The British glove manufacturer Cornelia James is often in the public eye. Since 1979, it has provided gloves by royal appointment to the Queen of England, and more recently it has dressed megastars including Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Madonna. All those high-profile customers are great for publicity, but nobody drives sales quite like Kate Middleton, said Genevieve James, the company's creative director. "We get far more of a spike in sales when someone like Kate wears them. But when it's somebody like the Duchess of Cambridge, the public, particularly in the US, can relate to that," James told IBM. James first confirmed that fact in 2012 when, at a ceremony for Remembrance Sunday, Middleton wore a pair of Cornelia James' merino wool gloves.

Recently, I met a few friends in preparation for a machine learning panel on e-commerce that will be happening in Seattle on May 31st. Our goal is to answer retailers real business problems with data science, and data analytics solutions. We started to discuss ways we could see data being used to improve different brick and mortar stores as well as e-commerce sites. One of our discussions led us to talking about Men's Wearhouse. We had originally started by discussing the problems with buying clothes online.

Engineers at Ocado Technology developed a robotic arm capable of lifting up thousands of the retailer's catalog items. For more videos, subscribe to Mashable News: http://on.mash.to/SubscribeNews Give us a follow: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mashable/

While AI has worked its way into countless sectors bringing changes to our everyday lives, the online retail industry, in particular, has been significantly transformed by the adoption of these new capabilities. The acceptance and growth of AI in e-commerce this year confirms what I believe: that the shopping experience of the future -- both online and in-store -- will be dominated by AI tech for years to come.

The lights are going out at malls across the United States with more than 20 major retail bankruptcies in 2017. As of today, store closures have skyrocketed to 7,000 doors throughout the nation, affecting such iconic brands as Toys R Us, Walgreens, Gap, Sam's Club, The Children's Place, Hallmark, Stride Ride, Aeropostale, Wet Seal, The Limited and Walmart. At the same time, investment in retail technology has never been higher, especially robots.A month after Walmart laid off close to 10,000 workers with the shuttering of Sam's Club, it announced a new partnership with Pittsburgh-based robot manufacturer, Bossa Nova. The mechatronics innovator will begin rolling out inventory auditing scanning bots to 50 Walmart locations. The machines will automate the tasks previously held by inventory associates by autonomously navigating around the store to check the shelf display, inventory position, and pricing of the big box's 200,000 items.

Ocado's fulfilment center in Andover has hundreds of robots working above a grid of groceries. In the race to stay alive in grocery retailing, Whole Foods sold to Amazon, Walmart offered grocery delivery and now Kroger has announced it will build three huge, automated warehouses filled with swarming robots to process online orders. The only problem: By the time Kroger gets those warehouses, which could rise to 20 in the coming years, it may still struggle to match Amazon in doing speedy delivery. The reason comes down to geography and the nitty-gritty details of Kroger's logistical overhaul. Kroger has picked warehouse builder Ocado, well known in the U.K. for being one of the first companies in the world to sell fresh food online when it first launched in 2000.

Successful retailers are data-driven retailers. The task of predicting consumer behavior, with an eye toward understanding individual customers, involves working with dozens of variables and data that is often incomplete, ambiguous, and organized for transaction processing and not analytics. The promise of data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is for these techniques to help spot trends and patterns with sufficient speed and accuracy for retailers to be able to adjust floor-sets, advertising, discounting, and product mix as quickly as possible. But just as data scientists are becoming more commonplace, antagonism is growing between expectations about how quickly algorithms and advanced mathematical techniques can transform retailers, and the reality that data science is, well, science. Just as with the physical sciences, there are many dead ends and failures in data science.

After a career that included helping Alphabet Inc's Google build out data centers and speeding packages for Amazon.com Inc to customers, Jim Miller is doing what many Silicon Valley executives do after stints at big companies: finding more time to ride his bike. But this bike is a little different. Arevo Inc, a startup with backing from the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency and where Miller recently took the helm, has produced what it says is the world's first carbon fiber bicycle with 3D-printed frame. Arevo is using the bike to demonstrate its design software and printing technology, which it hopes to use to produce parts for bicycles, aircraft, space vehicles and other applications where designers prize the strength and lightness of so-called'composite' carbon fiber parts but are put off by the high-cost and labor-intensive process of making them.

Well, time to ask Google Style AI to match your outfit. For a long time, fashion startups and retailers have had their sights set on making fashion apparel recognisable and searchable by AI's image recognition. The idea behind was always to snap a picture of someone walking down the street wearing a super dress, then, a few seconds later have Google telling you about the brand, model, style, material price and where to buy it from. After years of research, development, investments, startups and technology organisations mixing in, finally, Google launched its version of the AI fashion recognition innovation. Called'Style Match,' the feature builds on the existing'Google Lens' technology which lets users take photos of any fashion items and find other similar products.

The consumer relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) has had its rough patches. But initial terror at the specter of job-gobbling automation and affront at the insurgence of'inhuman' interactions is waning as the promise of support, entertainment, connectivity and even protection emerges - presenting retailers who dare to deal in the un-real with major opportunities. The sentiment was starkly illustrated when Italian fashion giant Prada promoted its Autumn/Winter 2018 catwalk show in league with'Instagram's first virtual influencer', superseding the fashion industry's vast pool of human bloggers, many of whom now represent retail's heftiest marketing spends. Lil Miquela, who may or may not be based on an LA-based blogger, is a bone fide CGI superstar; as of May 2018, she has a whopping 1.1M Instagram followers, a figure that's rocketed from an already robust 600k during the February show. She teased followers with videos, GIFs of the new collection and archival pieces, Instagram stories (micro videos) and even a tour of the venue via a drone that she controlled before the show kicked off.