According to Keith Anderson, SVP Strategy and Insight, Profitero, "Over the last 15 years… there've been at least a dozen technologies described as potential game changers, but… voice has clearly emerged as a truly game-changing technology… you now increasingly hear retailers, and especially brands, talk about mobile first, voice second." The report says that study after study points to the phenomenal growth of voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, driven by the rapid change in how shoppers are searching for information online. Amazon reported that the Echo Dot was the best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally on Cyber Monday 2017. In The Future of eCommerce, Kantar Retail says "Voice commerce is yet another technological vehicle that… allows consumers to make real-time purchasing decisions, creating a shopping environment that is both ad-hoc and spontaneous." So what should brands be doing now to get ready for the voice shelf?

The future of customer experience is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is popping up everywhere and changing how customers interact with brands. In fact, by 2025, an estimated 95% of customer interactions will be supported by AI technology. From chatbots to automation, artificial intelligence helps brands learn more about their customers to enhance personalization. The bot is trained to pick up on conversational cues to suggest arrangements--if a customer mentions they need something quickly, the bot can briskly suggest the perfect flowers to win someone over.

There is a rising concern among mainstream about the role of humans as AI and robotics become smarter. Putting aside many of the fallacies and assumptions about this concern, what are the types of jobs in 2018 and beyond that we should consider? In my second upcoming book The Human Race: How Humans Can Survive in the Robotic Age, I discuss that for those who are not PhD specialists in advanced technologies will need to focus on empathy-based jobs that machines cannot easily replicate. In more layperson terms, the jobs that we need to start thinking about are jobs that directly meet the empathy needs of other humans, such as coaching, counseling, friend-as-a-service, etc. With the retail disruption underway, traditional retail franchises are doomed. Same goes for any retail businesses. Past 2018, expect accounting, paralegal, online marketing and even auto repair to become more automated and replaced by robotic process automation (RPA), AI, bots and advanced robotics tailored for the home, work, public spaces and industries. When thinking about starting a new business in 2018, it's important to consider sustainability beyond the next 5 years.

At Bossa Nova we create service robots for the global retail industry. Our robots' mission is to make large scale stores run efficiently by automating the collection and analysis of on-shelf inventory data. We drive autonomously through aisles, navigating safely among customers and store associates. If we were a self- driving car we'd be operating at level 5 autonomy. Oh, we should add, it's real, happening today, you can meet our robots in some of the world's biggest retailers.

Today AWS in partnership with WP Engine is announcing the release of an Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress. The sample plugin enables WordPress creators to easily add Text-to-Speech capabilities to written content. As voice interaction becomes more common, it's essential to provide your website's content in audio formats. And, visitors who are drawn to your websites by voice capabilities can now consume your content through new channels, such as inline audio players and mobile podcast applications. Now your readers and listeners can listen to your posts, even while they are away from the screen – driving, riding a bike, or even jogging.

Walmart has looked to speed up innovation at the company, announcing in March that it was launching an incubator lab focused on projects in robotics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. The so-called Store No. 8 will be located in Silicon Valley.

The vast promise to revolutionize areas like healthcare and transportation has been tempered by uncertainty regarding when these developments will be ready for widespread implementation. With all the futuristic talk and attention-grabbing headlines, many may have missed the fact that in many small ways, AI is already here, shaping some of the mundane things we do on a daily basis. We may be taking for granted some of the most obvious examples of the progress in AI that have occurred in a device many of us use countless times every day -- our smartphone. There are also features that you may not be aware of that are driven by AI. Read on to find out about 10 of those innovations.

Developments in the field of artificial intelligence are incredible, almost as if they are from a different world. Investors spend millions in the development of AI. The most active technology is used in the field of Internet search, helping to shape the Google search engine and handle voice assistant requests. AI becomes more perfect with each passing day. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that this technology is increasingly being used for online retailers.

Online shopping doesn't follow a single path. Instead, there's an abundance of ways to make an online purchase -- apps, email, social media. These multiple options can be disorienting to customers if there isn't one clear route for reaching businesses. Enter "conversational commerce," or businesses and buyers connecting through messaging apps. Companies today can use chatbots to instantly communicate with customers and resolve their issues on multiple platforms, such as Facebook or their online store. These round-the-clock bots use AI to infer customers' preferences and create a valuable, individualized shopping experience.

In this paper we apply active learning algorithms for dynamic pricing in a prominent e-commerce website. Dynamic pricing involves changing the price of items on a regular basis, and uses the feedback from the pricing decisions to update prices of the items. Most popular approaches to dynamic pricing use a passive learning approach, where the algorithm uses historical data to learn various parameters of the pricing problem, and uses the updated parameters to generate a new set of prices. We show that one can use active learning algorithms such as Thompson sampling to more efficiently learn the underlying parameters in a pricing problem. We apply our algorithms to a real e-commerce system and show that the algorithms indeed improve revenue compared to pricing algorithms that use passive learning.