5. A study of four sectors 42 Retail However, some customers will still prefer personalised attention, and abilities such as accurate problem diagnosis, emotion identification and picking up social The overall retail market for cobots is estimated to be cues are notoriously very difficult to automate. worth more than US$11 billion across a range of Interviewee #4 told us that a lot of work is currently applications such as shopping malls, receptionists and taking place in identifying emotion. At Carnegie Mellon guides in hotels, airports, museums and amusement University’s Robotics Institute, its director Martial Hebert parks. Cobots also have significant potential to provide has said that the challenges are not so much in the guidance in banks and to carry out simple repetitive robotics but in “Understanding people, predicting cashier functions. people, and understanding their intentions. Everything Cobots mainly used in warehouses are Autonomous from understanding pedestrians for self-driving cars, to Mobile Robots (AMRs). For example, in 2017 Amazon understanding co-workers in collaborative robot had over 100,000 robots in use worldwide, with plans manufacturing, any application that involves interaction for many more (Heater, 2017) whilst Ocado has 1,100 with people at any level.” (Anandan, 2018). in one single 18-acre facility in South East UK (Kleinman, 2018). Robots are also increasingly being used not just to move products across a space but to deliver directly to the customer, such as Best Buy’s Chloe which picks up the CDs and DVDs ordered through touchscreens and delivers to the customer. Best Buy’s ‘Tally’ robot travels through warehouse aisles and tally up stock and can work out if items had been wrongly priced or put in the wrong place. The Starship delivery robot can travel outside the warehouse on pavements at around 4 miles an hour and carry a load of around 9kg. However, Interviewee#1 pointed out that these might need to be limited to very flat landscapes within low-crime zones. In South Korea, E-Mart is using LG’s shopping carts that can follow the customer around and navigate shopping aisles (Synek, 2018). One of the future benefits of the electronic cart is the ability to scan items as they are put into the cart and therefore reducing the need for check-out assistants. Giant Food Stores are using a cobot (Bowles, 2019) called Marty that alerts customers around it when it sees something it considers a hazard. It then sends a message to humans (located, in this case, in the Philippines) who are monitoring the stores on TV screens to determine if the potential hazard is something about which they need to alert the store manager. Investment in such a cobot is economically viable because US slip-and-fall accidents can be expensive if the retailer is found to be at fault. Cobots also have the potential to transform the customer experience. A recent survey (Ismail, 2017) found that nearly half of British consumers have experienced bias because of their individual characteristics, beliefs and/or appearance. Only 8% of respondents felt that chatbots will be biased; this is despite concerns that human bias could be transferred onto modern chatbots. Taking control: robots and risk