While people outside of the accounting profession continue to smugly insist that accountants will be out of work in 12 months 18 months two years five years any day now due to AI and automation, those of you who eagerly awaiting this happening will just have to keep waiting. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, we know it’s upsetting to hear. Any day now, promise.
In an exclusive published yesterday, Reuters says that Starbucks is scrapping its automated inventory count tool — which they so appropriately named Automated Counting — after a nine-month deployment in its North American stores.
The tool was part of CEO Brian Niccol’s efforts to fix the coffee chain’s persistent product shortages that he has blamed for hurting sales. The app – designed to improve Starbucks’ visibility into shortages at stores – frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, such as confusing similar milk types or missing them altogether, Reuters reported in February.
In that February story, Reuters wrote that the AI app’s provider NomadGo claimed 99% accuracy. “What NomadGo set out to do is modernize inventory counting to make it faster and less burdensome while providing timely, actionable data on product availability,” the company told Reuters in a statement.
Here’s NomadGO CEO David Greschler and Strategy Manager of Inventory AI at Starbucks (that’s a mouthful) Kevin Summers discussing it at FSTEC 2025 in a September 2025 YouTube video:
Preservetube link to that video in case it gets yoinked. After doing this for 17 years we’ve learned that you have to archive this stuff. It appears Starbucks has already deleted the app’s announcement off its blog as this link is dead though not yet fallen off from Google search.
Back to current day:
“Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired,” read an internal company newsletter dated Monday that Reuters reviewed and verified with two employees. “Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other inventory categories in your coffeehouse.”
Starbucks shared some employee feedback with Reuters that included one employee saying “Thanks for discontinuing Automatic Counting! The thought behind it was great, but the execution was proving difficult.”
You can also find employees celebrating the end of Automated Counting in their subreddit. This comment gives us a look into why it may have failed, which is that this stuff only works if you give it excellent data (but you’re all smart professionals, you knew that):
We joke about looming automation threats and acknowledge they are indeed real as the tech is advancing quickly but I think we can safely say that plenty of you will still be doing manual inventory counts come December. And probably the next December. And the December after that one…
