When Dominic Brynolf took his 70-year-old mother into a Trigo powered autonomous store, she expected sci-fi. Retina scans. Holograms. Complex rituals. What she got was… a grocery store.

“She was underwhelmed at first because she thought it was going to be like Minority Report,” laughs Dominic Brynolf, Vice President of Sales at retail computer vision AI pioneer, Trigo. “You walk the store, pick up all your items, and the magic only happens when you press a button. Suddenly everything you’ve chosen appears, even your loyalty points, and you tap and go.”

Dominic Brynolf, Vice President of Sales at Trigo

That’s the trick, he argues. The technology works precisely because you don’t notice it. No friction, no learning curve, just a better version of what shoppers already know. Fresh from Grocery Gazette’s Horizons event at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Dom sat down with us to discuss where grocery tech delivers real value, what’s holding retailers back, and why the most transformative innovations are often the ones you can’t see.

The hidden cost of doing nothing

For Dom, the biggest barrier to innovation isn’t a lack of good technology. It’s the weight of old decisions. “Some retailers are working with 20 or 25-year-old technical debt,” he says. “Back then, they bought a point-of-sale system that made perfect sense. But today, those legacy foundations slow down the roadmap. It has an impact on everything that follows.”

Those legacy systems were designed for a different era of retail challenges. Trigo’s loss prevention technology, for example, layers on top of existing infrastructure, creating a secure environment without forcing retailers to rip and replace, without adding friction for shoppers, and identifying the 80 per cent of highly stolen goods that are concealed before they ever reach checkout.

“Doing nothing is not the solution. Hope isn’t a strategy. At some point you have to pick something that’s important to the business, build a use case for it, measure the ROI, and then use that to earn internal investment for the next project.”

Where AI actually delivers

If legacy systems are one barrier, the other is distraction. With AI capabilities multiplying, retailers face what Dom calls ‘the paradox of too much choice’. “There’s so much out there that it actually slows down decision-making. It’s the same human problem we all have. You’ve got a to-do list as long as your arm, and you end up doing none of it.”

The most valuable AI applications, he argues, aren’t the headline-grabbing ones. They’re the ones that relieve teams from repetitive work. Take surveillance. Across the industry, thousands of hours are spent on manual monitoring. “You’ve got human beings staring at screens all day, tabbing through camera feeds, trying to catch thieves. Can you imagine a whole working day of just doing that? It’s extremely unproductive, and humans miss things that technology doesn’t.”

AI excels here because it can ‘manage by exception’.

“It can watch constantly, tirelessly, and tell you: here’s something happening in this store that you need to look at now. AI can surface the one event that requires human judgement, instead of asking somebody to stare into a bank of screens hoping to spot it.” The result, he emphasises, isn’t fewer jobs. It’s people “shifted from manually searching for problems to resolving the ones that matter.”

The world’s best autonomous store and why it works

For those still viewing autonomous retail as experimental, Dom offers a challenge: visit our autonomous store partners anywhere across Europe. “They are the very best autonomous stores anywhere on the planet right now,” he says. “Beautifully designed, operationally seamless, and proof of what’s possible when you focus on the possible.”

But whether it’s a flagship concept store or an express store, the principle is consistent: great technology should be invisible. “Shoppers touch an item once, and that’s it. No friction, no barriers. Just a better version of what they already know.”

What comes next

Dom’s parting message is simple. Start somewhere, and stay consistent. “One-offs are never as impactful. The real change comes when you build the right relationships, choose the right use cases, and keep the energy high.”

The future of grocery, in his telling, isn’t theoretical or distant. For early adopters, it’s already here. Already working, already improving operations behind the scenes. What retailers need now, he says, is “the courage to take the first step, and the clarity to take the next one.”

To find out more about Trigo, and to get in touch, click here.

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