Slowly but surely, robots are entering the mainstream consumer market. Softbank's chatty Pepper is already dealing with customers at Pizza Hut and Californian clothing store The Ave, Nadine has been working as a receptionist at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and online grocery leaders Ocado are building their own robot mechanic to help human employees. Scarlett Johansson even makes for a particularly effective killing machine in this year's sci-fi action film Ghost in the Shell. Whilst these bots are all used for various different applications within a range of industries, there's one thing they all have in common. In many ways, it seems to make sense that many advanced robots have been given a human design.

By the end of 2017, there will be over 33 million voice-controlled devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo in the hands of your customers. Even if you do not own one of these devices yourself, you're probably already familiar with how these devices are revolutionizing the online shopping experience. As an online retailer, you understand how important the omnichannel shopping experience is for your consumers. But have you ever considered that voice-controlled devices would become one of those channels you had to account for when creating content for your site? Here's what you need to know about voice-activated shopping as the popularity of these voice-activated devices grows.

Drone deliveries are expected to revolutionize supply chain and logistics, by providing last mile coverage along with faster deliveries. Now a new app showcases it can even overhaul the current delivery mechanism -- which consists of delivering packages to physical addresses -- by transporting the package right into your hands, wherever you are at the moment. DelivAir app made by product developers and technology consultants, Cambridge Consultants, will use GPS and smartphone signals to navigate drones carrying the package to a person's real-time location; it will also ask the person for navigational directions once it is in the person's line of sight. It will authenticate the source of the order by syncing with a blinking pattern initiated by the app on the user's smartphone. The drone will deliver the packages from a safe height, avoiding direct contact.

Amazon.com Inc. unveiled technology that will let shoppers grab groceries without having to scan and pay for them -- in one stroke eliminating the checkout line. Each year, new data comes out that indicates customer service and the customer experience (CX) are more important than ever. According to Forrester, 72% of businesses say that improving the customer experience is their top priority. A study from NewVoiceMedia indicates that companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service. No company can afford to be a customer service laggard.

Augmented reality (AR) and machine learning (ML) technologies have been around for years, but until now their use has mostly been limited to processing massive volumes of cloud data for specialized industries and applications. For instance, AR applications have been used in military systems for years, and online retailers have always used some form of ML to better understand and influence buying decisions. Now, with the release of iOS 11 and the new iPad Pro, Apple is making these technologies accessible to a much broader group of developers and non-technical users alike. Apple is known for democratizing very complex technologies by making them less expensive and easier to use. This is now the case with AR and ML in iOS 11 and iPad Pro.

How will AI change strategy? That's the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it's not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we'll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to prediction – like human judgment – will rise. But what does all this mean for strategy?

If there was any doubt that Google's October 4th event will include a miniature Home speaker, Walmart just erased it. The big-box retailer briefly posted a listing for the Google Home Mini that not only shows off the puck-like Assistant device, but gives an idea of what to expect when it launches. The Mini will reportedly ship around October 19th for $49, and you might not even have to pay that much. You see, Walmart has an tie-in with Google Express that cuts $25 off the price of orders until January 15th. That means you could be paying as little as $24 -- not bad for a brand new alternative to the Echo Dot.

Google will be announcing its new pair of Pixel 2 smartphones Wednesday alongside other new products. One of them is the smaller Google Home Mini, which popped up prematurely on Walmart's website Tuesday morning. The listing also revealed the Google Home Mini release date. Walmart listed that the Google Home Mini will arrive on Oct. 19, which is just two weeks after Google's official unveiling tomorrow. As IBT previously reported earlier this month, the smaller smart speaker will cost $49.

How will AI change strategy? That's the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it's not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we'll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to prediction – like human judgment – will rise. But what does all this mean for strategy?

Autonomous vehicles are poised to take to our roads in massive numbers in the coming years. This has been made possible due to advances in deep learning and its application to autonomous driving. In this post, we take you through a tutorial that shows you how to build a remote control (RC) vehicle that uses Amazon AI services. Typically each autonomous vehicle is stacked with a lot of sensors that provide rich telemetry. This telemetry can be used to improve the driving of the individual vehicle but also the user experience.