Disruptive technology like artificial intelligence (AI) is definitely leaving an indelible mark amid a COVID-19 pandemic where social distancing measures are forcing more reliance on tech. The same can be said in the retail sector and as more consumers head online to do their shopping the retail industry is deploying AI to enhance the experience. "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," a Wall Street Journal article noted. "To do that, these Web-only stores are supercharging search-and-recommendation engines by feeding data into sophisticated algorithms, building predictive models with a level of accuracy unimaginable just a few years ago." "Not all of the capabilities are new--algorithms have been around for decades," the article added.

Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced that it has acquired LLamasoft, a leader in AI-powered supply chain design and planning for a purchase price of approximately $1.5 billion. Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., LLamasoft's technology is used by hundreds of enterprise customers, including brands such as Boeing, Danone S.A., Home Depot, and Nestle. The acquisition will strengthen Coupa's supply chain capabilities, enabling businesses to drive greater value through Business Spend Management. The events of this year continue to demonstrate the importance of supply chain agility, as companies work to more rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, economic conditions, and the political landscape. With demand uncertainty on one hand and supply volatility on the other, companies are in need of supply chain technology that can help them assess alternatives and balance trade-offs to achieve desired business results.

You'll find some serious steals in this sale. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Black Friday doesn't officially begin until November 27, but already, plenty of retailers are serving up their best deals of the season, allowing for a full-on shopping bonanza all month long. QVC, for one, just dropped a massive Black Friday 2020 preview sale, with huge savings and free shipping across all categories, including electronics, beauty, kitchen, home, shoes, jewelry and more. Through November 8, QVC shoppers can enjoy savings of more than 30% on a ton of tried-and-true brands and items, with free shipping and handling on all applicable items.

Snag some of our favorite robot vacuums along with other customer-loved models at Best Buy. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Ready or not, Black Friday is here! Well… maybe not officially, but customer-loved retailers such as Best Buy have already kicked off their first and second rounds of Turkey Day-themed savings that you're not going to want to miss. The electronics hotspot is currently offering tons of discounts on everything from small home appliances to Reviewed-approved headphones and speakers, but some of the most exciting price drops on the site have come on iRobot's famous Roomba vacuums.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to automate decision-making in a variety of domains, including games, autoscaling, finance, robotics, recommendations, and supply chain. Launched at AWS re:Invent 2018, Amazon SageMaker RL helps you quickly build, train, and deploy policies learned by RL. Ray is an open-source distributed execution framework that makes it easy to scale your Python applications. Amazon SageMaker RL uses the RLlib library that builds on the Ray framework to train RL policies. This post walks you through the tools available in Ray and Amazon SageMaker RL that help you address challenges such as scale, security, iterative development, and operational cost when you use RL in production.

Floor space optimization is a critical revenue management problem commonly encountered by retailers. It maximizes store revenue by optimally allocating floor space to product categories which are assigned to their most appropriate planograms. We formulate the problem as a connected multi-choice knapsack problem with an additional global constraint and propose a tabu search based meta-heuristic that exploits the multiple special neighborhood structures. We also incorporate a mechanism to determine how to combine the multiple neighborhood moves. A candidate list strategy based on learning from prior search history is also employed to improve the search quality. The results of computational testing with a set of test problems show that our tabu search heuristic can solve all problems within a reasonable amount of time. Analyses of individual contributions of relevant components of the algorithm were conducted with computational experiments.

Walmart is laying off the robots it had deployed in about 500 stores to keep tabs on what's on and not on the shelves. The retailer said it has ended its relationship with startup Bossa Nova Robotics, which builds roving robots equipped with cameras for identifying out-of-stock and misplaced products. Walmart said in a statement it has "worked with Bossa Nova for five years and together we learned a lot about how technology can assist associates, make jobs easier and provide a better customer experience." It said it is still testing other new technologies for tracking inventory and moving goods. "This was one idea we tried in roughly 500 stores just as we are trying other ideas in additional stores," Walmart said in a statement. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the ending partnership Monday, citing unnamed people familiar with the situation who said the retailer found human workers could get similar results.

Walmart (WMT) has retired robots working in about 500 stores as it found "simpler solutions" to inventory management. The retail giant said it ended its five-year partnership with major supplier Bossa Nova Robotics. Walmart had pushed for automation in its stores for years. The company said in January that Bossa Nova robots would be used in 1,000 of its 4,700 U.S. stores. Walmart had repeatedly said such robots would be'sidekicks' to store workers.

Wayfair Inc. has 37,173 kinds of coffee mugs for sale. Factor in different colors, sizes or materials, and the range of options rises above 70,000. It's Jim Miller's job to help shoppers find the mug they want--along with a set of espresso cups, a waffle iron or other products they didn't know they wanted. In the past five years, the company's success rate has jumped 50%, measured by the number of clicks it takes for a customer to add an item to their carts and how often they buy those items, among other variables, according to Mr. Miller, the Boston-based online retailer's chief technology officer. He credits the gains to advances in smart software.

Many organizations have started adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions, yet the C-level executives are neither data scientists nor AI experts. AI is not a new concept. However, it is only in the last decade the technology has managed to make advancements worldwide. In the present day, we're able to speak to our mobile devices and it responds, when we're trying to book an Uber we receive multiple options with the price updates, or even when we're streaming service on an online portal, we receive recommendations – we've all been experiencing AI-enabled solutions everywhere. It's just that we tend to ignore them.