I'm John Batcha with my colleague and friend Joseph Sternberg, member at the

editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. He's a columnist for the editorial board.

He writes political economics. He's based in London.

And life in London, the parks are lighting up, the daffodils are everywhere.

Artificial intelligence is the dominant theme on the markets everywhere.

AI, we call it.

I've experimented with one AI, Claude, who belongs to Anthropic,

and enjoyed the exchanges with Claude.

However, AI is also in the marketplace and I read that shopping in London is now informed

by the ability of the chains. I read about the one called Tesco

to monitor purchases from the moment you

leave the object on the shelf in the store until you leave the store. Joe's had actual

experience with this. What does it look like, Joe? We have a couple of minutes.

I hate, well, I mean, it's an interesting example of the March of Progress and the economic change because I think that suddenly we're having a lot of innovation in the UK that will sound kind of familiar in the US.

I mean you have the Amazon stores

where you don't check out at all.

It just scans you as you walk through the door

on the way out.

Suddenly, we've had a huge investment in self-checkout technology, including these little handheld machines the size of a walkie-talkie that you can use to scan things as you take them off the shelf and put them in the cart.

And I think that it's an example of how

kind of stores are being motivated by issues

like trouble hiring a shortage of workers and also the expense of the labor force amid inflation

...