"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." In early September, the media went abuzz with news of Amazon becoming the second US company to surpass the $1 trillion market cap. However, the news of Amazon's success has eclipsed certain interesting facts: Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, Bebe, J.C. Penney, Macy's, Sears, and RadioShack are just a few of the high profile traditional retailers that had to shut down stores due to internet companies like Amazon cutting into their revenue. Experts believe that 2018 will end up being as difficult as 2017 was for traditional brick-and-mortar stores. All indications point to the fact that traditional brick and mortar stores will continue to go into obscurity for as long as the internet continue to thrive.

It's July 17 and the temperature in the West Texas desert is marching, predictably, toward 100 degrees. But the air is cool inside the one-story prefab building where Jeff Bezos, wearing a North Face hiking shirt and a cap emblazoned with an Amazon Robotics logo, is attentive, back straight, listening. It's only Tuesday, but the week has already been eventful. His company's annual Prime Day sale proved so popular (good) that it temporarily took down the website (terrible). Amazon workers in Europe are striking.

This week's sales run the gamut from home decor to Halloween costumes to kitchen tools, tech gadgets, and more. 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. This week, the internet is chock full of incredible deals, from savings on tech gadgets and video games to top-notch cooking tools. We sifted through all of them to bring you the best of the best, including many of the best products we've ever tested as well as popular items you'll love and some great retail sales.

This is where robots come in. Resembling oversize Roombas topped with Ikea shelving, these Kiva robots can carry up to 750 pounds of goods in their 40-odd cubbies. After a customer places an order, a robot carrying the desired item scoots over to a worker, who reads on a screen what item to pick and what cubby it's located in, scans a bar code and places the item in a bright-yellow bin that travels by conveyor belt to a packing station. AI suggests an appropriate box size; a worker places the item in the box, which a robot tapes shut and, after applying a shipping label, sends on its way. Humans are needed mostly for grasping and placing, tasks that robots haven't mastered yet.

AI will continue to transform our homes. One of the most prolific uses of AI can be found in the humble smart speakers that nearly one-quarter of Americans have in their homes. It's become increasingly clear that tech companies look to these AI assistants to create new sources of revenue. For example, Amazon's Echo speakers allow people to easily buy products from its website through voice commands, and recent data shows that Amazon Prime members spend $400 more on the company's site if they own an Echo speaker than members who don't have one. Amazon could add $10 billion to its top line by 2020 thanks to the company's sales through its smart speakers, according to RBC Capital Market predictions.

Move over mobile marketing: A little voice is whispering that your time as "the next big thing" is almost up. Actually, that whisper is more of a shout, and it's "Echo"-ing across the digital landscape, as voice-response technology is rapidly emerging as the most disruptive force to hit the industry since the internet became a visual medium. Just how loud will this sonic boom be? If your brand is starting to hear Siri's siren-like call to action, here are some insights and considerations you might find helpful: Research from OC&C Strategy Consultants projects that voice shopping will jump to $40 billion in 2022 (up from $2 billion today). However, the last-touch voice commerce experience has yet to reach the mass adoption levels that retailers like Amazon initially envisioned.

Amazon.com Inc's machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women. The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants' resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters. Automation has been key to Amazon's e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company's experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said. "Everyone wanted this holy grail," one of the people said.

Artificial Intelligence has taken every industry by storm. The market size of AI software is expected to reach up to $36 million by 2025. The opportunities this presents has caused retailers to pay attention to AI. Thus, more and more retailers, big and small, are applying AI tools in new ways across the entire product and service cycle- right from the assembling stage to the post-sale customer service interactions. As AI evolves further, the customer experience will only get better and so will improved outcomes through sales and customer experiences.

People really love their virtual assistants -- so much so, in fact, that over a million people asked Amazon Alexa to marry them in 2017 alone, the retailer confirmed to Business Insider. And that's not even including customers who might have proposed to their Google Assistant, or Apple Siri, or Microsoft Cortana. It seems that more than a handful of the estimated 600 million people who regularly use virtual assistants were inspired by the romance between Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansen in "Her." Unfortunately, Alexa has rejected all those curious consumers faced rejection. Asking Alexa to marry you gets a response along the lines of: "We're at pretty different places in our lives. I mean, you're on Earth and I'm in the cloud."

Customer service isn't just about having a pleasant attitude or adopting a "the customer is always right" policy. Those things are important, but they're only a few of the things a company needs to do to meet the needs of its patrons. Attitude and a willingness to serve become almost irrelevant if a store's shelves don't have the right merchandise, or a retailer does not offer the delivery or pickup model that meets a customer's needs. Currently, most retailers try to figure out the right mix to keep their customers happy using old-school techniques like observation and satisfaction surveys. Only 7% of retailers currently use artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance customer service.