By 2020, approximately 20.4 billion devices are estimated to be connected to the internet. These IoT devices are getting smarter, connecting to intelligent applications, such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, and helping consumers make transactions and complete tasks. However, they are also sparking conversational AI, and it stands to change customer service. Conversational AI consists of an advanced technology that uses natural language processing (NLP) so that computers can comprehend human language. Conversational AI includes a variety of technologies, such as chatbots, advanced notifications and personal assistants. Conversational AI is not without its challenges.

From all recent indications, the future of e-commerce will undergo vast changes in the coming years. Brands and retailers who want to succeed in this new landscape will need to turn to technology -- specifically AI and the IoT -- to learn about their customers and, in turn, build deep and lasting consumer relationships, according to a recent report. The report, carried out by Internet Retailing and PA Consulting, found that modern retail's intense reliance on data will only deepen as more and more brands grow their own e-commerce presence and sell directly to consumers. And because of this, online retailers will no longer have the monopoly on data that they once enjoyed over brands. The report, named "The direct-to-consumer challenge", also found that the rise of AI and the IoT will drive this ever-increasing dependence on data to understand consumers as more everyday products and household items will progressively start gathering huge swaths of information and be able to perform menial functions like purchases to refill supplies.

Japan's first convenience store was not, as many suppose, 7-Eleven in Tokyo in 1974 but Mitsui in Kyoto in 1673. The genius behind it was Mitsui Hachirobei, heir to the sake shop his father had opened a generation earlier. Of samurai birth, the father saw warrior status as useless in the dawning age of peace. He renounced his and went commercial. He struggled, perhaps too much the warrior at heart to really make a go of it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer pure science fiction, relegated to books, television and dystopian movies - we're well past that point today. Growth and investment in AI have been astonishing, and its set to continue with Gartner predicting AI technologies will be in almost all new software by 2020. While there has definitely been a laser focus on AI in the past few years, consumers and businesses have actually been exposed to AI for a long time, perhaps without even knowing. As an example, how do you think Outlook knows which emails to put in your spam folder? Or how does your favourite online retailer know which other products you might like?

Only a handful of people waited outside Apple's flagship London store for the iPhone 8 this morning - a far cry from the snaking queues of previous years. Queues were smaller than usual because of the anticipation surrounding the ultra premium iPhone X, which offers a radical redesign, new screen and advanced camera features. That is released in November. The special edition iPhone X features Apple's first ever edge-to-edge screen and facial recognition technology. This can be used to unlock the phone and make payments via Apple Pay, as well control new animated emoji - named Animoji - using their facial expressions.

Digitization of retail industry has unveiled new realms and opportunities for the retailers globally. Over time shopping has evolved drastically and is no longer just a utility of bartering money for a product. It is predicted that by 2018 75% of developer teams will utilize Artificial Intelligence in building one or more than one services or business applications. Over time Artificial Intelligence has made an impeccable space in the market. A study reveals that by 2020, around 80% of customer interactions will be handled by Artificial Intelligence.

From the outside looking in, shopping hasn't changed all that much in the past decade. Sure, it's more common now to find a brick-and-mortar synced efficiently with its online presence (Target is great at this). But those still seem to be the exception to the rule. Proving once again that there isn't a space that can't be reshaped by AI, our friends at CB Insights mapped the startups disrupting retail and e-commerce using artificial intelligence (AI). Syncing online and real-world inventories is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to converting retail to a 21st-century endeavor.

E-commerce websites such as Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart, and Walmart sell billions of products. Machine learning (ML) algorithms involving products are often used to improve the customer experience and increase revenue, e.g., product similarity, recommendation, and price estimation. The products are required to be represented as features before training an ML algorithm. In this paper, we propose an approach called MRNet-Product2Vec for creating generic embeddings of products within an e-commerce ecosystem. We learn a dense and low-dimensional embedding where a diverse set of signals related to a product are explicitly injected into its representation. We train a Discriminative Multi-task Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), where the input is a product title fed through a Bidirectional RNN and at the output, product labels corresponding to fifteen different tasks are predicted. The task set includes several intrinsic characteristics about a product such as price, weight, size, color, popularity, and material. We evaluate the proposed embedding quantitatively and qualitatively. We demonstrate that they are almost as good as sparse and extremely high-dimensional TF-IDF representation in spite of having less than 3% of the TF-IDF dimension. We also use a multimodal autoencoder for comparing products from different language-regions and show preliminary yet promising qualitative results.

If you're interested in drone deliveries, it's likely because you want your internet shopping dropped at your door within an hour of clicking "buy." And while companies like Amazon are working to make that happen, complicated logistics and thorny regulations mean it's likely to be years before you start hearing the whir of rotors on your front porch. Yet drones are already proving their worth with more urgent, medical, missions. The latest of these comes from Silicon Valley startup Matternet, which has been testing an autonomous drone network over Switzerland, shuttling blood and other medical samples between hospitals and testing facilities. "We have a vision of a distributed network, not hub and spoke, but true peer-to-peer," says Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos.

Israel is a country full of history, which is why they have more museums per capita than any other country. They also have the oldest continuously used cemetery in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Hearing that, you'd think that not a whole lot has changed over the years, but one thing that has constantly been evolving is their ability to innovate and be productive. Next to the U.S. and Canada, Israel has the largest number of publicly traded companies, which shows that they can also build successful businesses. Our recent article on "The Top-10 Biggest Startups in Israel by Funding" proved to be quite popular so we decided to do another article on the top 10 Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startups.