WASHINGTON--Amid rising calls for regulation, technology companies are pushing for laws that would restrict use of facial-recognition systems--and head off the more severe prohibitions some cities and states are weighing. Inc. and others stand to profit as government agencies and businesses expand use of the technology, which can require large investments in machine-learning and cloud-computing capacity.

Listen to what Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Jack Ma have to say about the way artificial intelligence will impact the future of work. Whether we like it or not artificial intelligence continues to increase in our every day lives. The Future of Work will definitely be different that what it is today. Understand the changes that are coming. "By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as poeple."

Over the years, the basic retail experience has remained more or less the same for the consumers. You go to a store, you look for the right product, and you make a purchase. But for the retailers, it is ever-changing. Analyzing consumer behavior is one of the biggest challenges that CPGs all around the world face. With increasing complexities, traditional auditing methods have proved inefficient.

On the heels of the planet's biggest technology show in CES, comes "The Big Show," otherwise known as NRF (National Retail Federation), which commences annually in NYC and is focused on what's next for the retail industry. Over the past year, Amazon received a lot of attention for the frictionless shopping technologies that it is already integrating into Amazon Go stores. The model systems to have already been accepted as the standard for future retail experiences, and with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, there have been rumblings that the chain could eventually see itself go in that direction. Amazon hasn't gone without competition in that space, however. In 2018, Microsoft and Walmart made waves with a new partnership that leveraged Microsoft Azure and AI to help Walmart improve in-store experiences.

It's part of Ikea's larger push to reduce its carbon footprint. Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group (the company that oversees Ikea's retail outposts), has expressed a commitment to making the company "climate positive" by the end of the decade; the company has allocated roughly $223 million to the initiative and has pledged to invent more energy-efficient alternatives for some of its most popular products. Waste poses a particularly tricky problem. Once a product leaves an Ikea store, the company doesn't have much control over whether it gets returned, passed on to some college kids, or ends up in a landfill. So Ikea is trying to prevent waste in the first place.

Scalable real-time assortment optimization has become essential in e-commerce operations due to the need for personalization and the availability of a large variety of items. While this can be done when there are simplistic assortment choices to be made, imposing constraints on the collection of feasible assortments gives more flexibility to incorporate insights of store-managers and historically well-performing assortments. We design fast and flexible algorithms based on variations of binary search that find the revenue of the (approximately) optimal assortment. In particular, we revisit the problem of large-scale assortment optimization under the multinomial logit choice model without any assumptions on the structure of the feasible assortments. We speed up the comparisons steps using novel vector space embeddings, based on advances in the fields of information retrieval and machine learning. For an arbitrary collection of assortments, our algorithms can find a solution in time that is sub-linear in the number of assortments and for the simpler case of cardinality constraints - linear in the number of items (existing methods are quadratic or worse). Empirical validations using the Billion Prices dataset and several retail transaction datasets show that our algorithms are competitive even when the number of items is $\sim 10^5$ ($100$x larger instances than previously studied).

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is "completely living up to its expected hype and hysteria," with 70% of daily digital interactions being AI-based, and businesses generating multimillion-dollar revenue streams from it. This was the word from Mike Bugembe, founder of UK-based AI consultancy, Lens.ai, delivering a keynote at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit 2020, in Johannesburg, today. Bugembe is a bestselling author, international speaker and executive advisor, helping organisations use data and AI to transform their businesses and grow. Discussing the importance of an AI strategy to gain business value, Bugembe noted that companies across the globe are ramping up investments in AI-related technologies and gaining multimillion-dollar-revenue streams, cutting costs, managing risk, improving operations, and finding innovative ways to develop products and strengthen customer intimacy. However, he warned that without an intelligent roadmap, companies risk focusing on the wrong opportunities, resulting in failure to tap into the true promise of AI. "Business and technology experts believe AI will be the most significant technological revolution that businesses have ever experienced," said Bugembe.

Have you ever wished that you had someone who would guide you through your shopping list, or give you an informed suggestion on what to buy for any particular purpose? In today's day and age given we have so many options and advertisements cluttering our minds with unnecessary trivia about various products which we may or may not need, it is important to think beyond this. Product plug-ins are becoming increasingly common for various platforms like YouTube and Instagram to name a few. While they are able to target the audience much better than the more conventional modes of advertisement like television or newspapers, they still lack that personal touch. Now imagine an AI-based system that will be able to address this problem by establishing a personalized database.

The way Americans shop has changed drastically over the past 10 years and traditional brick and mortar shops have been hit hard by this. In 2019 alone it has been expected that more than 8,600 stores would close continuing a trend that coined the term retail apocalypse. But all is not lost, Artificial Intelligence is making a big impact on these businesses that could save the retail industry from dying. In just two years retail use of AI grew by 600%. Fifteen percent of companies reported spearheading the investment and adoption of AI systems and 1 in 4 large retailers are using their IT budget to invest up to 10% on AI systems.