For its inaugural re:Mars conference, Amazon invited attendees it calls "dreamers and builders" -- business leaders, scientists and others who are making contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. During the Wednesday keynote at the Las Vegas event, Amazon brandished its own AI credentials, making the case to its potential customers and partners that its teams -- across the business -- are pushing forward the stat of the art. Across every step of its e-commerce operations, AI is at work: Amazon shared the way it uses AI to power e-commerce forecasting, and it showcased StyleSnap, an AI-powered feature that lets shoppers in the Amazon app takes a picture of a piece of clothing and find similar items for sale. Amazon also revealed newest fulfillment center robots, called Pegasus and Xanthus, as well as a new drone that Amazon says will start commercial deliveries within months. For in-store shopping, Amazon revealed new details about the technology that drives its Amazon Go stores.

Consumers today enjoy new levels of shopping convenience, brought to them by the rise of click and collect, home delivery and subscription models. Channel blurring, or consumers moving purchases of a product to alternative channels, has had a noticeable effect on where consumers shop, what products manufacturers and retailers sell, and how they sell them. According to IRI, online sales of consumer packaged goods rose 35.4% in 2018, with more than half of purchases coming from pure-play online retailers. Thus, in order to remain successful, CPG companies must be able to quickly and accurately identify opportunities for growth beyond traditional store formats. Technology powered by artificial intelligence can better understand where consumers are shopping, as well as their purchase preferences and habits, in order to optimize a CPG's approach to marketing and promotions.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is showing that tech companies are finally getting a grasp on robotic appendages. In a demonstration at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas -- a Bezos sponsored event to showcase the latest advancements in machine learning, automation, robotics and space -- the CEO showed off a duo of surprisingly agile robotic hands. In a video on Twitter, Bezos can be seen using high-tech gloves to manipulate a pair of robotic arms. By mimicking his motions, Bezos is able to summon the arms to carry out sophisticated actions using fine motor skills. In one exercise, Bezos is seen passing a ball back and forth between hands and in another he uses the arms to adeptly place plastic rings around a rung.

Walmart employees will start delivering groceries right to a customer's refrigerator in three cities this fall. Starting this fall, Walmart customers can not only buy groceries online, they can then have them dropped off right in their kitchen. More than 1 million shoppers in Kansas City, Mo., Vero Beach, Fl, and Pittsburgh, Pa. will be able to use Walmart's new "InHome'' service, the latest volley in the delivery wars being waged by retailers racing to woo customers with convenience and speed. Walmart employees will first pick the produce or other household items, ordered by a shopper online. They will then deliver food items into the customer's refrigerator, using smart technology that enables the homeowner to let them in and watch what they do while they're there "Once we learned how to do pickup well, we knew it would unlock the ability to deliver,'' Doug McMillon, Walmart's president and CEO, said in a statement.

LAS VEGAS (AP) " Amazon said Wednesday that it plans to use self-piloted drones to deliver packages to shoppers' home in the coming months. The online shopping giant did not give exact timing or say where the drones will be making deliveries. Amazon said its new drones use computer vision and machine learning to detect and avoid people or clotheslines in backyards when landing. "From paragliders to power lines to a corgi in the backyard, the brain of the drone has safety covered," said Jeff Wilke, who oversees Amazon's retail business. Wilke said the drones are fully electric, can fly up to 15 miles (24 kilometers), deliver in 30 minutes and carry goods that weigh up to 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms), like a paperback or toothpaste. Amazon has been working on drone delivery for years.

LAS VEGAS - Amazon.com Inc. has new drones that in coming months will deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less, a step toward a goal that has eluded the retailer for years. The new drone takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter, is more stable than prior models and can spot moving objects better than humans can, making it safe, Jeff Wilke, the chief executive of the company's consumer business, said at the company's "re:MARS" conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Wilke did not say where customers might see the drone in action, but Amazon made its first customer delivery by drone in the United Kingdom in 2016. For years, the world's largest online retailer has promised that packages would be landing on shoppers' doorsteps via these small aircraft, but hype around the service has long outpaced reality. The company has worked to ensure that hard-to-see wires would not trip up its vehicles, for instance, and it has faced tough regulations limiting commercial flights, particularly in the United States.

In the fast-moving digital world, imagine getting a seamless shopping experience, where all the visual content is instantly shoppable and available online to try on before one goes to the final checkout screen. The field of computer vision, which aims to help machines understand visual data as a human would, is rapidly moving ahead, dramatically changing the way we shop and interact with the world around us. One of the more interesting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies gaining popularity in retail is computer vision. Computer vision solutions automate the process of collecting digital images and analysing them at an in-depth level to inform decision-making. Essentially, computer vision allows machines to make judgments reacting just in the same way a human mind would react.

In a series of "groundbreaking first" the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore successfully delivered and transplanted a donor kidney into a patient using an unmanned drone to transport the donated organ. Within a matter of months, your future Amazon orders could be delivered by a self-driving drone. Officials with the online shopping giant unveiled the latest Prime Air drone design Wednesday at Amazon's re:MARS Conference (Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space) in Las Vegas. "We've been hard at work building fully electric drones that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes," Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "And, with the help of our world-class fulfillment and delivery network, we expect to scale Prime Air both quickly and efficiently, delivering packages via drone to customers within months."

Furniture giant, IKEA, is looking to court gamers and people living in cramped spaces with a new wave of robotic furniture and niche e-sport accessories. The Swedish furniture and home accessory giant has always been known for its clean modern aesthetics, but for customers in Hong Kong and Japan that modern style will also be functionally futuristic. Rognan, as the company has dubbed it, is a robotic storage unit that can move from side-to-side using a remote touch pad and is able to dispense space-consuming furniture on-demand, including a couch, a bed, and a desk. IKEA's new robot storage unit is designed to help people maximize space in urban apartments -- many of which are not known for their ample room Aside from adding a bit of sci-fi flare to one's apartment, the unit, which was developed in partnership with furniture startup Ori Living, is actually designed to solve a problem in many urban apartments -- space, or the lack thereof. 'More and more people are living and moving into cities where approximately an extra 1.5 million people join the urban population every week,' said IKEA. 'With Rognan as a robotic furniture solution for small space living, people will be able to turn small spaces into smart spaces that have all the comfort and convenience of a home.'

Your smartphone is an ideal shopping tool -- always with you and armed with a rear camera that captures things you might want to buy. Now imagine its front camera looking back at you, judging your reaction to what you're seeing and taking your smile as a cue to urge you to make a purchase. That's the innovation behind NexTech's latest "sentiment-based technology solution" for its Try-It-On retail augmented reality platform, thanks to AI provided by Microsoft Azure. If it sounds a little creepy, that's probably because AI is learning to do what human salespeople have done for generations: gauge a customer's sentiment and capitalize on it to make a sale. The difference is that NexTech is making facial recognition and analysis possible within retailers' augmented reality apps and websites, rather than limiting it to physical stores.