Isn't that what we all would like to have every night? But somehow, grocery shopping remains a tedious and sometimes overwhelming task. Especially when you account for the varied preferences and dietary needs of those you're feeding. You make your way to the supermarket, written list in hand, strategizing about the most efficient route through the store to ensure you don't keep walking from one aisle to the other. After you've figured out the route you're going to take, you face the challenge of picking from a wide variety of sizes, brands, and prices of the products you need.

Consumer brands and retailers often struggle to fully understand ever-changing customer needs. That is why you mostly find XL sizes in your favorite fashion store and no M sizes. That is why you have to spend hours looking for the style you saw on Instagram and still not find it. That is why the cost of dead inventory to fashion retailers in the US alone is an estimated to be a whopping USD 50 billion. And that is part of the reason why the US generated 16 million tons of textile waste in 2014.

At re:Invent 2018, we announced Amazon SageMaker Neo, a new machine learning feature that you can use to train a machine learning model once and then run it anywhere in the cloud and at the edge. Today, we are releasing the code as the open source Neo-AI project under the Apache Software License. This release enables processor vendors, device makers, and deep learning developers to rapidly bring new and independent innovations in machine learning to a wide variety of hardware platforms. Ordinarily, optimizing a machine learning model for multiple hardware platforms is difficult because developers need to tune models manually for each platform's hardware and software configuration. This is especially challenging for edge devices, which tend to be constrained in compute power and storage.

Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of two books: The New York Times Bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (winner of the 2015 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and translated into more than 20 languages) and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, as well as the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. His TED Talk on the impact of AI and robotics on the economy and society, given on the main stage at the 2017 TED Conference, has been viewed more than 2 million times. Martin is also the consulting artificial intelligence expert for the new "Rise of the Robots Index" from Societe Generale, underlying the Lyxor Robotics & AI ETF, which is focused specifically on investing in companies that will be significant participants in the AI and robotics revolution. He holds a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a graduate business degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written about future technology and its implications for publications including The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times.

Cision Ltd. (NYSE: CISN) is buying TrendKite Inc. for $225 million. TrendKite uses artificial intelligence to help communications professionals assess the impact of their efforts. "TrendKite and Cision have a shared understanding of the communications industry's need to quantify the business value of earned media campaigns," says TrendKite CEO Erik Huddleston. "The combination of TrendKite's rich analytics platform and the Cision Communications Cloud platform will powerfully impact our joint customer base with the most robust, end-to-end Earned Media Management solution available." Buyers are hot on the trail of innovations, including artificial intelligence, that will drive sustainable value to customers and make companies more efficient, more effective and less expensive to run.

Leading economists say that the world is experiencing a technical revolution at a never-before-seen level of complexity. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the center of this shift and is changing the way that people work, live, and relate to one another. These trends tend to scare people. "When we attempt to use machines to replace the role of humans in our social lives, the response is immediate and negative," writes Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder at NudgeAI for The Globe and Mail. But there's another side to this story, says Woods. "The last islands of human employment won't be based on skills that machines are incapable of; they will be areas where we won't desire AI replacement."

Would you ever consider purchasing diamond jewelry online? Lots of people have -- according to Research and Markets, the jewelry ecommerce market accounts for roughly 5 percent of the $257 billion overall jewelry industry, a share that's expected to triple by 2020. It's growing especially quickly in Asia, where the compound annual growth rate from 2011 to 2014 exceeded 60 percent. But if you're reluctant to dive in, you're not the only one -- there's a lot of uncertainty in the online diamond-buying market. High-resolution photos alone don't always tell the full story, particularly if they're lit unnaturally.

At first glance, the black and white Robomart vehicle, with its minimalist design and rounded body, looks like a vision of the future. But if you ignore the lack of a steering wheel and human driver, the electric, grocery-filled machine -- about the size of a minivan -- is actually something of a throwback. For much of U.S. history, perishable kitchen items such as produce, milk, eggs and ice arrived outside people's homes on a daily basis, first by horse-drawn wagon and later by truck. This curbside service would eventually fall victim to refrigeration, automobiles and the rise of the supermarket, making weekly shopping trips the modern American norm, according to Boston Hospitality Review. Now Robomart -- a Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up -- seeks to merge the old with the new.

If the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), that took place in Las Vegas earlier this month, is anything to judge by, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be the buzz words for 2019. Reports of "Jaw-dropping' AI technology abound, including: AI enhanced products are coming into our consumer lives at a dizzying pace. Can we expect to see the same flurry of AI and ML solutions coming into hospitals, schools, retail stores, and hotels in 2019? The short answer is yes. While adoption is slow, and we are unlikely to see the sheer number or diversity of AI and ML solutions increase, AI and ML technology is permeating into enterprise environments.

As the digital era continues to turn retail on its head, Walmart's story is particularly interesting, as the brand is somehow both the challenger and the incumbent. Walmart has been the world's largest retailer since 1988, but as Sears proved, prominence isn't permanent. The retailer had a series of disappointing quarters, seemingly on track to become Amazon's biggest casualty. Galagher Jeff, the company's VP of Merchandising Operations and Business Analytics, even said so when he spoke at NRF 2019: Retail's Big Show in New York City earlier this week. "We had a business that was successful and we stopped taking risks," admits Jeff.