Amit Chachek spent two decades building award winning visual effects for brands like Walmart and Coke before founding WeR AR, an augmented reality company built to fix the physical retail shelf.
His core argument is simple. Retailers know everything about their backroom inventory and everything about the point of sale, but the space in between, the shelf itself, is a blind spot.
Amit walks through how WeR AR uses a standard smartphone camera, no robots or fixed shelf cameras required, to let employees detect, verify, and fix shelf issues in real time. He explains the RGIS partnership, how data ownership is split between the platform and the retailer, and why he still believes smart glasses are three to five years from being useful in the enterprise.
Listeners get a grounded look at where AI actually helps on the retail floor right now, and where the hype around wearables and robotics still outpaces reality.
Website: https://expanio.com/
Podcast website: https://expanio.com/commerce-untold-podcast/
Eitan Koter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eitankoter/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@expanioglobal
Guest: Amit Chachek, CEO, WeR AR
Amit Chachek’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitchachek
WeR AR: https://wer.io
Key Takeaways:
• The retail shelf hasn’t changed in 100 years, and that gap between backroom and POS data is where retailers are blind
• A regular smartphone camera can replace shelf scanning robots and fixed cameras, cutting hardware and ROI headaches
• Augmented reality on shelf can cut daily shelf management tasks by fifty to eighty percent
• Humans empowered by AR outperform robots because robots can detect problems but cannot execute fixes on the shelf
• Vision-language models still can’t consistently understand spatial environments from video, which is why smart glasses remain years away from real utility
• Winning enterprise retail deals takes one internal champion willing to test in real stores for over a year before wider rollout
Chapters:
[00:16] Introduction: From VFX to Retail Shelves
[01:11] Amit’s ADHD Story and the Road to Entrepreneurship
[04:20] Leaving Media and Entertainment for Augmented Reality
[09:40] How AI Reshaped WeR AR’s Roadmap
[13:43] Pitching Shelf Intelligence to Store Managers
[15:23] Smartphones vs. Shelf Scanning Robots
[17:20] The RGIS Partnership and Retail Data Ownership
[22:19] Smart Glasses, Qualcomm, and Why Phones Still Win
