Hi Steemians, today I just want to share to you about "EKKBAZ", what is EKKBAZ? It is like being "Henry Sy" of your own. Base on their website it says "Powered by blockchain, artificial intelligence, social and collaborative technologies to significantly simplify direct to store interactions, reduce middlemen and empower root-level store owners in any corner of the earth. In short through ekkbaz we can now take advantage the B2B set up of business, overcoming some constraint in doing the traditional way of business. The goal of EKKBAZ will be developing BAZ Protocol, a decentralized and intelligent network with purpose-built components for FMCG businesses.

The online fashion retail space continues to boom, as modern consumers increasingly lean towards a more convenient remote buying experience. However, to stay ahead of the competition, leading retail brands need to offer an ever evolving catalogue of seasons, styles and sizes on their platforms. This poses a challenge for inventory management, when constantly updating and removing available items daily. For warehouse staff, and catalogue managers, one of the biggest challenges is developing an efficient system to log new items while on the move, and quickly determine whether the item is already in stock. When dealing with such large catalogues, the traditional method of manually checking each garment from millions of items, would slow processes to a snail's pace.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Retail Market size is set to exceed USD 8 billion by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. The AI in retail market is driven by the increasing investments in it across the globe. The growing investment in the technology is attributed to the wide applications of the AI technology along with advanced analytics, machine learning. AI is set to unleash the next phase of the digital disruption and the market participants are preparing themselves for it. The investment in the technology is growing rapidly, dominated by the tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, AWS, and Baidu.

SEATTLE – A couple's private conversation was mysteriously recorded by their Amazon Echo device and sent to one of their contacts, igniting privacy concerns about the voice-activated gadgets the online retailer wants to make as commonplace in homes as televisions. The two found about it when they received a phone call two weeks ago from one of the husband's employees telling them to "Unplug your Alexa devices right now. You're being hacked," news station KIRO 7 reported. Inc. said in a statement to the station that it was an "extremely rare occurrence." The Portland, Oregon, couple used Amazon's voice-activated devices throughout their home to control heat, lights and the security system, according to the news report. Amazon in 2014 introduced the new line of devices, which can also stream music and order goods from Amazon via voice command.

Applying reinforcement learning in physical-world tasks is extremely challenging. It is commonly infeasible to sample a large number of trials, as required by current reinforcement learning methods, in a physical environment. This paper reports our project on using reinforcement learning for better commodity search in Taobao, one of the largest online retail platforms and meanwhile a physical environment with a high sampling cost. Instead of training reinforcement learning in Taobao directly, we present our approach: first we build Virtual Taobao, a simulator learned from historical customer behavior data through the proposed GAN-SD (GAN for Simulating Distributions) and MAIL (multi-agent adversarial imitation learning), and then we train policies in Virtual Taobao with no physical costs in which ANC (Action Norm Constraint) strategy is proposed to reduce over-fitting. In experiments, Virtual Taobao is trained from hundreds of millions of customers' records, and its properties are compared with the real environment. The results disclose that Virtual Taobao faithfully recovers important properties of the real environment. We also show that the policies trained in Virtual Taobao can have significantly superior online performance to the traditional supervised approaches. We hope our work could shed some light on reinforcement learning applications in complex physical environments.

The Home Shopping Network was a victim of its own success. Its reach had expanded across innumerable digital platforms--but while this generated reams of data about its customers, HSN's marketers struggled to keep track of individual retail journeys. To up its odds of driving conversions, the company needed to better understand its individual customers, from their unique tastes to their browsing habits. To make that possible, HSN knew it had to automate and accelerate data collection across its channels. It also had to deliver that data to marketers in an organized, easily understandable format that enabled them to take action quickly.

Ocado, the UK leader in home-delivered groceries from robot-run distribution centers, has established a licensing deal with US grocery chain Kroger (NYSE:KR) whereby Kroger will take a 5% stake in Ocado – an investment valued at $247.5 million and Ocado will help Kroger set up systems to manage online ordering, fulfillment and delivery operations utilizing Ocado-proven technologies. Ocado will see the Kroger chain build up to 20 Ocado-designed robot-run warehouses over its first three years. In a recent letter to Kroger stockholders, CEO Rodney McMullen said that Kroger is redeploying capital to emphasize improving its digital capabilities and enabling customers to shop in the store, by ordering online and picking up their order at the store, or getting their groceries delivered to their homes. Although McMullen didn't single out Amazon or any other competitors in the supermarket arena, Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods and Walmart's price-cutting moves and partnering with online grocery deliver service Instacart are rapidly changing the landscape of grocery shopping. "Kroger is right in the middle of such a reinvention," McMullen said in the shareholder letter.

Amazon's facial recognition tool is being referred to as a'recipe for authoritarianism and disaster' after it was revealed to be used by law enforcement officials. Now experts say it raises even greater concerns, as the artificial intelligence used to power the technology could exhibit racial bias. Many are calling on Amazon to release data that shows they've trained the software to reduce bias, but it has yet to do so. A controversial facial recognition tool, dubbed Rekognition, marketed to police has been defended by its creator, online retailer Amazon. The controversy was spurred by a report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which found that Amazon's facial recognition tool, dubbed'Rekognition', is being used by law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Florida.

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 which 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 towards 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.

Never before have customers been more in control of the retail trade than today. Or has the retailer wrested control of the exchange? Let's revisit this in the light of new technologies and sensors deployed in this "game". In the sixties through the eighties, the Sears, Walmart and K-mart kind of super stores aggregated purchase information to decide what to buy and stock their shelves. Improving the scale of procurement they drove down the purchase price of things like Levi's Jeans to the detriment of the manufacturer.