The robots are coming for our jobs! At least, that's what many people fear. They worry that artificial intelligence -- the technology that enables machines to learn and evolve by rewriting their own computer code -- will one day displace human workers. When ATMs were first introduced, people assumed it meant the end of bank tellers. As the number of ATMs rose from zero to 400,000 between the 1970s and 2010, the number of people employed as tellers increased, as efficiencies due to automation led to the opening of more and more bank branches offering personalized service closer to customers. There's no reason to think this trend will change with AI.

In 2017, online gift retailer RedBallon's marketing team started working with "Albert", a digital marketing platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Working across Facebook, Google, YouTube and other paid and earned media channels, Albert autonomously targets audiences, mixes and matches creative assets, buys media, runs campaigns, measures performance, applies insights from one channel to another, and then makes adjustments based on what "he" learns to optimize the return on marketing investment. With Albert's help, the total cost of customer acquisition across channels for RedBalloon was reduced by 25% in less than one month. He also relieved the marketing team of many of the manual and process-driven tasks they'd been doing. The time they were spending manually executing search campaigns, researching keywords, or altering social media audiences was redirected to more strategic activities, such as devising campaigns that targeted niche, high value, and previously ignored audiences uncovered by Albert.

LONDON, UK – Conversational AI allows you to reignite the customer experience with increased engagement, personalised customer service and improved customer satisfaction. Your customers can simply ask for what they want as if they were talking to a live assistant--and receive the right response, every time. Providing 24/7 customer support simply on your own terms is no longer enough. Your customers want an experience that's fast and convenient. They want to message you a question while waiting in line for coffee or use their voice to make an online purchase while driving to work. They want to be understood using their own words, not your jargon.

Endorsed with a portfolio of digitally-empowered consumers, artificial intelligence in the retail market is acclaimed as one of the fastest growing verticals presently . In 2017, this business space registered a global share of USD 650 million and is forecast to record a CAGR of 40% over 2018 - 2024. With the retail space becoming affluent with more number of e-commerce platforms as well as startups with large technology appetite, the adoption of AI in the retail market is bound to increase. Additionally, the technology is witnessing a slew of opportunities in sync with the hi-tech trends including the likes of blockchain, AR, and the Internet of Things establishing their footprints in the retail domain. Amidst all these tech interventions, the focal point of this consumer-driven industry is to deliver an unrivaled shopping experience to customers as well as ensuring optimal management of resources and stocks.

What does digital transformation really mean in retail? It is simply transferring an old, obsolete product-centered model that has been followed for so many years to a customer-centered model. This is somewhat easy to say, but again, what does it specifically mean for the retail industry? Instead of focusing on a supply chain view – cheaper purchase, higher sales, and optimizing everything in all of these – retailers should focus more on the digital value chain view. They must be able to collect data regarding their customers, products and locations, turn those information into useful insights, and then turn those insights into planning and action.

This week saw a lot of machines taking over for humans in both the pharmacy and warehousing industries and augmented reality finally go mainstream in retail. China continues to commit to innovating faster than any other country and This Week In China Tech is our way to keep you on top of the most important stories coming from the mainland. Here are this week's headlines. JD.com, one of China's largest e-commerce companies, announced the new Augmented Reality (AR) Innovation Alliance (article in Chinese) and brought three new AR products to market. The alliance brings together hundreds of corporations, including Intel, Wal-Mart, Vipshop, Lenovo, and Carslan.

Bots are dominating online communication, and most consumers don't even realize the number of times they have interacted with a bot while browsing their favorite website or completing an online purchase. Bot technology is far from a new concept, though, as its origins date all the way back to 1966 with the invention of Eliza, a bot that managed to mimic a natural conversation through programmed responses. With no sign of slowing down, here are five innovative ways bot technology is advancing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a push toward being able to accomplish things that require human intelligence without needing humans. In the world of bots, the implementation of AI is geared toward creating environments where the bot you are speaking to is indistinguishable from a human being.

Well if sci-fi is about speculating what might be, then it could very well be right about AI (except hopefully for any terrible consequences). Because machines are getting super smart and that means big things for us all. Artificial intelligence or machine intelligence essentially refers to machines that can mimic thinking that we associate with humans. This includes the ability to learn from its experiences, to process large amounts of data to solve problems, make decisions or even predictions, and to understand and respond to natural language. It's already happening and Google's recent I/O 18 conference showed just how amazing some of the advances have been.

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.44% said that one of its Echo home speakers mistakenly recorded a private conversation and sent it to a person in the owners' contact list, an incident that raises questions about the security of such voice-operated devices. Confirming a report by a local television station in Seattle, Amazon on Thursday said that the Echo device misunderstood pieces of a conversation as commands, causing it to think it was being instructed to send the message. "As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely," a spokeswoman added in a statement. The incident was first reported by KIRO 7, which aired an interview with a Portland, Ore., user identified only as Danielle. The user said that one of her husband's employees had received a recording sent from inside her house.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) got an early start in smart speakers with its Echo devices, but Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google is catching up quickly. Last year, Amazon took the lion's share of the market with Google a distant second in terms of sales. But during the first quarter this year, the sales between the two companies are much closer, with at least one research group indicating Google may have sold more devices than Amazon. This article originally appeared in The Motley Fool. Google sold 3.2 million Home devices in the first quarter, according to Canalys, more than the 2.5 million it estimates for Amazon.