Slowly but surely, artificial intelligence is making an impact on the average consumer's daily life. Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Home, etc. have made AI mainstream, but what if we could make retail shopping with AI mainstream as well? For example, imagine walking into your favorite retailer and having the store not only recognize that you're there, but then direct you to particular styles, brands, and products based on your unique user profile. Sound too good to be true? It's coming -- the time is now for AI in ecommerce.

Video: VR, AR or mixed: Which reality is best to sell your story? Drowning in data is not the same as big data. Here's the true definition of big data and a powerful example of how it's being used to power digital transformation. Deloitte research on the consumer experience found that we are not in the midst of a retail apocalypse, but a retail renaissance. The report, which was based on a survey of more than 500 traditional retail, pure play, consumer goods, and branded manufacturing leaders around the globe, showed that brand leaders are rethinking the consumer experience by investing in new emerging technologies like AI, mixed reality AR/VR, and engagement platforms to grow revenues and new customers.

To see what it's like inside stores where sensors and artificial intelligence have replaced cashiers, shoppers have to trek to Amazon Go, the internet retailer's experimental convenience shop in downtown Seattle. Soon, though, more technology-driven businesses like Amazon Go may be coming to them. A global race to automate stores is underway among several of the world's top retailers and small tech start-ups, which are motivated to shave labor costs and minimize shoppers' frustrations, like waiting for cashiers. They are also trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the physical retail world as it does online shopping. Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone.

Blockchain technology is also democratizing artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses of any size will soon be able to offer the sort of personalized recommendations that are currently the province of giant retailers like Amazon. Imagine walking into a neighborhood shop for the first time and the sales associate immediately shows you the products that match your tastes, in your size, and that you don't already own. That's the sort of intuitive experience that AI promises. The barrier is gaining access to enough high quality data about customers to adequately power those systems.

Key Target audience for Artificial Intelligence in retail is retail solutions, platforms, and service providers, AI system providers. IBM, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, and Amazon Web Services are some of the companies that provide AI in retail products and services. The key vendors profiled in the report are as follows such as IBM (US), Microsoft (US), Amazon Web Services (US), Oracle (US), SAP (Germany), Intel (US), NVIDIA (US), Google (US), Sentient technologies (US), Sales force (US), ViSenze (Singapore). North America is the highest contributor in the adoption and implementation of AI in retail. Artificial intelligence in retail market report provides detailed insights into the global AI in retail market to 2022. North America is expected to have the largest market size during the forecast period.

The convenience store giant will adopt facial and gesture recognition and behavior analysis at the chain's 11,000 Thai stores. Through a partnership with AI provider Remark Holdings, 7-Eleven will use facial and gesture recognition to collect and analyze data points on traffic in stores, staff activities, how long customers linger at specific shelves, as well as their emotions as they pass through stores, the report said. It can also identify members of 7-Eleven's loyalty program, allowing managers to single them out for promotions. Soopakij Chearavanont, chairman of Charoen Pokphand (CP), which operates the retailer, said in the report that the technology would help the chain drive revenues, cuts costs and improve margins. To read more, click here.

As a research scientist at the German online retail giant Zalando, Dr. Alan Akbik is an expert in Natural Language Processing and Data Extraction. In his work for the company, which at any given moment is handling massive numbers of online transactions in multiple languages, Akbik helps unveil unique insights into the very structure of human language by observing and analyzing huge sets of multilingual text data. Here's what he had to say about the possibilities for both business and the study of language that NLP is bringing online. What first inspired you to pursue a career as a data scientist? In a sense, all of humankind's knowledge is stored in written language in books, the Web, and elsewhere.

Nathan Stone (NS) and Peter McLean (PM) are a team both professionally at Haven Power, a business energy supplier in Ipswich, UK, and also off the clock when they recently collaborated to create SafeHaven, the third place winner in the AWS DeepLens Challenge. SafeHaven was designed to protect vulnerable people, by enabling them to identify "who is at the door?" using an Alexa Skill. Unknown visitors trigger SMS or email alerts to relatives or carers, via an SNS subscription. Nathan, a BI Developer and Pete, a Data Architect, have been using AWS services to design and build the BI platform at Haven Power. However, prior to using AWS DeepLens they had no machine learning (ML) experience and didn't know where to begin.

The retailer that factors this kind of capability into its merchandising will delight its customers, who seek personalization, convenience, and responsiveness. AI can also make a difference to the physical experience.

Retail companies will invest about 2.76 billion euro in artificial intelligence this year. According to research firm IDC, they are the main driver for AI worldwide, ahead of the banking sector. An estimated 19.1 billion dollar (15.5 billion euro) will be spent on cognitive and AI systems in 2018. That is more than 50 % (54.2 % to be exact) more than last year, according to research firm IDC. It says that 40 % of every digital transformation initiative will use AI in 2019 and that number will grow to 75 % in 2021. Remarkable:the retail sector will surpass the banking industry and spend the most on artificial intelligence in 2018.