Advancements in AI, machine learning and conversational technologies coupled with consumers' desire to self-serve is fuelling widespread adoption of virtual assistants and chatbots for customer engagement. Yet despite their popularity many implementations fail to live up to customer and organizational expectations. Designing an AI-powered conversation to sufficiently meet consumer needs and return real business value requires not just technology--but a nuanced strategy and in-depth considerations. Join leading user experience and customer engagement experts as they share key principles and lessons learned from designing millions of conversational AI interactions for some of the world's largest organizations--across messaging, web and IVR. Wherever you are in your journey--whether you're just considering implementing a conversational virtual assistant or wondering why your current one isn't living up to expectations--this is a must-attend Webinar.

Not only does Amazon SageMaker provide easy scalability and distribution to train and host ML models, it is modularized so that the process of training a model is decoupled from deploying the model. This means that models that are trained outside of Amazon SageMaker can be brought into SageMaker only to be deployed. This is very useful if you have models that are already trained, and you want to use only the hosting part of SageMaker instead of the entire pipeline. This is also useful if you don't train your own models, but you buy pre-trained models. This blog post explains how to deploy your own models on Amazon SageMaker that have been trained on TensorFlow or MXNet.

Want to know what Amazon.com Inc. will be doing in physical retail tomorrow? Look at what is happening in China today. If you'd taken this advice, you wouldn't have been surprised when the behemoth spent $13.7 billion last year buying Whole Foods. Eighteen months earlier Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. had launched Hema, a technologically advanced blend of online grocery shopping, dining and bricks and mortar.

Often referred to as the Amazon of China, JD.com started in 1998 as a brick-and-mortar store in Beijing, but it has aspirations to be the world's leading e-commerce retailer. Based on its tremendous growth, it might not take long for the company to get there. Richard Liu, the company's founder, CEO, and chairman, has even gone so far to predict his company won't need humans and said, "I hope my company would be 100% automation someday…no human beings anymore, 100% operated by AI and robots." JD.com and its competitors such as Amazon, Alphabet, Tencent, Alibaba and more are not only racing to be the world's largest e-commerce business but to create the operating system for retail in the future. JD.com is driving business with artificial intelligence, big data, and robotics while building the retail infrastructure for the 4th industrial revolution.

Earlier this year, autonomous retail store Amazon Go opened to much fanfare, which just goes to show you how much we love buying isht. Every organization on the planet--even the 24-hour Elon Musk show known as Futurism--covered the event as if it were a visit by the pope. Headlines declared that the store of the future is here--and then promptly chased after the next squirrel. We've been watching the evolution of retail automation for a while now, so as the store went live in Seattle, we wrote about 11 Examples of Grocery Store Technology that will enable the grocery stores of the future. While Amazon Go is probably the most advanced convenience store on the planet, it's far from being the only one ushering in the era of retail automation – where self-checkout is replaced by no checkout at all.

A robot will soon be able to handle your groceries for you. Walmart announced Friday that it will soon incorporate automated robotic carts, called Alphabots, in one of its superstores in Salem, New Hampshire. Alphabots can pick and pack shoppers' online orders and complete otherwise mundane tasks in the hopes of streamlining Walmart's online grocery service. 'Alphabot will work behind the scenes to make the process even easier by automatically bringing items from storage to associates who will consolidate the items in the order,' Mark Ibbotson, Walmart's executive vice president of central operations, said in a statement. 'For our pickup associates, that means less time walking the store aisles in search of products and more time ensuring customers are getting the absolute best in fresh produce, meats, etc.' The retail giant installed a 20,000-square-foot extension connected to the store that will house Alphabot.

The company said Friday it's working with Alert Innovation on the Alphabot, which it's testing in Salem, New Hampshire. The mobile carts move up and down and sideways to retrieve items faster than if workers walked the aisles.

Walmart is testing out a new system that will help put together grocery orders placed by customers online. The service lets users order groceries, choose a pickup time and have their order delivered to their car, and the new automated system, called Alphabot, will take over some of the legwork that goes into collecting order items. It will automatically gather certain items from a location's storage area and transport them to employees who will then package the order. The first Alphabot system will be tested at a supercenter in Salem, New Hampshire and Walmart expects it to be up and running by the end of the year. The company is currently adding a 20,000-square-foot extension to the store, which will house Alphabot and include drive-thru lanes for grocery pickup.

Digital transformation is more than a buzz phrase for the enterprise. Technology is reshaping business in numerous ways, and the overall concern is that anyone without the newest tech in place will soon be left behind. This fear is not unfounded. "Digital is approaching a tipping point. Over the next five years, companies will begin to see digital affect the majority of their revenues. Most of today's companies are unprepared for this change," according to a Forrester report on the state of digital business.

There is an episode of Doraemon where the robotic cat uses a wand to get products shown on the TV. The latest toy, that new dress – anything a person wanted could be obtained by pointing the wand at the object displayed on the screen. New York-based retailer Choosy is like Doraemon's gadget for womenswear. Imagine scrolling through Instagram and seeing an outfit that you like. Up until now, you tap the photo and see if the brands are tagged.