot ceiling. It depends how you want to go.”

The Prudential Center location took less than two months to build, Puric told SBJ, following a period in which HBSE evaluated available vendors and chose AiFi on the strength of its technical capacity and synergy with Verizon (a partner since 2020). Pepsi Grab & Go replaced a portable concession stand, and “consistently outperforms” traditional shops in metrics like throughput and transaction time, Puric said.

Anecdotally, I buy it. Multiple beverage-only transactions at an adjacent traditional concession stand (that I subtly timed on my phone) averaged well over a minute, sometimes two or three. And while a small queue formed during first period intermission at the Pepsi Grab & Go, it did not extend back more than five or six parties at a time.

“We actually did some unique for Grab & Go, we split the store in half,” Puric said. “That was midway through the design, because we didn’t want any queueing to happen here.”

My last question was on my receipt. It arrived in timely and accurate fashion this time. But what if I had a dispute?

Carlin, who noted 86% of customers receipts arrive within an hour and 96% within two (with the remaining 4% largely attributable to network errors), said AiFi has more than 40 full-time staffers on board to vet footage flagged for review.

“Only about 0.3% of the video that we capture gets sent to anybody,” he said. “But you have to have that [process] in the loop. And I think it’s important for everyone to understand it’s not a bad thing to have a human look. That’s how these systems get better, right? It’s not magic. It has to get trained.”

AiFi, he added, is GDPR compliant, meaning it does not store any personal identification data. Credit card information is not retained past routing to the partner’s fintech provider, which ships back a “token” that signals the gates to open (a hold of $25 was also temporarily placed on my card). Faces of customers are blurred as they shop.

Carlin compared AiFi’s technology to a game engine, recreating a 3D rendering of the physical space, then tracking objects and key points on people (head, shoulders, elbows, wrists and torsos) to identify items that are removed.

“The business logic is how do you generate a receipt?” Carlin said. “What we do is we track people and objects through space, and we see, when a hand goes into a space that we’ve planogrammed as a Labatt Blue, and comes out with a bottle that is brown and has a blue label, and there is no brown and blue-labeled bottle on the shelf anymore, we can rightly extrapolate, at a high confidence level, that what you’re trying to do is buy a Labatt… As long as we never see you put it back down and you walk out past the line that we’ve demarcated as the exit, then you get charged for a Labatt Blue.”

Sounds refreshing. Maybe next time.