BENGALURU: Imagine you walk into aretail store wearing a blue striped shirt and by the time you go to the store help, he is already prepared with half a dozen striped shirts that you could consider buying. This might very well be possible, thanks to a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) based retail in-store products of SaaS provider Capillary Technologies. The company, which recently raised $20-million, has been working on using AI to understand the demographics, footfall and conversations within a retail store to give these stores a helping hand in an era where online players are aggressively expanding their operations. By using these solutions, stores can now attempt to do targeted advertising, produce heat maps, analyse conversations and build unique customer profiles. Capillary is piloting these solutions with an initial few customers. For Capillary, this is opening up a new suite of products other than its existing omnichannel customer engagement products.

Walmart is envisioning a high-tech future for its stores, based on the patents it recently filed. In fact, the devices it's considering sound like they'd be perfect for use in cashier-less stores similar to Amazon's, including a smart cart that can help shoppers navigate Walmart's aisles and find specific products. Another patent is for a wearable that can track either shoppers or employees as they enter and leave the premises. Walmart is also thinking of developing a drone that shoppers can summon with their phones to guide them to the specific item they're looking for. Yet another patent is for a sensor that can detect the product you put in your cart, while three more are for for shelves that can sense the products in stock.

Artificial intelligence is making big strides in self-service retailing. That much was evident at the recent CES show in Las Vegas, which showcased numerous applications to enable brands to stay relevant as e-commerce continues to grab more of the retail market. One of the most impressive exhibits using AI was a glassfront merchandiser called Vicki, from ViaTouch Media, that lets shoppers take products from a shelf and examine them before making a purchase. When the product is removed from the shelf, a video screen above the door plays content related to that particular product. The customer also can ask questions and get answers about products in the machine from Vicki, thanks to the machine's audio technology.

Walmart's shelf-scanning robots have started picking up shifts in some California stores. The six-foot-tall robots come with a tower that tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, as well as incorrect prices and mislabeling. The robots pass that data to store employees, who then stock the shelves and fix errors. A Walmart in Milpitas, Calif. is currently testing the robot, but Walmart also has plans to roll them out to 50 more U.S. stores sometime soon. The approximately 2-foot (0.61-meter) robots come with a tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, incorrect prices and mislabeling Out-of-stock items are a big problem for retailers since they miss out on sales every time a shopper cannot find a product on store shelves.

Google made a splash earlier this week with a new Assistant-powered shopping initiative seemingly aimed at chipping away at Amazon's dominance, and now it has a new target in its sights: Venmo. Starting today, you'll be able to use your iPhone or Android phone to send money to anyone in your contact list just by asking Google Assistant. Like the Google Express shopping service, you'll need to have Google Pay installed and set up, but once you go through the process--either through the app or by following Assistant's guided setup--you'll be able to send any amount of money just by saying, "OK Google, send Brad $100 for dinner." Google also says the service will be coming to Google Home and other Assistant-powered speakers in the coming months. But it still could be a while.

"I get invited to everything, and everywhere I go, everyone wishes they had my job. But that's not true here," said Pablos Holman, a self-described futurist and inventor who has worked on lasers that kill mosquitoes and machines that suppress hurricanes. "There's geniuses everywhere," he said, motioning to the pair talking next to him, the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall and the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. "I don't even register on this scale." We're at Mars, an exclusive three-day conference at a midcentury-modern hotel here in the California desert run by Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, for some of the world's most successful geeks. For its first two years, Mars was largely secret; the most prominent image that leaked was a photo of Mr. Bezos piloting a 13-foot robot last year. This year, Amazon lifted the veil and invited a handful of reporters into Mr. Bezos's brainiac pow-wow.

Back in 2014, Sadanobu Takemasu was asked by his boss to go to Lawson, the convenience store chain known for its white milk can logo on a blue signboard. Takemasu thought Ken Kobayashi, then president of Japan's largest trading house, Mitsubishi Corp., was suggesting he go shop at a Lawson store in the basement of their Tokyo office building. Kobayashi had other staff on hand to take care of such mundane errands. "I replied, 'Me?'" Takemasu, 48, said in a recent interview with The Japan Times. Instead of going to the convenience store, however, he was appointed vice president of the national chain.

By the end of 2021, more than 1.6 billion people will use voice assistants on a regular basis, and it is certain they will want to do more than ask about the weather or hear their favourite song. Such assistants will provide retailers with an unprecedented opportunity as consumers use them to find, research and buy products. For this reason, exploring how voice assistants can improve the customer experience is a core focus for many retailers right now. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is powering voice technology systems and be it Alexa, Siri or Google Home, these platforms are enabling customers to interact with brands in ways that are not only convenient but also highly personalised and contextualised. In a conversational AI world, virtual assistants will search, open, fetch, command and engage the dozen or more websites, portals, apps and systems we all interact with daily.

Today's shoppers have developed a new standard of behaviors, preferences and expectations for all of their retail experiences. Responsible with meeting these elevated needs, retailers seek to overcome the hurdles of legacy technology and captivate each of their customers on a 1:1 basis. In the past, consumer value expectations were centered on three variables: cost, choice, and convenience. With instant gratification available at the push of the button, customers are looking to have more control of their purchase journey and are seeking out personalized shopping experiences. Accustomed to the instant access of e-commerce shopping, customers are looking for opportunities to skip the line and have direct communication channels to ask, troubleshoot, and of course, shop.

In this post I'm going to show what streaming ETL looks like in practice. My first job from university was building a data warehouse for a retailer in the UK. Back then, it was writing COBOL jobs to load tables in DB2. We waited for all the shops to close and do their end of day system processing, and send their data back to the central mainframe. From there it was checked and loaded, and then reports generated on it.