Humans 1 – Machines 0: The E-commerce Glitch You Won’t Believe

Here we go:

This whole humans vs. machines thing isn’t just some sci-fi storyline anymore. It’s already happening. And it's messy. Especially when you're running an e-commerce biz with fresh products, home delivery, store pickups, lockers… the works.

Let me tell you what happened to us, and I swear, no one saw this coming.

We recently jumped into a supermarket e-commerce project. At first glance, everything looked good: new orders come in, there's a system that picks up the notification, and boom—the team gets to work.

They don’t waste time. As soon as a new order drops, the prep team grabs it and flies. We’re talking like a minute to get it packed and marked as "ready." Super efficient, right?

Yeah, well... too efficient, turns out.

See, there’s also an automation system in place. Every few minutes—could be 2, could be 5, honestly can’t remember—it checks for orders in "paid" status to trigger other processes.

Problem is: our human team was so damn fast that by the time the automation kicked in, the order was already marked as "prepared." It skipped the 'paid' state entirely, at least as far as the automation saw it.

So what happens? That order slips through the cracks. It never gets processed by the bot. Why? Because it never got caught in the tiny window where it was marked "paid." The humans beat the machine to the punch.

Weird, right?

We had an actual incident just because people were too quick at doing their job. It's not their fault, of course. But still—classic case of "machine rules vs. human reality."

So, I ask you: Who’s really winning this war?

People or machines?

'Cause sometimes... the problem is that the humans are better.