Just over 306 million Americans are affected by stay-at-home orders, nearly 95% of the U.S. population. COVID-19 will forever change retailing, and its initial impact on e-Commerce is creating challenges to online selling & service no one imagined in January. Mobile devices are the most popular device for online shopping by a wide margin. E-Commerce and online retailers' supply chains, order management, and fulfillment systems are all being tested by the triple-digit order and revenue growth going on today. And best of all, more energy and intensity is being put into improving customer experiences online.

IFTTT can tell you when to change your home's air filter: Last month on our IoT Podcast, we mentioned the new Ecobee service that sends you air filters for your HVAC system. Thanks to IFTTT, if you use 3M Filtrete Smart filters, you can set up an IFTTT recipe when it's time to replace that filter, even if you don't have a smart thermostat. You can't set up an automatic order based on the sensor in the filter, but with IFTTT, you could change the color of a light, add a task on your to-do list, or create some other action that tells you it's time to buy a clean filter replacement. The new IFTTT integration is one of several the company debuted this month. Covariant raises $40M to build better AI for robots: Covariant, a robotics startup that was initially born as an academic research project, raised $45 million in Series B funding this week.

Nvidia today unveiled its plans to acquire Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed sum in a bid to bolster the chipmaker's presence in the networking space. Combined with Mellanox, which Nvidia bought last year for more than $6.9 billion, the chipmaker says Cumulus' open networking platform will help to accelerate the development and adoption of the software-defined data center. "The Cumulus acquisition, along with Mellanox, strengthens our position to reshape the modern data center to handle the exponential growth in AI [artificial intelligence] and [high-performance computing]," an Nvidia spokesperson wrote in an email to SDxCentral. "Cumulus' networking software expertise augments Nvidia's strategy of innovating across the entire stack, from silicon to systems to software, to deliver unique value to customers." Nvidia claims that with Cumulus it will be able to innovate across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software.

One of the biggest tech opportunities over the next decade is artificial intelligence (AI). According to Grand View Research, the general AI market, across a variety of products and services, is set to expand at a huge 46.2% average annual growth rate between 2019 and 2025. AI is set to power the next generation of tech innovation, from virtual assistants, to big-data analytics and inference, to self-driving cars, to image and voice recognition, and new 5G applications. With COVID-19 sweeping across the country and leading to shelter-in-place orders, many of these tech trends could be accelerated, as business look to quickly digitize to serve customers and cut costs. With many AI-oriented big tech companies reporting resilient financial results in their first quarter earnings reports, several look like strong buys in May as we come out of the March crash.

Covariant today announced the close of a $40 million series B funding round to bring its robotic control systems to additional industries and create more systems capable of picking, placing, and unloading objects in warehouses. Until now, Covariant has focused its efforts on ecommerce picking robots in highly automated warehouses. It may be best known for its work in robotic grasping, the task of picking up objects with a robotic hand or gripper. The startup -- whose founders who met at OpenAI and University of California, Berkeley -- has raised $67 million, to date. After emerging from stealth earlier this year with support from deep learning luminaries like Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, and Yann LeCun, Covariant stated that the Covariant Brain system is capable of picking and packing some 10,000 items with 99% accuracy. Robotics manufacturer ABB signed a partnership with Covariant in February, following a picking and sorting test held by ABB last year in which Covariant outperformed 20 other systems.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI) right now- with many predicting that AI will lead the next wave of economic growth and productivity for the next couple of decades at least. AI refers to the use of data to simulate human intelligence processes including learning, reasoning and self-correction by machines. AI is making its way into almost every industry. With IDC predicting that worldwide spending on AI will be nearly $98 Billion in 2023, the implications of this technology are massive. And this has not been ignored by Wall Street. Analysts say that plenty of compelling investments can be found within this space.

Ford said Tuesday it will delay until 2022 plans to launch an autonomous vehicle service, as the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the company to rethink its go-to-market strategy. The news was shared as part of Ford's quarterly earnings, which was released after the market closed Tuesday. Ford reported a $2 billion loss in the first quarter compared to a profit of $1.1 billion in the same period last year. The company warned that losses during the second quarter will widen as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt its business. Ford is a bit different from other companies that have launched autonomous vehicle pilots in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating many problems for the car industry, and that extends to Ford's self-driving taxis. While discussing its quarterly earnings, the company revealed that its autonomous vehicle services have been delayed from 2021 to 2022. In a statement to TechCrunch, it said it needed to "evaluate" the effect of COVID-19 on customer behavior and potentially change its strategy. It also wanted to offer future users "peace of mind" knowing that they and their packages would be safe. Ford COO Jim Farley warned during the earnings call that the pandemic could influence society for "many years to come," with people seeking out more ways to avoid unnecessary human contact.

Signalling the resistance of the robotic process automation market despite a poorly performing economy, RPA solutions provider Blue Prism announced that it has raised over $124 million in equity financing at a valuation of around $1.24 billion. According to CEO Jason Kingdon, a bulk of the capital will go into bolstering the company's automation suite. Just last month, Blue Prism had launched a COVID-19 response task team to perform a variety of functions. This team has been working with the UK's National Health Service, University of California, and the Leeds Building Society to automate personnel, vaccine development, finance, and related health care support functions. "Our RPA solution is more important than ever in this environment," Kingdon said in a report. "The impact of this pandemic is unknown, and as a result, we are taking action to invest and reinforce our product differentiation in preparation for the opportunities that will occur," he added.