In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. The goal wasn't to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. A smaller team spends less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done. But it's the latter that really matters for Amazon.

The computer on which this article was written is sitting on a laptop stand that tells you everything you need to know about how Amazon does business. At $19.99 (£14.99) a pop, the laptop stand combines everything customers love about Amazon: utility, price and convenience. It's also a total and complete knockoff – of a laptop stand that the San Francisco-based company Rain Design began selling nearly a decade before Amazon decided to make its own. Amazon's innovation with its own version was to replace Rain Design's raindrop logo with its own smiley arrow logo – and cut the price in half. "All Amazon had to do was pick the best one and copy it," said Rachel Greer, a former product manager for Amazon who runs a consulting firm for Amazon vendors.

File photo: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos laughs as he talks to the media while touring the new Amazon Spheres during the grand opening at Amazon's Seattle headquarters in Seattle, Washington, U.S., January 29, 2018. If a "top-secret" Amazon plan comes to fruition, the online retail giant's next big thing might be home robots. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the company's plans, Bloomberg reports that Amazon is getting serious about building a domestic robot. Think Alexa, but with the ability to move around your home autonomously. The project, codenamed "Vesta" after the Roman goddess of the hearth, home, and family, reportedly kicked off years ago, but has been gaining steam of late.

The technology, called Stoplift, analyzes security video to automatically detect theft or errors at the checkout, according to Malay Kundu, the creator of Stoplift. "It can actually tell what you've handled versus what you've rung up," Kundu said. The Cambridge businessman used to develop real-time facial recognition systems to look for terrorists in airports. He realized similar technology could be used at the checkout to tackle a $13 billion per-year problem for grocery stores in the United States. "For every item that is stolen, they have to sell 50 more just to make up for that one item that was lost," Kundu said.

Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail and cloud computing giant has embarked on an ambitious, top-secret plan to build a domestic robot, according to sources familiar with the plans. Code-named "Vesta" after the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, the project is overseen by Gregg Zehr, who runs Amazon's Lab126 hardware research and development division based in Sunnyvale, California.

Top retailers are adopting AI to address CX challenges the retail industry is facing at large. No wonder, digitally savvy eCommerce retailers are leading the pack. Knowing is not enough, understanding the customer holds the key. How do you develop a thorough understanding of the customer? Is there a way to get a unified view of the customer journey?

Machine learning is a great way to extract maximum predictive or categorization value from a large volume of structured data. The idea (at least for "supervised learning," by far the most common type in business) is to train a model on a one set of labeled data and then use the resulting models to make predictions or classifications on data where we don't know the outcome. The approach works well in concept, but it can be labor-intensive to develop and deploy the models. One company, however, is rapidly developing a "machine learning machine" that can build and deploy very large numbers of models with relatively little human intervention. You may have heard of dunnhumby, a UK-based analytics company that's owned by the big retailer Tesco.

Some grocery stores in Rhode Island and Massachusetts are using artificial intelligence to catch shoplifters. The technology, called Stoplift, analyzes security video to automatically detect theft or errors at the checkout, according to Malay Kundu, the creator of Stoplift. "It can actually tell what you've handled versus what you've rung up," Kundu said. The Cambridge businessman used to develop real-time facial recognition systems to look for terrorists in airports. He realized similar technology could be used at the checkout to tackle a $13 billion per-year problem for grocery stores in the United States.

Despite recent blows to the footwear industry, there's ample reason to be hopeful with cutting-edge technology. "We're living in amazing times where new innovations coming out of research in these fields is capturing people's imaginations. And those innovations will be realities in the not-too-distant future," said Acharya. "Today, we're creating machine-learning algorithms to help retailers incorporate all these sources of data and solve new business challenges." He pointed to returns forecasting -- and how data science can help -- as one example.

Despite being around for decades, AI is currently one of the most popular topics in business with Gartner predicting that by 2020 AI will be a top five investment priority for more than 20% of CIOs. Join Joey Moore, Director of Product Marketing and Greg Moore, Manager for Personalisation and Campaign Strategy of Episerver for a practical webinar on The 3 key ways to improve the customer journey. AI is currently closing the gap between detecting patterns from large data sets and predicting intent (a role traditionally reserved for human marketers and merchandizers). AI-powered technologies are replacing the manual work traditionally completed by merchandizers to make product recommendations and marketers to make ad spend decisions. For now, AI will not completely replace all human effort, but it will dramatically improve the effectiveness of ecommerce teams that use it while enhancing the experience of shoppers who purchase from AI-centered ecommerce businesses.