Change in the retail industry has been accelerated by new competitors and global digital transformation. Underlying this shift are two key trends: the use of technology to understand the rapidly shifting attitudes and sentiments of highly informed buyers, and the demand from retailers to search for a successful operating model in a digital world. Two companies, both powered by AI innovations, are delivering new applications that address these trends – ModiFace and Daisy Intelligence. ModiFace, a Toronto-based company is transforming the way people choose new hair colors and, along with it, the multi-billion dollar hair care industry. Daisy Intelligence, an artificial intelligence software-as-a-service company, is focused on helping retailers improve promotional planning and pricing decisions.

Areas such as offering a personalised experience can be tackled with artificial intelligence (AI), but retailers should make sure they are prepared before adoption, says an expert panel. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered. You have exceeded the maximum character limit. Please provide a Corporate E-mail Address.

Voice shopping accounted for $2bn in spend last year but this is expected to jump to $40bn in 2022, as the number of smart speakers in homes more than quadruples within the same timeframe. The number of homes using smart speakers will rise from 13 per cent today to 55 per cent by 2022, according to management consulting firm OC&C Strategy Consultants. Despite this, only 39 per cent of consumers trust the'personalised' product selection of smart speakers. The three most commonly shopped categories are groceries, entertainment and electronics – representing 20 per cent, 19 per cent, and 17 per cent of voice purchases respectively. This is followed by clothing at eight per cent.

Technology is changing the way we work and the jobs we do. Will artificial intelligence and robots relieve us of humdrum tasks, making our working lives easier, or will they take our jobs away altogether? As part of a new series called the Future of Work, we look at the growing popularity of "daigou" - Chinese expats who buy consumer goods for people back home in China. Sandra Lee describes herself as part of a "global phenomenon". A 37-year-old Chinese expat who lives in Central Coast, Australia, she makes money by selling Australian goods to people back in China.

Accurate demand forecasts can help on-line retail organizations better plan their supply-chain processes. The challenge, however, is the large number of associative factors that result in large, non-stationary shifts in demand, which traditional time series and regression approaches fail to model. In this paper, we propose a Neural Network architecture called AR-MDN, that simultaneously models associative factors, time-series trends and the variance in the demand. We first identify several causal features and use a combination of feature embeddings, MLP and LSTM to represent them. We then model the output density as a learned mixture of Gaussian distributions. The AR-MDN can be trained end-to-end without the need for additional supervision. We experiment on a dataset of an year's worth of data over tens-of-thousands of products from Flipkart. The proposed architecture yields a significant improvement in forecasting accuracy when compared with existing alternatives.

OK, I'll say it: Buying clothes online still sucks. Unless you're buying something from a brand you already own and know the sizing of, it's nearly impossible to get the fit right on the first try. This is why people often buy two sizes and return one, or just skip clothing e-commerce all together and head into the store to try it on in person. The result is either high shipping and return costs for the retailer or a missed sale entirely -- basically a lose-lose situation. Enter Savitude, a startup that wants to make sure the clothes you buy will not only fit you, but also look good with your body shape.

Amid a world-wide crisis in the bee industry, two companies have formed a joint venture to produce honey sustainably in the UAE. With summer flowers out and in full bloom bees are finding lots of pollen for their hives. SAN FRANCISCO -- Birds do it. Now even educated Walmart drones may do it. The world's largest retailer has applied for a patent for drone pollinators to make up for the decline in bees and other insects that fertilize crops and make much of the food the company sells possible.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting way ahead of itself. Venture capital is being thrown at anything that claims to have it. Startups are using it as a buzzword that they have to cram into their business idea just to sound like they are on the cutting edge of technology. They say AI is going to take over the world and that it will change the world at a pace faster than anything we've ever seen. Recently, I saw an article about an online retailer that claimed to use AI to make people purchase more often because they could intelligently recommend products to the user.

Walmart Inc's patent filings hint that it may see a future where farmers use its drones to not only spot crop problems but selectively apply chemicals or even disperse pollen to bring shoppers the freshest and cheapest food possible. The world's largest retailer applied for six patents last year on drones that aim to prevent damage to crops, control pest attacks on farms and cross-pollinate plants, according to U.S. Patents and Trademark Office documents that were made public last week and seen by Reuters. Groceries make up 56 percent of the company's total revenue and Walmart may see drone technology as one way to get food from farms to store shelves faster and more cheaply to compete with Amazon.com Walmart Inc's patent filings hint that it may see a future where farmers use its drones to not only spot crop problems but selectively apply chemicals or even disperse pollen to bring shoppers the freshest and cheapest food possible. In one application, Walmart seeks to patent a system that would use drones to identify crop-damaging pests and then dispense insecticides on the critters.

Having an eCommerce platform for your business means competing with the giant online retailers in the marketplace. While you may not have their resources, you can use similar technologies to make your company efficient and highly visible in a very crowded playing field. And the way to do it is by using artificial intelligence or AI -- delivered through the cloud. The great thing about AI is it has become integral in the way many businesses operate and the way consumers interact with digital touch points. And according to HubSpot, 63 percent of customers don't even know they have been using AI technologies.