LAHORE - An exhibition titled "2nd Machine Learning Projects" featuring projects of International Technology University students on Artificial Intelligence opened at the Punjab Signal Processing and Information Decoding Research Laboratory on Sunday. The exhibition opened after four-month training of MS and PhD students of ITU who presented their Machine Learning course projects, geared towards solving interesting and locally relevant problems. The projects included a project on grocery stores who always find difficult to forecast sales and purchase of items. The project Walmart Data is aimed at predicting unit sales quantities of sales items across 54 grocery stores using the technique of rolling means and LSTM neural. This project will help managers in warehouse management, manpower estimation and effective sales promotions.

When the last of 807 Woolworths stores across the UK closed in January 2009, budget shoppers and pick and mix fans mourned the end of an era. The closure of one of the country's iconic retail chains showed that high street shops were struggling to keep up with the pace of change, and that even industry giants were not immune from disruption. History repeated itself earlier this year when major toy store Toys R Us became yet another casualty. Heralding the death of the high street seems somewhat severe, but it's clear that incumbent retailers are facing a monumental challenge. In the face of ecommerce behemoths, (and not just Amazon), retailers are increasingly becoming technology companies in their own right.

Walmart is taking on Amazon with a new shop-by-text service. The $50-a-month membership program lets harried shoppers use text messages to order items that are delivered to their doorstep. Called Jetblack, it lets shoppers buy items from Walmart.com and other retailers and marks the latest effort by the nation's largest retailer to cater to higher-income consumers. Walmart is taking on Amazon with a new shop-by-text service. It's being tested in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, but is expected to roll out to more regions over time.

This was a sponsored post by AIMIA under the Master Report series. An average US household has 30 loyalty cards, of which 54% are inactive. The number is even higher for the APAC region. Customers, who shopped more often at retailers due to their loyalty offerings, have dropped from 34% (2013) to 28% (2016). Retail loyalty is very common, but still the hardest nut to crack.

Japanese businesses will share industrial data with members of other sectors and even direct rivals in hopes of boosting productivity overall, through a private initiative led by retailer Seven & i Holdings and a separate government platform. Advances in artificial intelligence enable companies to use so-called big data in ways they could not before, to seek deeper understanding of customer behavior. For instance, pooling information from Seven & i's 23 million daily customer interactions and mobile provider NTT Docomo's network of 76 million mobile subscribers could help pinpoint areas where everyday shopping is inconvenient, which would help with planning the expansion of online supermarkets. Combining knowledge of people's movements and tastes could also help with building attractive towns and planning store locations. From June, Seven & i -- the department store operator and parent of convenience store giant Seven-Eleven Japan -- will link up with nine other companies, including Docomo, railway operator Tokyu, trading company Mitsui & Co. and megabank Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group.

"Digitizing" store shelves is a new imperative for Coca-Cola and other CPG companies. In the face of changing consumer behavior and the new retail playbook scripted by Amazon, CPG brands have raced to hop on the "digitization" bandwagon to erase the advantage e-commerce has over brick-and-mortar retail. Now add this area to their get-even list: store shelves. For decades, CPG companies like Coca-Cola have conducted manual audits and surveys to see if, how and where stores stock their goods on shelves, as well as find out if their goods are next to rivals' products and if any out-of-stock items have been replenished. Thanks to technology, this old-school and time-consuming process, prone to human errors, is increasingly being dropped as CPG brands seek to bridge the gap between what they can see in stores and online.

Fleiss said one of the technologies that will usher retail into the future will be the ability to have a personalized shopping experience through text messaging and online chat. The U.S. retail giant is pouring billions of dollars into beefing up its e-commerce business and has recently announced partnerships with logistics companies to deliver groceries ordered online. Two such partnerships Walmart had struck with ride hailing services Uber and Lyft have ended, however, Reuters reported earlier this month. Jetblack, which is available with a monthly membership fee of $50, will offer same-day and next-day delivery at no additional cost. The challenge for the service will be competing with other established membership services like Amazon Prime and Prime Now, which already enjoy wide adoption and are popular with urban consumers.

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.