Ocado plans to wheel out Star Wars-style C-3PO humanoid robots at its warehouses as early as 2025. The'SecondHands' robots will pass spanners and move ladders to workers using artificial intelligence and speech recognition. Ocado has already built a prototype, marking the latest move from the online grocery specialist to cut its reliance on human workers. Ocado plans to wheel out Star Wars-style C-3PO humanoid robots at its warehouses as early as 2025. The'SecondHands' androids will pass spanners and move ladders to workers using artificial intelligence and speech recognition.

If armies of Terminators start wiping out humanity, their ancestors might be traced to an upmarket grocery home delivery service that sells fancy toilet roll. Ocado Technology, the innovation arm of the grocery retailer, today unveiled the first prototype of its SecondHands project, a humanoid robot called ARMAR-6 that will one day shadow and collaborate with maintenance workers in Ocado's three warehouses in the UK. The grocery company wants ARMAR-6 to learn to understand what people are working on, anticipate any help they might need, and step in with manual assistance at the appropriate time. For example, if a technician asks for a spanner, the robot should identify the tool among others in a toolkit, use its natural language skills to ask the technician "Do you mean this spanner or that one?", and then hand it

Several use cases showcasing different solutions are covered in this video. Introduction to Amazon SageMaker (10 minutes) This course provides an overview of Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that enables data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Introduction to AWS Greengrass (10 minutes) This course is an introduction to AWS Greengrass, which lets you run local compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities for connected devices in a secure way. You can build machine learning models in the cloud and execute their inference at the edge. Introduction to Amazon Comprehend (10 minutes) This course introduces you to Amazon Comprehend, a new AWS service that helps with natural language processing. In this course, we discuss how Amazon Comprehend solves challenges like the exponential growth of unstructured text, explore the service's five main capabilities, and review some popular use cases.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow, evolving technologies will naturally emerge. In the realm of ecommerce, businesses can barely keep up with the pace of AI as it is, but they must in order to capitalise on opportunity and maintain a competitive edge. There's too much useful, revenue-driving technology to embrace. If you're interested in gaining a competitive advantage in the retail ecommerce space, then it's essential to learn the AI trends sure to impact business systems and development in 2018. Here's what you can expect: Online shopping on Amazon, for example, can often be a price hunt and peck.

At first blush, the bathroom is the most boring possible spot smart-home technology could be applied, except maybe a closet. But consider a mirror that turns on motion-activated lights when you get up in the middle of the night, or tells you the weather in the morning. Consider setting the shower on to the perfect temperature just by asking, before you climb in. There are even "intelligent" toilets in the works though how intelligent they'll be remains to be seen. At an opening press event for CES Sunday, Kohler debuted a voice-enabled lighted mirror with dual-microphones and Amazon.com

The CEO and founder of Amazon.com is listed as the world's richest person with a net worth of $105billion. Thanks to a surge in Amazon's share price, the 53-year-old added $34.2 billion to his wealth in 2017 to round out a standout year for the tech and retail giant. The Seattle-based company has grown from its online retail roots to cloud computing, streaming video, artificial intelligence and more. Amazon's shares have recently been boosted by its acquisition of grocery chain Whole Foods. The firm has also expanded its line-up of devices tapping into its digital assistant Alexa.

Cue machine learning, allowing fashion retailers to immediately get a handle on the colors and styles that are selling when demand is peaking, and before it's too late to bring it into stores. During our onsite video conversation, Hannah Vogt, Knowledge Management for SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation at SAP, showed me an example at the recent SAP TechEd Barcelona event. "Advanced machine learning capabilities allow the computer to interpret what a store manager is looking for, and instantaneously pulls together all the information from a company's ERP systems in a way that humans couldn't accomplish all alone," said Vogt. "The manager doesn't have to use transaction codes or any kind of computer-speak to obtain the data needed." Using machine learning, managers could in seconds find out what colors are trending in Paris, and likely to cross the ocean to the United States, staying one step ahead of increasingly fickle and demanding fashion consumers. "Managers can react faster to match trends, triggering production to adjust inventory in stores that's more in synch with up-to-the-minute fashions," said Vogt. "There's no time to lose in the current market, and you have to move faster than the competition in order to survive."

Machine learning is quietly spreading into every aspect of our lives. Perhaps it is not quite yet completely common, but it is definitely becoming more noticeable. From recommendations by online retailers to better, less congested routes to familiar destinations, it is starting to make our lives easier. At the same time, of course, we are starting to rely on it more and more to help us organise our complicated lives, and live smarter. One really big change has been from products to services.

The internet of things has certainly become an essential part of Big Data. It will also be a key trend in 2018 and beyond. For example, it can be utilized by retailers to establish their competitive edges, such as store location, stock and store management and customer relationship. A company has to be flexible enough to turn the data into valuable business insight and action. Artificial intelligence caught increased market attention last year.

The rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace poses a little-discussed question – wouldn't it be better if the HR department, not the programmers, oversaw robots? Rob Mettler suggests the idea is not as bizarre as it sounds. Is HR ready for the robot revolution? The view that robots should report to the head of HR might sound absurd, but when the CIO of a major online retailer talks about his warehouse robots working in teams, when companies introduce "AI board members", and robots start being trialled in social care, it's time to reconsider lines of responsibility. Of course, many will be of the opinion that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) aren't human and we shouldn't even entertain the idea.