Other companies experimenting in Arizona with similar technology include Waymo. The Google spinoff has been trying out robotic cars to help commuters get to stops on Phoenix's transit system. The company is also conducting a pilot program with Walmart shoppers taking the vehicles to pick up online grocery orders. Supermarket chain Kroger Co. recently partnered with Nuro, a Silicon Valley startup founded by ex-Google engineers, to test delivering groceries with driverless cars in the suburb of Scottsdale.

Imagine if your neighborhood grocery or convenience store offered one-hour, on-demand fulfillment -- not through intermediaries like Postmates or Instacart, but entirely in-house -- and made a profit on every order. As fantastical as the idea might seem, that's the promise of CommonSense Robotics, an Israeli micro-fulfillment startup that today launched its first autonomous sorting and shipping center in downtown Tel Aviv. "We started CommonSense Robotics because as consumers we wondered: Why can't we get our online orders faster and cheaper than going to the store? We're excited to see this groundbreaking technology finally serving real customers to allow for fast, inexpensive deliveries of high-quality products," said Elram Goren, CEO and cofounder of CommonSense Robotics, adding, "It's a true win-win for both retailers and consumers." CommonSense's fulfillment center -- which it claims is the world's smallest -- measures just 6,000 square feet in total.

When you ask Amazon's Alexa, "What is Wikipedia?" Alexa took this line directly from Wikipedia's entry on Wikipedia, as it does with many of its answers. Perhaps what it should have said was this: "Wikipedia is the source from which I take much of my information, without credit, contribution, or compensation." Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running, as "part of Amazon's and CEO Jeff Bezos' growing work in philanthropy," according to CNET. It's being framed as a "gift," one that--as Amazon puts it--recognizes their shared vision to "make it easier to share knowledge globally."

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.

Jan Soerensen, General Manager, North America for Nosto, offers insights -- from working with thousands of retailers across the globe -- to help companies better understand how using AI can help them delve deeper into consumer behavior and generate new opportunities for growth. One of the biggest challenges currently facing the ecommerce industry is how to best offer customers personalized shopping experiences. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are rapidly changing the game by collecting and analyzing vast quantities of customer data and helping retailers leverage it to create highly personalized shopping experiences. Here's how AI can enable you to go beyond just personalizing products to building memorable, full brand experiences that fuel longer-lasting customer relationships. On average, we know that when a custom shopping experience is implemented for customers, they'll spend twice as long on a website, have an 18% higher order value, and a 133% higher conversion rate according to Nosto reports.

Inc's (AMZN.O) 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.

An ever-expanding list of benefits and a growing demand for voice interfaces has placed Conversational AI high on the list as a key component for any digital transformation strategy. With everyone from industry analysts and the Board recommending investment, the next question is how and where do you start with conversational AI? There is no doubt that conversational AI will be the defining technology of the next decade. From improving customer service and driving online sales revenue, to new ways of differentiation using voice interfaces, the speed with which conversational AI is being embraced is breathtaking. According to Gartner by 2020, 25% of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant technology across engagement channels, up from less than 2% in 2017.

The proliferation of private label, white label, and store brands has caused a fundamental shift in how retailers think and operate from a supply management perspective. Retailers that are focused on private label are able to realize higher margins from this segment of their business, but they need to think and act like a manufacturer of consumer goods, food and beverage, high tech, pharmaceuticals, or whichever industrial segment the retailer participates in. Therefore, retailers need to go back to what works in different industry segments, working with contract manufacturers and other outsourced elements of their supply chain, but look to the future for advanced capabilities. In a variety of industries, outsourcing manufacturing is a viable option – it works. However, a key challenge is loss of control of materials as they progress through the outsourced supply chain on the journey to the retailer's shelf.

When you go shopping you might not always know what you're looking for, but Ben Zifkin is betting that robots might help you find it. "It's the new way of doing things for retailers," says Mr. Zifkin, chief executive officer of Hubba Inc., a Toronto-based online business-to-business platform that connects retailers to brands. For the brands, the attraction is obvious – they are put in front of big retailers. But artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world for retailers, too, Mr. Zifkin says. Ben Zifkin is CEO of Hubba Inc., a Toronto-based B2B platform that connects retailers to brands.

To handle more-natural spoken interactions, Alexa must track references through several rounds of conversation. If, for instance, a customer says, "How far is it to Redmond?" and after the answer follows up by saying, "Find good Indian restaurants there", Alexa should be able to infer that "there" refers to Redmond. We call the task of reference tracking "context carryover," and it's a capability that is currently being phased in to the Alexa experience. At this year's Interspeech, the largest conference on spoken-language understanding, my colleagues and I will present a paper titled "Contextual Slot Carryover for Disparate Schemas," which describes our solution to the problem of slot carryover, a crucial aspect of context carryover. "Domain" describes the type of application -- or "skill" -- that the utterance should invoke; for instance, mapping skills should answer questions about geographic distance.