CAPE Project Introduction

The retail sector is vital to the economy, and a report by EuroCommerce and McKinsey & Company emphasizes the need for the European Union's retail and wholesale sector to undergo a triple transformation in sustainability, digitalization, and skills and talents, with investments potentially reaching 600 billion euros by 2030. Digital transformation aims to create an omnichannel industry through advanced analytics, enhancing growth, efficiency, and IT modernization. Despite a preference for physical stores, customers engage in both online and offline shopping activities, necessitating a seamless, personalized shopping experience that combines these channels.

The CAPE project addresses the technical and operational challenges of improving shopping experiences and employee work environments. It focuses on personalizing experiences, enhancing the health and performance of robots/kiosks, and offering alternative technologies. The project addresses three major problems and fourteen minor challenges, including resource and movement management, employee identification and tracking, privacy and trust, customer engagement, intelligent search, HCI communication, and mood recognition. Five use cases employ AI, deep learning, blockchain, and IoT to enhance the shopping experience, provide personalized recommendations, boost employee and customer satisfaction, create a trustworthy IoT environment for smart manufacturing, and monitor feedback. The targeted impacts include improved customer experience, increased sales, enhanced safety and efficiency in smart manufacturing, better employee and customer satisfaction, and more efficient store operations. Innovation areas involve technologies like smart dialogue systems, facial emotion recognition, IoT-based recommendations, trust management, customer communication platforms, and employee tracking through biometric kiosks and cameras. Beyond market impact, the CAPE project will study the effects of these technologies on various business domains, benefiting the academic community with insights into customer satisfaction, purchase behavior, employee productivity, and loyalty. The consortium, comprising 16 partners from Romania, Korea, Turkey, Portugal, and Singapore, includes experts in telecommunications, technology consulting, retail, and data analytics, with extensive R&D experience across multiple domains. This diverse expertise positions the consortium well to achieve its goals.