Coffee with a Shot of technology

If you walk into a Starbucks store anywhere in the world and you’ll encounter a similar sight: coffee beans grinding, espresso shots being pulled and customers talking to baristas while their coffee order is hand-crafted. But a lot goes behind the story, you get Coffee with a Shot of technology at Starbucks.

This process looks like a daily simple scene happening every day at the shop, but a lot run behind in an orchestrated manner to manage around 100 million customers every week.

With the help of Microsoft, Starbucks is creating an even more personal, seamless customer experience in its stores by implementing Artificial Intelligence.

At the Microsoft Build 2019 conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demonstrated how Starbucks delivers its signature customer experience with AI technologies.

Making recommendations more relevant with reinforcement learning(subset of machine learning, a branch of AI)

Starbucks has been using reinforcement learning technology — a type of machine learning in which a system learns to make decisions in complex, unpredictable environments based upon external feedback — to provide a more personalized experience for customers who use the Starbucks mobile app.

Also the customers get personalized drink according to weather situation. What customers would like to drink if its too cold, all such quick decisions are made by coffee machines.

This all is based on AI. (Artificial intelligence is defined as a collection of technologies that are capable of sensing, thinking, and acting like rational human beings, the most common applications being chatbots, facial recognition, image classification, aggregators, recommendation engines, and targeted marketing. AI has the potential to solve complex problems effectively at scale.)

Starbucks has partnered with Microsoft to deploy Azure Sphere, designed to secure the coming wave of connected internet of things (IoT) devices across its store equipment.

The AI technology will also enable Starbucks to send new coffee recipes directly to machines, which it has previously done by manually delivering the recipes to stores via a thumb drive multiple times a year. Now the recipes can be delivered securely from the cloud to Azure Sphere-enabled devices at the click of a button in all the stores of Starbucks across the world.

Using blockchain to share coffee’s journey with customers

Starbucks also innovated ways to trace the journey that its coffee makes from farm to cup — and to connect the people who drink it with the people who grow it.

information about where their packaged coffee comes from, from where it was grown and what Starbucks is doing to support farmers in those locations, to where and when it was roasted, tasting notes and more.

This new transparency is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service, which allows supply chain participants to trace both the movement of their coffee and its transformation from bean to final bag. Each state change is recorded to a shared, immutable ledger providing all parties a more complete view of their products’ journey.

This can not only empower farmers with more information and visibility once the beans leave their farms but also allows customers to see the impact their coffee purchase has on the real people they’re supporting.

So don’t you think Starbucks is not only a coffee shop, it is giant data tech, which has amalgamated data, technology, and business better than most.

Also read, AI/ML Image & Video Changes – Step 1: Installation of TensorFlow in Anaconda