Last year, Amazon opened its first convenience store embedded with its "just walk out technology." Located in Seattle, the Amazon Go store, which lets shoppers walk in, load up on the items they want and walk out without having to pay for the items in a checkout line, has been testing its technology with Amazon employees. Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company has worked through some of the hangups with the technology and is making moves towards opening its store and others to the public. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that while the Amazon Go store did well with a small amount of customers who were shopping fairly slowly, it couldn't keep up when there were more than 20 shoppers in the store at once. The store uses cameras, sensors and deep learning algorithms to track shoppers as they move around, log which items they take and charge them once they leave. Those technical bugs pushed the public opening of the store from an initial projection of early 2017 to an undetermined future date.

Personalized experiences are a hot topic these days. Certain types of businesses have become very skilled at delivering personalized service. Think about a hotel you've stayed at before that welcomes you back and remembers that you liked a certain type of pillow, a specific newspaper and a corner room. The experience is becoming more and more common, and this type of service is crossing over into many other industries, especially retail. When a customer walks into a retail store, the salesperson has two choices: simply ring up a purchase, or truly help the customer get what he or she really needs.

On the third floor of a shopping mall in the heart of Shanghai last week, Xiaolan He, a woman in her 50s, took an olive-green down jacket to a fitting room. To her surprise, she found a screen about the size of a large poster on the wall. It recognized the item of clothing in her hands through a tiny sensor embedded in the garment, and showed several options for matching items that she could flip through like a photo album. The screen, and the system that powers it, make up FashionAI--which essentially became He's personal stylist. FashionAI received its first big wave of customers on Saturday during Singles' Day, a Chinese shopping festival started by Alibaba in 2009 and held on November 11 each year.

"Both the cost and time savings were immediately recognizable." Indigo, "the world's first cultural department store for book lovers," is an adored and well-respected brand. As part of Indigo's corporate identity, they take pride in an elevated employee experience. Repeatedly ranked among the top 10 in Top Retail Employer Brand lists, it is no surprise that Indigo is flooded with over 2200 online applications every single week. Indigo approached Ideal as their number of applications continued to climb.

A child safety warning has been issued over'smart' toys that can be hacked via their Bluetooth connections. The security loophole means that it is possible for strangers to connect to the toys and talk to children without their parents' knowledge. Consumer group Which? said an investigation found'worrying security failures' with the I-Que Intelligent Robot, Furby Connect, Toy-fi Teddy, and CloudPets cuddly toy. It has written to retailers asking them to stop selling the toys ahead of Christmas until the security problems have been resolved. A child safety warning has been issued over'smart' toys that can be hacked via their Bluetooth connections.

Alibaba's sales from Saturday's Singles Day event exceeded 25 billion dollars, more than quadruple what Americans spent last year during Black Friday. While the majority of those sales undoubtedly came via online purchases, the company also quietly experimented with an AI-powered project designed to woo offline shoppers. FashionAI was developed by Alibaba researchers in order to provide a recognizable interface for customers to use while trying on clothes. It's a basic screen interface that uses machine-learning to make clothing and accessory suggestions to customers based on the items they are trying on. There's no camera; it uses information embedded in the item's tag to make the recommendations.

Artificial Intelligence has been a hot word across all industries lately. Think all the fuss around self-driving cars, Google's updated Assistant and the general talks of how conversational interfaces are the future of tech. Around 54 percent of retailers already use or plan to add artificial intelligence technology to their toolkit, with 20 percent planning to introduce some AI within the next 12 months, according to the latest report from SLI Systems. The increased adoption of AI in retail can be specifically attributed to advances in the deep learning. Deep learning is a specific machine learning approach to building and training neural networks.

Alibaba set a new Singles' Day record this Saturday by selling a staggering $25 billion worth of goods. The company also quietly tested a technology that could help it reinvent retail using artificial intelligence. On the third floor of a shopping mall in the heart of Shanghai last week, Xiaolan He, a woman in her 50s, took an olive green, down jacket to a fitting room. To her surprise, she found a screen about the size of a large poster on the wall. It recognized the item of clothing in her hands through a tiny sensor embedded in the garment, and showed several options for matching items that she could flip through like a photo album.

Two months ago, I pointed out that iconic software giant Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was more of an artificial intelligence company than most everyone recognized. Thanks to a handful of acquisitions and a couple of home-grown efforts, much of the long-term future value of MSFT stock was riding on how potent the company's AI technologies were. It turns out that Microsoft may be closer to a meaningful AI endzone than previously thought. It recently teamed up with Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) to promote a new deep-learning programming interface called Gluon.

There have been a number of buzzwords and defining technology trends in retail over the last decade: from Big Data, to omnichannel, and the ubiquitous, omni-present Cloud. And now the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have seemingly become the latest crazes and talk of the town. Forrester expects investment in AI to triple this year. By 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed by AI according to research by Gartner. The value of AI is estimated to be worth $36.8bn globally by 2025 predicts US market intelligence firm Tractica.