Earlier this month, it said that digital sales for the past quarter had grown 66 percent. "We cannot just rely on physical stores to reach all of our customers for delivery and and pick-up," said Yael Cosset, Kroger's chief digital officer, in an interview with CNBC. Kroger has more than 2,800 stores across the U.S., under banners like Fred Meyer, Ralph's and Harris Teeter. Nuro, founded in 2016 by Google engineers, is an autonomous car company built explicitly for the business of transporting goods. That means its cars are slimmer and designed differently than ones meant to carry people.

Kroger currently offers grocery delivery in vehicles driven by people at about 1,200 of its 2,800 stores, covering about 20 different markets in the U.S. If the Nuro tests go well, Kroger say it's likely to expand its use of driverless cars, potentially allowing its supermarkets to reduce its delivery fees and reassign workers who had been driving cars to other jobs focused on improving customer service.

Google is becoming more like Amazon.com. Meanwhile, the online retailer -- which is Google's biggest ad buyer -- is embracing an advertising model. Every year, investors eagerly await Mary Meeker's Internet Trends presentation. Many say she is the top expert in this field. Meeker's longevity is impressive; she's been at this since at least the early 1990s.

Have a nagging feeling that someone -- or something -- is watching you? Chances are it's a camera. Cities around the world employ computer vision-enabled CCTV to monitor vehicle and pedestrian traffic. And in the near future, brick-and-mortar stores might use them to nab shoplifters. Japanese telecom company NTT East teamed up with tech startup Earth Eyes to create AI Guardsman, a machine learning system that attempts to catch crooks in the act.

Information technology has enabled the upheaval of longstanding business models, whether in the globalization of product supply chains, the outsourcing of manufacturing, delivery and support processes or the use of efficient, just-in-time manufacturing. While the changes have many benefits, they have also served to make the product development process more complicated, with one notable exception: the supply chain simplification from disintermediation. Disintermediation, namely the elimination of middlemen, took off with online commerce, but the notion of more directly connecting customers and suppliers has started to seep into almost every business sector. While disintermediation has historically involved streamlining a linear supply chain, the next stage in business evolution entails creating bidirectional connections between various stakeholders in the product development, delivery and purchase process. That's the thesis of Hortonworks' CEO Rob Bearden who characterizes the evolution of linear supply chains that follow a set of procedural processes into a mesh of connected communities comprised of customers, suppliers, producers, manufacturers and service providers as Hyperbolic?

"AI is the new electricity" said Andrew Ng, computer scientist and co-founder of online university, Coursera. Artificial intelligence (AI) has indeed come a long way from being confined in the research laboratories or science fiction movies. It is a persistent reality in today's world, which has permeated every layer of business, causing disruptions of unprecedented magnitude. In such a short span of time, AI has an incredible impact in reshaping the entire retail landscape by boosting productivity, increasing accuracy and improving reliability of business intelligence. AI and machine learning have already begun to make sweeping changes to the entire retail ecosystem.

Florida has stopped testing Amazon's facial recognition program after rights groups raised concerns that the service could be used in ways that could violate civil liberties. Orlando ended a pilot program last week after its contract with Amazon.com Inc to use its Rekognition service expired. 'Partnering with innovative companies to test new technology - while also ensuring we uphold privacy laws and in no way violate the rights of others - is critical to us as we work to further keep our community safe,' the city and the Orlando Police Department said in a joint statement Monday. Orlando was one of several U.S. jurisdictions that Amazon has pitched its service to since unveiling it in late 2016 as a way to detect offensive content and secure public safety.

No one would doubt it's been a tough decade for retailers, and many have failed in the face of digital disruption and transformation. But for Salesforce senior VP of retail and consumer goods, Shelley Bransten, the rise of relationship-based engagement is offering up reasons to be increasingly optimistic about the retail market moving forward. "We're getting beyond the world of transactions and back to the heart of retail, which is creating relationships with shoppers," she told attendees at the recent Salesforce Connections event in Chicago. "The shopper is in control and expectations are higher than ever." Yet with less than 1 per cent of customer data being looked at in the retail sphere, let alone being realised in engagement and interactions, there is plenty of room for improvement, Bransten said.

The U.S. cotton market has remained stable since its spike in 2011, when China executed its cotton reserving and fiber hoarding plan. It is believed that U.S. cotton demand and price were artificially kept low because there are always worries that China would unexpectedly unleash its cotton stockpile, about half of the global storage. However, U.S. cotton price finally showed a revival in recent days. The ICE July cotton futures closed at 95.21 cents a pound on Tuesday, June 12, the highest level for a front-month future contract in the last 6 years. The revival could be attributed to multiple factors, with an emphasis on the worries about insufficient rain in the cotton-growing areas and the newly issued import quotas from China.

A little over a week after the fervor surrounding Google's involvement in the Department of Defense's Project Maven, an autonomous drone program, showed signs of abating, another machine learning controversy returned to the headlines: local law enforcement deploying Amazon's Rekognition, a computer vision service with facial recognition capabilities. In a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, 19 groups of shareholders expressed concerns that Rekognition's facial recognition capabilities will be misused in ways that "violate [the] civil and human rights" of "people of color, immigrants, and civil society organizations." And they said that it set the stage for sales of the software to foreign governments and authoritarian regimes. Amazon, for its part, said in a statement that it will "suspend … customer's right to use … services [like Rekognition]" if it determines those services are being "abused." It has so far declined, however, to define the bright-line rules that would trigger a suspension.