Retailers love to burble on about how cool and smart their supply chains are, yet come a crisis like COVID-19, toilet roll and hand sanitizer are suddenly rarer than strong political leadership. The truth is, the weak link remains with the in-store reporting of sales back to local or regional HQ and an inability to respond to fast-moving changes through the supply chain. AI and Bots will help out next time a similar event comes around by dynamically responding to changes across the supply chain. Bots and AI are already well entrenched in our supply chains, but not to the extent retail business leaders would like to think. Even a minor shock can impact individual stores and there are plenty of examples beyond the current crisis.

Since the coronavirus outbreak, online retailers like Wayfair, Etsy Inc. and Pinterest Inc. are ratcheting up efforts to leverage data from a surge in e-commerce to get better at helping customers find what they are looking for--even when they don't know what that is,

The holidays can be stressful as the number of people you need to buy gifts for grows with each passing year. You may not be able to control that, but you can still find good presents for everyone on your list while sticking to a budget. To help you do so, we've gathered all of the items in our holiday gift guide that come in at under $50 right here. But before we get into the list, we wanted to call out two specific guides in which almost all of our recommendations are under $50: our digital and subscription gift guide and this roundup of our staff's favorite books, music and media. Check out those stories for digital gifts you can send loved ones that you can't see in person and for the best media that's been keeping us entertained this year.

There's no better way to spend a mid-winter holiday evening than wrapped up in blankets on the couch, sipping cocoa and watching a fun, wholesome film with the family -- at least it would be if you hadn't already been locked in the same house with these same mouth-breathers under COVID quarantine for the last nine months. So this year, while the fam is off-key singing their way through Frozen 2 for the bazillionth time since March, give yourself an early gift. Put on some Kamasi Washington and curl up with one of these phenomenal titles. It's sometimes said that traveling back in time is only a fantasy for the privileged. In Octavia Butler's seminal story -- here adapted into graphic-novel form -- a young, black, 20th century woman time-travels to a plantation in the antebellum South.

Hwy Haul uses a digital platform to match shipments with truckers. As Director of Supply Chain, Syed Aman spent several years making sure when produce reached Walmart WMT stores, it wasn't rotten. Now, as CEO and co-founder of Hwy Haul, he's using what he learned to give other supermarkets the same insurance, because it's not just a few bad apples spoiling the whole bunch. "Produce spends half its life in the supply chain and more than $15 billion is wasted or rejected in transit every year," said Aman. "On average 14% of the produce shipments get rejected." The lingering Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the problem with supply chain disruptions and strict packaging requirements by top retailers such as Walmart and Target TGT adding to the complexity of getting fruit and vegetables from farm to produce shelves while still fresh, Aman said.

Due to accessible big data collections from consumers, products, and stores, advanced sales forecasting capabilities have drawn great attention from many companies especially in the retail business because of its importance in decision making. Improvement of the forecasting accuracy, even by a small percentage, may have a substantial impact on companies' production and financial planning, marketing strategies, inventory controls, supply chain management, and eventually stock prices. Specifically, our research goal is to forecast the sales of each product in each store in the near future. Motivated by tensor factorization methodologies for personalized context-aware recommender systems, we propose a novel approach called the Advanced Temporal Latent-factor Approach to Sales forecasting (ATLAS), which achieves accurate and individualized prediction for sales by building a single tensor-factorization model across multiple stores and products. Our contribution is a combination of: tensor framework (to leverage information across stores and products), a new regularization function (to incorporate demand dynamics), and extrapolation of tensor into future time periods using state-of-the-art statistical (seasonal auto-regressive integrated moving-average models) and machine-learning (recurrent neural networks) models. The advantages of ATLAS are demonstrated on eight product category datasets collected by the Information Resource, Inc., where a total of 165 million weekly sales transactions from more than 1,500 grocery stores over 15,560 products are analyzed.

This eufy vac is insanely discounted right now. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. In the age of smart home technology, robot vacuums are a must. These little devices roam around your home, sweeping and suctioning up dirt, pet hair and grime from your floors, all while you work, run errands or relax. These best-selling machines don't typically come cheap, but thanks to Walmart's current Black Friday 2020 sale, you can get a popular eufy robot vacuum for less than $100.

Many of us have already encountered artificial intelligence (AI) in product searches, online shopping processes, and out-of-home advertising. It seems to offer unlimited potential, from AI-powered automated content to predictive targeting and personalized product recommendations in real-time. AI's capability to collect and analyses vast quantities of data in record time is also a big advantage in marketing. AI is already providing guidance at many touchpoints along the customer journey with personalized content, product recommendations, and dialogue with virtual assistants such as Hallo Magenta, Amazon Alexa, or the Google Assistant. The latter uses RankBrain, a machine learning-based search engine algorithm, to increase search result precision.

As the pandemic raged on, enterprises of all scales rushed to accelerate their digital transformation efforts for maintaining business continuity. The retail sector also didn't escape unscathed and had to take a flurry of measures to remain operational amidst rising discretionary spending by consumers. The crisis has pushed the retail organizations to take pivotal digital decisions instantly to achieve tangible business results. One of the technologies that has garnered much attention in these tricky times is Artificial Intelligence (AI). The technology enables organizations to make well-informed data-driven decisions and predict the possible outcome of those decisions.

Amazon unofficially kicked things off on Prime Day last month, and now we're starting to see a number of early Black Friday deals pop up at other retailers. Walmart will actually have a couple of rounds of deals going live on its website and in its stores this month, and the first rolled out online tonight at 7pm ET. We sifted through the list and found the best tech deals you can get right now. This is a new all-time-low price for Apple's standard AirPods with wired charging case. The previous low came last month during Amazon Prime Day when these earbuds dropped to $115.