Starbucks made a national bet on an AI tool; 9 months later, it pulled the plug

Last fall, Carl Addison showed his Starbucks coworkers a magic trick. As a shift supervisor at his Seattle-area café, he was responsible for the store’s twice-a-week inventory count. Starbucks had introduced a new AI tool in September to automate the process. Called Automated Counting, it used an iPad camera to identify and tally items on the storage shelves, turning an hour-long job into one that was supposed to take as little as 10 to 12 minutes. Addison discovered that when he aimed the iPad…