At the heart of many successful businesses is a deep understanding of their customers. In a previous blog post I explained how a customer 360o initiative could be enhanced by using Amazon Redshift Spectrum as part of an AWS data lake strategy. In this blog post, I want to continue the theme of demonstrating agility, cost efficiency, and how AWS can help you innovate through your customer analytics practice. Many of you are exploring how AI can enhance their customer 360o initiatives. I'll demonstrate how targeted campaigns can be driven by machine learning (ML) through solutions that leverage Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Pinpoint.

Not all that long ago, if you pictured a commuter on a train platform, they would likely be reading a newspaper or sipping coffee. Flash forward to now and the same commuter might be planning a party, test driving a car or fighting for survival in a zombie apocalypse--all from their mobile device. Thanks to smartphones, consumers are carving out new and sometimes surprising behavior patterns. Marketing strategies have historically relied on some very basic assumptions of consumer behavior. For example, a person in a car will most likely be facing forward--toward a billboard. At a grocery store checkout, idle shoppers browse impulse buys.

In January 2018, I entered a Kaggle competition called the Mercari Price Suggestion. The competition lasted three months and ended a few weeks ago. The challenge was to build an algorithm that automatically suggests product prices to online sellers, based on free-text descriptions, product categories and a few other attributes. I joined the competition a month before it ended, eager to explore how to use Deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for this problem.Those four weeks competing were a sequence of curiosity, engagement, and excitement. I ended up with a single end-to-end Deep Learning model (no ensembles) implemented in Tensorflow, which landed me in the the 35th position (out of 2,384 teams) in the Private Leaderboard.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully-managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. But besides streamlining the machine learning (ML) workflow, Amazon SageMaker also provides a serverless, powerful, and easy-to-use compute environment to execute and parallelize a large spectrum of scientific computing tasks. In this notebook we demonstrate how to simulate a simple quantum system using TensorFlow together with the Amazon SageMaker "bring your own algorithm" (BYOA) functionality. To follow this exercise you need an AWS account with access to Amazon SageMaker and basic familiarity with Python and TensorFlow. The quantum effect we are going to simulate is known as superradiance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the way forward for the retail industry in terms of technology but at the moment, baring a few countries not all are ready for this change in retail and the retailers are also unsure about the introducing AI in their stores like a self-checkout platform is still better than a service robot asking for details. Stressing on the same and to better understand the standing of AI in retail, Retail Analytics Council (RAC) – the leading body focussed on the study of consumer buying behaviour across retail platforms and the impact of technology – held the first-ever Retail Robotics and AI Conference recently in San Francisco, USA. Retail and technology industry leaders, C-level executives along with academic leaders discussed various key topics at the event, including the use of AI in retail, understanding of consumer buying patterns, growing execution of robotic applications in retail and the current retail industry trends, at the conference. At the event, Don Schultz, Director of RAC warned that with the increasing reliance on technology, the retail industry will soon become'retail singularity'. Referring to the data released by market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Schultz told that before 2020, 40 per cent digital retail transformation steps will get an AI support.

Shopping shouldn't feel like a chore. It should be fun and convenient, delighting the customer at every turn. The next generation of AI will anticipate your needs before you do. Imagine the perfect blazer arriving to your doorstep just-in-time for your cocktail reception. This may seem like a hi-tech fantasy, but thanks to the powerful combination of artificial intelligence and mobile technology, seeing is more than believing, it is a mechanism for brands to drive value-based shopping experiences.

Amazon is setting foot in the Sex-Robotics market. Amazon Prime members will be able to order a sex-robot of choice and have it delivered to their home within hours. Thousands of Alexa based skills will be implemented into the robots to provide a personalized experience. Amazon's Lab126 has ramped up personnel recruit for the project and has commenced a beta-testing program by supplying first prototypes to its employees. The project is secretly named "Alsexa".

Things with Amazon are about to get really intimate. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the online retailer, which already knows more than its fair share about you and your shopping preferences, is about to learn something more -- your exact size. Amazon is reportedly inviting customers into a New York office in order to keep tabs on their body shape and size over a 20 week time period. Twice a month, volunteers (chosen from a survey) will visit the office in order to allow Amazon to better understand "how bodies change shape over time," as per the survey. In return, participants will receive Amazon gift cards worth up to $250.

However, modern customers (Millennials and Generation Z) are not so easy to surprise. So, it is not enough for retailers to keep up with settled trends -- they have to be few steps ahead to hold all the aces. Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes a life jacket in this case. How can retail benefit from Artificial Intelligence solutions? Much as television in its time or Internet accordingly, Artificial Intelligence is here yet to make a revolution in common things.

The popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has grown exponentially in recent years. According to Gartner, a research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500, Artificial Intelligence will be one of the top five investment priorities for more than 30 percent of Chief Information Officers by 2020, as they find more ways to include it in their digital business strategies. Gartner also predicts that AI technology will be pervasive in almost every new software product and service by 2020. Even now, from marketing, to retail, to software development and product design, Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly useful for improving products and services which ultimately improves customer experience. So, in what ways exactly does artificial intelligence improve customer experience?