Where will I wear this? Stitch Fix, a popular online subscription and personal shopping service, promises to spare its customers from the drama of shopping by matching each person with a personal stylist who selects clothing and accessories based on the individual's size, style and budget. How can a stylist, who does not personally know you, manage to successfully curate your wardrobe? The secret sauce is the algorithms, which are at the core of the company's business model and do everything from drive the clothing selections to assign human stylists to optimize production and logistics. As a personal style service "that evolves with your tastes, needs and lifestyle," Stitch Fix benefits from algorithms on a daily, customer-by-customer basis.

With VR (virtual reality) becoming more and more popular, I was highly intrigued with the premise of this story. The book summary caught my interest and, for the most part, CTRL Illusion lived up to my expectations in regards to what I expected to see in a science fiction / fantasy story. There were hover bikes, enhanced people, animated tattoos (Kutoo), DNA trackers for prior offenders, optical browsers, and the ability to access a victims's memories through advanced technology. Side note: The ability to access a victim's final moments came with one humungous drawback -- the detective experienced all the pain and suffering but couldn't react. With the level of violence in the world, I'm not sure if mankind is ready for that bit of tech yet.

Lowe's is turning to AI technologies to give customers--and its employees--a big helping hand. The venerable home improvement retailer probably isn't the first name that comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence and robotics. Yet it's fitting that a chain selling hammers and saws would clearly see AI technologies for what they are--tools to get a job done. Welcome to a world where software meets the hardware at a home improvement brand. Gihad Jawhar, vice president of digital development at Lowe's and the guiding hand behind the company's AI efforts, describes the big picture behind the brand's deployment of various technologies--computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)--to solve customers' problems and guide them seamlessly and quickly to the right products.

A new study by CapGemini finds that consumers are ready to embrace AI support, and that AI interactions, if properly designed, can enhance the personal connection they feel to brands. The study is comprehensive – it is based on surveys of 10,000 consumers from 10 different markets and covers all ages, income groups and employee status. It is current, as the surveys were conducted this May. These surveys were supplemented with three virtual focus group discussions with 8-10 consumers per focus group in the U.S., France and Germany. Research for the report included interviews with several key industry stakeholders and academics.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions. Read Wirecutter's continuously updated list of Prime Day deals here. A solid $50 discount on a great starter drone, this discounted price extends to all colors. The DJI Spark Fly More Combo is the budget pick in our guide to the best drones.

Artificial Intelligence offers a plethora of opportunities to bring a change in almost all spheres, be it health-care, education, e-commerce, research. Can marketing be left behind? With the abundant data and self-learning nature of AI-powered algorithms, retailers can leverage the power of AI to cater to customers and drive sales. AI is revolutionizing the shopping experiences by making them more personalized, fruitful, efficient, and relevant. AI not only helps shoppers find a perfect product but also recommends products, predicts the shopping list and speeds up the checkout process.

Microsoft today announced a five-year partnership with Walmart to speed the company's digital transformation via a combination of AI, cloud, and Internet of Things (IoT) services. It is no coincidence that the strategic partnership is being announced on Prime Day, the biggest day of the year for Walmart's chief competitor Amazon. As part of the deal, Walmart and Sam's Club will migrate their cloud computing to Azure, and Walmart will utilize Azure's IoT platform to track things like HVAC and refrigeration systems. Machine learning services from Microsoft will be used to perform tasks like routing company delivery trucks. "Walmart is already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads and is now embarking on a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications," the company said today in a blog post.

For a couple of days this week, I attended the EmTech NEXT conference at MIT, which is organized by MIT Technology Review. The focus of the event was that fabled idea "The Future of Work," and if you are on the side of the humans, the future seems pretty bright. Virtually every speaker (MIT folks, AI and robotics leaders) came out in favor of augmentation over automation. They say that AI and robots won't take our jobs, but rather augment them by doing the things we humans don't do so well. I must say that I was a bit surprised that augmentation has become the consensus view among experts.

If you're an Amazon Prime member, it's likely that you've had a shopping list ready for weeks. But if you're just browsing today through July 18, we have a few Prime Day deals on weird or quirky items that you might not have even considered. From robots you can keep in your home to Japanese-style toilet seats, here are the strangest, coolest discounted items we've seen this Prime Day. Jibo is kind of like an Alexa speaker... if Alexa had a body, face, and could dance. When we reviewed Jibo a year ago he brought us joy and creeped us out in almost equal order, but we kept him around.

TORONTO, ONTARIO – According to a new research report by the market research and strategy consulting firm, Global Market Insights, Inc, penetration of AI technologies in the retail market will exceed 8 billion USD by 2024. The AI in retail market is driven by increasing investments across the globe. This growing interest can be attributed to the wide applications of machine learning, predictive analytics, and deep learning. Furthermore, AI is set to unleash the next phase of the digital disruption in retail – and the major players in the sector are ramping up their digitalization efforts as a result. With a storied history in the AI and data analytics space, the founder and CEO of Daisy Intelligence, Gary Saarenvirta, is today working at the forefront of the disruption taking place globally in retail.