Sam’s Club Robots Get Smarter

Sam’s Club’s autonomous floor-scrubbing robots are getting an upgrade. In partnership with Brain Corp and Tennant Co., the warehouse club announced it is adding an inventory scanning feature to its robotic fleet chainwide.

The new Inventory Scan accessory will be fitted to almost 600 floor scrubbers already deployed within Sam’s Club stores. Once installed, the new, cloud-connected Inventory Scan tower can capture data as it moves autonomously around the club. Reports are then delivered to the club managers with insights such as verification of pricing accuracy, planogram compliance, product stock levels and product localization.

The towers are powered by Brain Corp.’s AI operating system, BrainOS, and manufactured by Tennant Co.

"Sam’s Club is hyperfocused on making sure our members have a seamless shopping experience, so any time-saving innovation we can implement is significant. By adding Inventory Scan to our current fleet of robotic scrubbers, we obtain critical inventory data that previously was time consuming to obtain," said Todd Garner, VP of in-club product management for Sam’s Club.

Eugene Izhikevich, CEO of Brain Corp., added, "We are actively taking BrainOS-powered robots from primarily task-oriented machines to in-store data acquisition platforms, able to deliver actionable insights on inventory availability, planogram compliance and more. This adds significant ROI for retailers."

In relation to creatin a seamless shopping experience, Sam’s Club in July 2021 began piloting Scan & Ship technology that lets customers scan select merchandise in-store for delivery to their desired destination. Scan & Ship offers "great potential to deliver the ultimate omnichannel member experience across our entire chain," Sam's Club SVP and Chief Product Officer Tim Simmons said at the time.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart Inc., has nearly 600 clubs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.