IKEA's latest effort to improve its environmental footprint has taken a decidedly aquatic bent. The company has designed a remote-controlled boat, the Good Ship IKEA, that clears trash from the water. It may look cutesy (it's modeled after the SMÅKRYP bath toy), but it's very much functional. They use environmental cleanup boat technology that can collect up to 44lbs of debris at a time -- a small fleet could keep a river relatively pristine. Like some aerial drones, the remote control provides a first-person view thanks to a camera.

And one place that it's really starting to change things is e-commerce. Below you'll find some interesting stats and facts about how AI is growing in e-commerce and how it's changing the way we do things. From personalizing the shopping experience for customers to creating personal buying assistants, AI is something retailers can't ignore. We'll also take a look at some examples of how leading online stores have used AI to enrich the customer buying experience.

Save money on home products and more with these deals. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Walmart (and its sister site Jet.com) is often underrated as a place to shop online, but you and I know differently. Not only it is a great place to shop for basics at a great price, but you can also find incredible deals on popular products.

Cashierless checkout technologies today are delivered in two iterations. The first takes the form of a typical mobile self-checkout -- a shopper scans products with a mobile device as they browse the aisles, then pays for the transaction via a mobile app without having to fumble through their wallet for cash. Consumers are warming up to the concept, with 48% of U.S. consumers expressing the belief that scan-and-go technology would make shopping easier, and 43% saying they would rather try scan-and-go than wait in a checkout line, according to data from GPShopper. The more recent iteration of cashierless has been heavily publicized with the openings of the first 10 Amazon Go stores. Most of the major players within this space have combined AI- and computer vision-based technology with in-store sensors.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. It's Presidents Day, and you know what that means--a lot of stuff is on sale right now. Whether you have the day off or you're stuck at the office while your kids get to stay home from school, there's one thing everyone can enjoy on this Monday holiday--deals, deals, and more deals. This February holiday typically brings with it discounts and big savings on large appliances and mattresses, but that's not where it ends.

Two decades ago, retail was the most untapped market in India and today, it is the fastest growing! Indian retail sector that boasts of employing 8 per cent of the total workforce, currently a billion-dollar market expected to become a trillion-dollar market by 2020, is on a roll and it is getting more expansive and robust one year after another. Mr Ambud Sharma, Founder and CEO of Escaro Royale feels, "Indian retail industry is growing at its fastest pace ever thriving to become the world's largest retail industry. The continually churning wheels of development and advancements in product delivery have led to a huge transformation in the retail segment." He also adds that India is poised to become the world's largest e-commerce market and 2019 is going to witness a lot many changes in the retail sector.

At the beginning of last year we announced an Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows blog and website creators who are using WordPress to quickly and easily create audio versions of their posts, articles and websites. A few months later, we updated the plugin with the ability to quickly translate the content of websites to other languages using the Amazon Translate service. This functionality, together with the ability to create audio versions, allows you to voice the content of sites in translated languages. We want to allow creators and authors to reach more readers/listeners around the world using the latest AI services offered by AWS.

Facial Recognition is a biometric application which catches a picture and uses it to distinguish people by applying facial analytics and comparing it with the current database. Facial recognition systems are regularly utilized for security purposes, particularly in the surveillance field however as of late the utilization of facial recognition in different applications has advanced. The facial recognition market is driven by expanding criminal exercises, internationally. Aside from it, the expanding safety efforts at ATMs and the growing establishment of facial recognition systems at air terminals, and shopping centers drive the facial acknowledgment market. Silicon Valley's way to deal with facial recognition, utilizing amazing PCs and huge datasets of appearances to prepare profoundly precise programming, is just the start to enter into the security market.

We consider a context-based dynamic pricing problem of online products which have low sales. Sales data from Alibaba, a major global online retailer, illustrate the prevalence of low-sale products. For these products, existing single-product dynamic pricing algorithms do not work well due to insufficient data samples. To address this challenge, we propose pricing policies that concurrently perform clustering over products and set individual pricing decisions on the fly. By clustering data and identifying products that have similar demand patterns, we utilize sales data from products within the same cluster to improve demand estimation and allow for better pricing decisions. We evaluate the algorithms using the regret, and the result shows that when product demand functions come from multiple clusters, our algorithms significantly outperform traditional single-product pricing policies. Numerical experiments using a real dataset from Alibaba demonstrate that the proposed policies, compared with several benchmark policies, increase the revenue. The results show that online clustering is an effective approach to tackling dynamic pricing problems associated with low-sale products. Our algorithms were further implemented in a field study at Alibaba with 40 products for 30 consecutive days, and compared to the products which use business-as-usual pricing policy of Alibaba. The results from the field experiment show that the overall revenue increased by 10.14%.

At the meeting on Wednesday, bureaucrats gave a presentation to cabinet ministers showing how Facebook, Google, Amazon.com, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd and China's top search engine Baidu Inc have increased influence by expanding into payment systems, retail shops, self-driving cars, drones, and interconnected devices.