The other test, from Walmart's Store No. 8 incubator, may be more ambitious. Project Kepler, as it's called, would use computer vision and other technologies to eliminate the need for cashiers, similar to Amazon Go. While the exact details haven't been mentioned, it would reportedly share Amazon's use of cameras and sensors to automatically charge you when you pull an item off the shelf.

Walmart isn't commenting, and it's not certain how far along either project might be. Amazon Go still isn't public (it has problems with crowds), and we wouldn't be surprised if Walmart has plenty of issues to solve as well.

The personal shopping feature is slightly odd for Walmart -- if you're the sort who can afford a personal shopper, you're probably more interested in fetching luxury goods. However, this and the cashier-free research make sense in light of Walmart's competition with Amazon. And like it or not, this also hints that the days of human staffing might be numbered. If Walmart can run cashier-free stores with maintenance robots handling the remaining work, there would be very little need for fleshy employees.