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.

Original, accessible, and provocative….Tegmark successfully gives clarity to the many faces of AI, creating a highly readable book that complements The Second Machine Age's economic perspective on the near-term implications of recent accomplishments in AI and the more detailed analysis of how we might get from where we are today to AGI and even the superhuman AI in Superintelligence…. At one point, Tegmark quotes Emerson: 'Life is a journey, not a destination.' The same may be said of the book itself. Enjoy the ride, and you will come out the other end with a greater appreciation of where people might take technology and themselves in the years ahead.

In this paper, we consider a realistic and meaningful scenario in the context of smart grids where an electricity retailer serves three different types of customers, i.e., customers with an optimal home energy management system embedded in their smart meters (C-HEMS), customers with only smart meters (C-SM), and customers without smart meters (C-NONE). The main objective of this paper is to support the retailer to make optimal day-ahead dynamic pricing decisions in such a mixed customer pool. To this end, we propose a two-level decision-making framework where the retailer acting as upper-level agent firstly announces its electricity prices of next 24 hours and customers acting as lower-level agents subsequently schedule their energy usages accordingly. For the upper level problem, we optimize the dynamic prices for the retailer to maximize its profit subject to realistic market constraints. The above two-level model is tackled by genetic algorithms (GA) based distributed optimization methods while its feasibility and effectiveness are con-2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Please cite this accepted article as: Fanlin Meng, Xiao-Jun Zeng, Yan Zhang, Chris J. Dent, Dunwei Gong, An Integrated Optimization Learning Approach to Optimal Dynamic Pricing for the Retailer with Multi-type Customers in Smart Grids, Information Sciences (2018), doi: 10.1016/j.ins.2018.03.039 Preprint submitted to Information Sciences March 22, 2018 firmed via simulation results. Keywords: Bilevel Modelling, Genetic Algorithms, Machine Learning, Dynamic Pricing, Demand-side Management, Demand Response, Smart Grids 1. Introduction With the large-scale deployment of smart meters and two-way communication infrastructures, dynamic pricing based demand response and demand-side management programs [37] [12] have attracted enormous attentions from both academia and industry and are expected to bring great benefits to the whole power system. Real-time pricing (RTP), timeof-use pricing (ToU) and critical-peak pricing (CPP) are commonly used dynamic pricing strategies [20].

Most people have heard of AI (artificial intelligence) and BI (business intelligence), but few have heard of CI (customer intelligence). Some even call it cloud intelligence because so much customer data is now stored in the cloud. Is CI for real or just a figment of our imaginations? Before we get to the numbers, let's look at the definitions. AI is all about getting computers to perform tasks or processes that would be considered intelligent if done by humans.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has taken a robotic dog for a walk at a secretive conference in California. The 54-year-old has been pictured strutting alongside Boston Dynamics' four-legged SpotMini robot, which has previously been compared to killer canine bots featured in the Netflix series Black Mirror. Bezos, who is worth a reported £92 billion ($130 billion), posted the photo to his Twitter account on Monday with the caption: 'Taking my new dog for a walk.' He is currently attending Amazon's'Mars' conference in Palm Springs - an invite-only gathering of robotics companies and academics that focuses on machine learning, automation, robotics and space exploration. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has taken a creepy robotic dog for a walk around a secretive conference in California.

Google routinely fields product queries from millions of shoppers. Now, it wants to take a cut of their purchases, too. Under a new program, retailers can list their products on Google Search, as well as on the Google Express shopping service and Google Assistant. In exchange for Google listings and linking to retailer loyalty programs, the retailers pay Google a piece of each purchase, which is different from payments that retailers make to place ads on Google platforms. A new Google initiative called'Shopping Actions,' should help retailers fend off Amazon's growing dominance.

We're positive you'll agree that chatbots have become a significant part of our everyday lives. Judging by the market situation today, it seems like chatbots are here to stay. Although chatbots aren't being used to their full potential, the new millennium has brought a change for the better. Chatbots are finding their place in marketplaces worldwide, and recent results stand behind scientific assumptions that the artificial intelligence is slowly'conquering the world'. Information technology is moving a lot faster than other industries nowadays. As a result, budget-retailers like Nordstrom Rack rely on chatbots to provide assistance to their customers, and so does TJ Maxx.

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.