Wish there was a place to shop where you could compare prices from multiple retailers at once and get the best deal on your favorite products, while also getting everything you need shipped quickly and efficiently right to your door? Say hello to Google Express, the online shopping service that's designed to give you that experience. While it's been around for years, this constantly evolving platform is part of Google's attempt to unseat Amazon's hegemony in the online shopping world. The service aims to make buying products online more convenient and accessible. But chances are, you've never even heard of it before.

A new tech trend has emerged at the world's largest retailer, as Walmart brings on board thousands of robots in nearly 5,000 of its 11,348 stores. According to CNN Business, these robots will be scrubbing floors, scanning boxes, unloading trucks and tracking shelf inventory at mostly domestic U.S. locations. Robots will replace lower-level jobs--serving in janitorial functions as well as performing basic inventory work--in order to manage rising costs. A new robot unloader has already been used on the docks in hundreds of stores, pulling boxes from delivery trucks while automatically scanning and sorting merchandise. The unloader will be deployed at over 1,100 retail locations in the near future.

We often frame new automation technology as a grave and immediate threat to the jobs and livelihoods of the humans whose tasks the machines take over. Tell that to the custodians at Sea-Tac airport who no longer have to spend their nights scrubbing floors, or sales associates at your local supermarket who will no longer have to schlep carts full of products throughout the store thanks to BrainCorps' smart scrubbers and tugs. BrainCorp is an AI software developer based in San Diego, California. Founded in 2009, the company spent half a decade developing its computer vision and automation technology before pivoting into the floor care industry. This service sector "hadn't seen a lot of automation yet or at least successful automation of the products," John Black, Brain Corp's Senior Vice President of New Product Development, told Engadget.

Machine learning, virtual reality (VR), and pop-up stores are increasingly crucial to industries such as retail, as they help organizations deliver an easier -- and more exciting -- customer experience. "We have invested heavily in machine learning … to automate the ease of the shopping experience," Walmart Executive Vice President and CTO Jeremy King said onstage at NRF 2019. Imagine how long it takes a busy parent to manually add 100 grocery items to a virtual shopping cart, for example; now contrast that with automation that intuits what each shopper needs, whittling the process to mere seconds. "Building that kind of experience is really important." Click the button below to load the content from Youtube.

Amazon's Echo speakers have a broadcast feature that will help you send a message to family members that might be scattered around the house. If you have an Amazon Echo product, you aren't the only person privy to your private conversations. Thousands of people across the globe are employed by Amazon.com to listen to Echo recordings, transcribe and annotate them and feed them back to the software so that Alexa can better grasp human speech, according to a report from Bloomberg. The employees – ranging from Boston to India – signed nondisclosure agreements barring them to speak publicly about the program. According to Bloomberg, they work nine hours per day, with each reviewer going through as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift.

When Amazon customers speak to Alexa, the company's AI-powered voice assistant, they may be heard by more people than they expect, according to a report. Amazon employees around the world regularly listen to recordings from the company's smart speakers as part of the development process for new services, Bloomberg News reports. Some transcribe artist names, linking them to specific musicians in the company's database; others listen to the entire recorded command, comparing it with what the automated systems heard and the response they offered, in order to check the quality of the company's software. Technically, users have given permission for the human verification: the company makes clear that it uses data "to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems", and gives users the chance to opt out. But the company doesn't explicitly say that the training will involve workers in America, India, Costa Rica, and more nations around the world listening to those recordings.

The new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technology organizations to bring control of the human experience back in-house. Together, CMOs and CIOs are building an arsenal of experience-focused marketing tools that are powered by emerging technology. Their goal is to transform marketing from a customer acquisition-focused activity to one that enables a superb human experience, grounded in data. In experiential marketing, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Analytics and cognitive capabilities illuminate the context of customers' needs and desires, and determine the optimal way to engage with them. Experience-management tools tailor content and identify the best method of delivery across physical and digital touchpoints, bringing us closer to truly unique engagement with each and every human. Imagine a world in which a brand knows who you are and what you want, and can deliver the product, service, or experience that best suits your needs seamlessly and in real time, across physical or digital channels. Marketing technology is undergoing a renaissance. Channel-focused solutions such as websites, social and mobile platforms, content management tools, and search engine optimization are fast becoming yesterday's news. As part of the growing beyond marketing trend, organizations are adopting a new generation of martech systems that deliver unprecedented levels of customer intimacy, targeted engagement, and precision impact.

Walmart's "customer hosts" will still greet customers but have additional and physically demanding responsibilities, which means eliminating greeters. Walmart is planning to use thousands of robots for a wide variety of tasks within its stores following a "well-received" round of tests in 2018. "Smart assistants have huge potential to make busy stores run more smoothly," the nation's largest private employer said in a news release. Walmart, which employs 1.5 million associates in the U.S. alone, said in the release Tuesday that the plans will give employees "more of an opportunity to do what they're uniquely qualified for" which is serve customers face-to-face on the sales floor. Walmart isn't the only retailer that has robots roaming around.

Amazon thinks it knows what may be in the stars for its Prime subscribers. The e-commerce giant has set its sights on disrupting the astrology industry by launching horoscopes exclusively for members of its $119-per-year Prime subscription service, according to Fast Company. However, don't expect to gain any expert insight into whether or not your lover may be waiting in the wings or if you're about to strike it rich. Instead, the horoscopes are a thinly-veiled marketing scheme meant to push Prime subscribers to the latest and greatest products on Amazon. The service is available through Prime Insider, Amazon's newsletter for Prime members that gives information about deals and recommendations, as well as how-to guides.

Brick and mortar stores have been hit hard by online retailers like Amazon. Walmart (which has its own online presence) believes it has an answer to dwindling sales. Its solution, robots that take care of mundane jobs (like cleaning up spills) while its staff spends their time helping customers. The retailer announced today that it will deploy 1,500 new "Auto-C" autonomous floor cleaners, 300 "Auto-S" shelf scanners and an additional 1,200 "FAST" unloaders to scan and sort items as they come off delivery trucks. Plus to streamline online orders, it'll have 900 "Pickup Towers" so customers can order something on the company's site and just pick up it up from a vending machine at their nearest Walmart.