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For all the talk about the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive meaningful transformation for retailers that want to reinvent themselves for today's demanding renvironment, many companies fall short of harnessing the full benefits of AI and analytics for actionable insights. That's because many of these attempts fail to take into account the human element of effective change management. For retailers to successfully benefit from AI, there must be systematic, organizationwide commitment to driving meaningful change and creating a data-driven culture. In more than 10 years of deep engagement with retailers working to adopt AI-based price and promotion optimization, I've learned that AI and analytics alone do not power true transformation to a more agile and nimble strategy. Instead, real success comes when a company embraces wide-ranging organizational change.

Battlesnake is an AI competition based on the traditional snake game in which multiple AI-powered snakes compete to be the last snake surviving. Battlesnake attracts a community of developers at all levels. Hundreds of snakes compete and rise up in the ranks in the online Battlesnake global arena. Battlesnake also hosts several offline events that are attended by more than a thousand developers and non-developers alike and are streamed on Twitch. Teams of developers build snakes for the competition and learn new tech skills, learn to collaborate, and have fun. Teams can build snakes by using a variety of strategies ranging from state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to unique heuristics-based strategies. This post shows how to use Amazon SageMaker to build an RL-based snake.

Keeping up with ever-demanding customers and fierce competition requires setting eyes on tiniest details. Customers were never so picky, but we cannot judge in the times of abundant choices – we have to adapt. When it comes to retail business, apart from offering a high-quality product, customers are seeking for enhanced customer experience, and that's the aspect that makes a whole difference. Did you know that artificial intelligence (AI) in the retail business was valued at $650 million in 2017., and the predictions show the rapid growth of around 40% until 2024.? Keep reading as we're going to talk about the ways AI can improve the performance, productivity, and ROI of your retail business. No being able to satisfy demanding customers can potentially lead to negative business results such as higher inventory costs or losing the customers due to not having the item on demand.

'Ecommerce businesses have a problem - one that causes lost customer revenue, yet has been historically nearly impossible to solve' Geoff Huang, VP of Product at Sift The problem stems from the inability to know their false-positive rate, which is the percentage of orders from legitimate customers that are mistakenly blocked as fraud. According to a survey conducted by CNP, 42% of ecommerce merchants don't know their false-positive rate (also known as customer insult rate). That is a startling statistic--nearly half of online sellers have no visibility into the number of good orders they inadvertently block or the subsequent revenue lost from those orders. And the news, unfortunately, doesn't get much better. Sift polled 1,000 adult consumers and found roughly 25% of insulted online shoppers--those who were falsely declined--will take their business to a competitor.

While artificial intelligence is increasingly being used for dealing with customer issues, those customers have mixed feelings about it. Nearly half (47%) of consumers do not enjoy having customer issues resolved without human interaction, according to a new study. Of those, 41% generally like dealing with a real person and 6% say AI has failed them in the past, according to the study, comprising a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by Blue Fountain Media. More than half (53%) say they enjoy getting customer service issues resolved without human interaction. However, 25% of them enjoy AI-based customer service, such as a chatbot, but say there definitely is room for improvement, with AI sometimes getting stuck in a loop.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models at any scale. In addition to building ML models using more commonly used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, you can also build reinforcement learning (RL) models using Amazon SageMaker RL. Amazon SageMaker RL includes pre-built RL libraries and algorithms that make it easy to get started with reinforcement learning. For more information, see Amazon SageMaker RL – Managed Reinforcement Learning with Amazon Sagemaker. Amazon SageMaker RL makes it easy to integrate with various simulation environments such as AWS RoboMaker, Open AI Gym, open-source environments, and custom-built environments for training RL models.

E-commerce will have grown 5% by 2021, meaning it will soon make up 17.5% of total global retail sales. Perhaps the single most powerful driving force behind the industry's growth so far has been technology. From rapid improvement in smartphones to new software that creates immersive and frictionless customer experiences, advancements in tech are paving the way for the future of e-commerce. Technology is often viewed as impersonal, something that provides a uniform experience to every user, no matter who they are. But in fact, many advances in e-commerce technology are focused on exactly the opposite: providing personalized, one-on-one interactions between brands and individual shoppers, but at scale.

Amazon on Monday announced it will now offer its cashierless store technology, called "Just Walk Out," to other retailers. The technology uses a combination of cameras, sensors, computer vision techniques and deep learning to allow customers to shop, then leave the store without waiting in line to pay. This is the same technology that today powers the Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores and Amazon's newly launched Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle. Reuters first reported the news just ahead of Amazon's official announcement, adding also that Amazon says it has signed "several" deals with initial customers interested in using Just Walk Out in their own stores. Amazon did not say who those customers are, however.

In recent years, there has been a greater demand on retailers to adapt to rapid changes in consumer attitudes and the marketplace in order to keep up. Customer experience is very much dependant on retail operations, which have the potential to make or break a customer's journey. It's imperative for retailers to adopt a globally competitive business model, and using artificial intelligence technologies can break down barriers and make it easier to communicate with customers. It's now become possible for businesses to continuously scrutinise customer behaviour data and generate alerts through the power of machine learning. Most companies are already rich with data.