Artificial intelligence is rumored to be the next global technological revolution. Currently, it appears to have penetrated into various industries across the globe and is expected to soon change how human live, interact, work, and receive services among other benefits. Also, this groundbreaking is proving to be quite useful in carrying out mundane tasks in various companies in a bid to allow human experts to deal with more important jobs. For instance, Mark & Spencer (M&S) is substituting call center staff with an AI-driven chatbot, which is made to rapidly handle customer complaints. For this undertaking, Mark & Spencer will utilize software from various technology companies including Google and Twillo in an effort of automating its calls' routing.

Grocery giant Kroger and autonomous vehicle startup Nuro launched their driverless delivery service Thursday in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is the first market for the two companies, which first announced their partnership back in June. To start out, only one store is involved in the experiment: the Kroger-owned Fry's Food Store on East McDowell Road. Customers can place orders via Fry's website or mobile app. Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery.

Air pollution in cities can be an acute problem leading to damaging effects on people, animals, plants and property. It is an important topic which is getting increased attention as the human population of cities continues to increase. This year it was the subject the 2018 KDD Cup, the annual data mining and knowledge discovery competition organized by ACM SIGKDD. The burning of fossil fuels for transport and home heating is a major contributor to air pollution in urban environments, creating the pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2). This is a secondary pollutant produced by the oxidation of NO. It is a major contributor to respiratory problems. In the European Union, the Cleaner Air For Europe (CAFÉ) Directive 2008/50/EC established an hourly limit of 200 μg/m3 and an annual mean limit of 40 μg/m3 in respect of NO2.

Kroger's driverless grocery delivery vehicles are finally hitting the road. The supermarket operator said it will start testing the self-driving cars on Thursday at a Fry's Food Store in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's part of Kroger's ongoing partnership with Nuro, a Silicon Valley startup founded two years ago by two engineers who worked on self-driving cars at Google. Kroger's driverless grocery delivery vehicles are finally hitting the road. The firm said it will start testing the self-driving cars on Thursday at a Fry's Food Store in Scottsdale, Arizona Customers can order groceries via Kroger's website or mobile app and select same-day or next-day delivery.

It sounds counterintuitive, but there's a conversation taking place today about how businesses can use artificial intelligence to bring more human emotion and connection to customer service. In the past, people had to actually go to a store to buy a book, some jeans, or a potato. Sometimes these human lifeforms even forged personal relationships. But today, consumers frequently buy products and access other customer service through various online channels. That removes the human element – either completely (in the case of basic chatbots or other self-service mediums) or partially (because live agents are on script and remote).

Kroger unveils plans to test market home delivery via driverless cars. The grocer with 119 locations in Arizona is part of the Kroger chain. Kroger confirmed Thursday it will begin testing driverless grocery delivery in suburban Phoenix. Customers of the supermarket giant's subsidiary Fry's in Scottsdale, Arizona will be able to place online orders starting Thursday. Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery though a fleet of self-driving vehicles.

Regardless of how technology is changing the way commerce is done, at its core, commerce is still about buying and selling goods. However, when there are too many choices or the products or services are complicated, buyers may need help with the purchase process. That's where AI in e-commerce comes in. Retailers are increasingly looking to automated conversational chatbots and messaging technology to help with these needs. Known as conversational commerce, the use of natural language technology, which supports back-and-forth interaction with an intelligent bot in voice or text, has gained widespread acceptance among retailers and consumers alike.

British fashion brand Burberry is one of the most recognized luxury clothes labels in the world. Starting in 2006, the company aimed to reinvent itself as an "end to end" digital enterprise. Its strategy was to use Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to boost sales and customer satisfaction. It does this by asking customers to voluntarily share data through a number of loyalty and reward programs. This information is used to offer personalized recommendations, online and in store.

Last week, the Alexa Auto team announced the release of its new Alexa Auto Software Development Kit (SDK), enabling developers to bring Alexa functionality to in-vehicle infotainment systems. The initial release of the SDK assumes that automotive systems will have access to the cloud, where the machine-learning models that power Alexa currently reside. But in the future, we would like Alexa-enabled vehicles -- and other mobile devices -- to have recourse to some core functions even when they're offline. That will mean drastically reducing the size of the underlying machine-learning models, so they can fit in local memory. At the same time, third-party developers have created more than 45,000 Alexa skills, which expand on Alexa's native capabilities, and that number is increasing daily. Even in the cloud, third-party skills are loaded into memory only when explicitly invoked by a customer request.

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 1.24% introduced its Alexa digital assistant seven months after Cortana's launch, but its Echo and sibling devices now control two-thirds of the U.S. smart-speaker market, according to research firm eMarketer. The market share of devices using Cortana isn't large enough to be listed in eMarketer's tally. Microsoft's effort to turn Cortana into a viable competitor, while voice computing is still in its early days, is bigger than just the market for smart speakers that sit on kitchen counters checking the weather. It is an opportunity to lead in the next big advance in computing, in which people use their voices rather than a keyboard and mouse. Companies that master so-called conversational computing will have an edge in the emerging business just as Windows gave Microsoft an advantage in the PC era, analysts say.