Overview
- An internal company newsletter dated Monday announced that the Automated Counting program would be retired and that beverage components and milk will revert to the same counting process used for other inventory categories.
- Starbucks and Reuters say the tool repeatedly miscounted and mislabeled items on shelves, sometimes confusing similar milk types or missing products during scans that used tablet cameras and LIDAR.
- The company said it is standardizing manual counts for key beverage items and will push for more frequent daily replenishments as immediate fixes to recurring product shortages.
- NomadGo, the vendor that supplied the app, said it is learning from user feedback and iterating on the product while Starbucks focuses on consistent execution at scale.
- The change is part of CEO Brian Niccol’s broader operations push to fix store-level availability, and it signals that in-store variability and real-world packaging limits can undercut AI pilots even where they once showed promise.