People are really pressing my buttons these days on the subject of robots. Belinda Duperre, who sold jewelry at Sam's Club…earns $2 more per hour at Amazon than at Sam's, in part because she's a lot more productive. At Sam's, she served perhaps one to 20 customers a day. At Amazon, she packs 75 to 120 boxes an hour that are then whisked via high-speed automated conveyor belts to fleets of trucks that fan out across the region. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive.

If artificial intelligence lives up to the hype and becomes the most important aspect of cloud computing over the next several years, Walmart wants to make sure it's prepared. The retailer is planning to build a neural network cluster based on Nvidia's AI chips over the rest of the year, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry, as reported by Barron's. The cluster will allow Walmart's OneOps team, which builds and maintains the company's internal application development system, to build a series of neural networks in order to train AI systems within current and future applications. AI could become a huge differentiating factor in the retail stores of the future, and it's one big reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion this year. Whole Foods gives Amazon Web Services' artificial intelligence team reams of data on shopper behavior to study and train its own AI systems, and AWS will be able to use Whole Foods stores to test drive AI-related services that could eventually become part of the core AWS product lineup.

Say goodbye to the glitchy self-checkout scanners in your local retail store. Grocery buying is about to get a big boost from artificial intelligence. At a prototype store in Santa Clara, California, you grab a plastic basket, fill it up as you amble down an aisle packed with all kinds of things--Doritos, hand soap, Coke, and so on--then walk to a tablet computer near the door. The tablet shows a list of everything that's in your basket and how much you owe; you pay, and you leave. This store is actually the demonstration space of a startup called Standard Cognition, which is using a network of cameras and machine vision and deep-learning techniques to create an autonomous checkout experience. Standard Cognition cofounder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal says the company hopes to have it in a store--either a partner's or the company's own--in six months, most likely in the Bay Area.

Sophisticated knock-offs can be difficult to spot, even for experts. It takes years of experience to see mistakes in the grain of the leather, or issues with the stitching - and even then there is a lot of guesswork involved. New York startup Entrupy believes it has developed technology that can solve those issues. Using a handheld microscope camera and computer vision software, the company claims its tech can spot fakes for 11 brands, including Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, with better than 98% accuracy. Second-hand clothes stores use specialist staff to detect counterfeits, but as Entrupy's co-founder Vidyuth Srinivasan told Bloomberg, "for businesses that are growing, that's not a scalable solution".

Retailers are starting to use artificial intelligence to power both customer engagement and service. Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the brink of going mainstream in retail because it shows real potential in helping traders give their customers better service. As more retailers are investing in developing their own approaches to AI, commerce platform providers are also adding more and more automated decision making and machine learning to their software. The time is right for businesses of any shape and size to look into the potential of this technology. Retailer Shop Direct is already using AI and machine learning to talk to its customers but has plans to push this further in the next 12 months. Last year, its Very.co.uk brand launched an automated'Very Assistant' within its mobile iOS app that answers shoppers' customer service questions through a conversational user interface (CUI).

Recently, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research wrote in an investor note that Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE:WMT) will ramp up its focus on deep neural networks for its OneOps cloud business and that the retailer will tap NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) graphics processing units (GPUs) to make this happen. Deep neural networks are used in artificial intelligence processing to allow computers to understand the relationships between pieces of information without having to be specifically programmed to understand that the information is related. Deep neural networks, and the broader deep learning segment, are part of a growing artificial intelligence market. Chowdhry thinks the ramp-up of Wal-Mart's cloud will happen over the next six months and will be "incrementally positive" to NVIDIA's GPU business. These rumors come after reports surfaced in June that Walmart was asking some of its technology customers to move off of Amazon's Web Service (AWS) cloud business.

Walmart is the undisputed king of retail for decades. The recent years have witnessed meteoric rise of primarily online retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba that has challenged Walmart. While Walmart with its 11,000 brick-and-mortar stores has an almost-unbeatable offline presence, it's not resting on its laurels. Not only is Walmart pushing its online presence aggressively, it is also leveraging technology to offer customer best of both the worlds, offline and online. Walmart uses bleeding-edge technology such as AI, machine learning, Big Data, and IoT to maximize efficiency and keep customers happy.

Artificial intelligence and shopping -- does that mean robots that'll stock the shelves? We'll have robots that will use A.I. to check inventory, help customers find the items they're shopping for, ferry supplies from one part of the warehouse to another, aid with shipping, you name it. But the real revolution for A.I. and shopping will be invisible because the technology will create better experiences for consumers while helping employees and shopkeepers run operations more effectively. Let's take any big department store that sells thousands of home, fashion, and beauty products -- more specifically, let's say that there are exactly 100,000 products. Because customers will buy up to 150 percent more and be happier with their purchases if they're shown the items in context, merchants will create outfits, design window displays, and produce splashy catalogs and digital lookbooks to help customers imagine how to wear the latest fashion trend, how to arrange their living rooms to show off their new velvet sectional, or how to install an outdoor shower.

In recent years we have seen significant scientific contributions to the field of human influence, which studies how the people we know and interact with influence the decisions we make. Coupled with the data already available about retail purchases and the latest advances in artificial intelligence, these new insights on human influence can strategically impact various segments of the retail industry. For a long time, retailers have been accumulating customer transaction information through Points of Sales terminals. Usually those metrics were only able to describe how effective retailers were in their attempts to influence individual customer behaviors. Whatever happened when clients interacted afterwards with their friends, families and coworkers--the concrete acts of social influence that many times lead to purchasing decisions--remained a mystery, a black hole of information.

At Retail TouchPoints, we've reported on at least 50 AI-related stories in the last 10 months alone. Most retailers are aware of AI to some degree; many retailers are trying to fit AI strategies into their future budgets; and a number of retailers already have started testing and implementing AI projects to improve mobile sales, social commerce, product promotion, personalized recommendations and sentiment analysis. Many prominent retail industry analysts have reported on AI in studies, videos and reports, including IDC's Greg Girard, who spoke at the 2017 Retail Innovation Conference. Watch his video presentation here: Artificial Intelligence In Retail: It's Time Now. Girard and IDC predict that worldwide spending on cognitive intelligence and AI will reach $12.5 billion in 2017, an increase of 59.3% over 2016. Girard also shared: "By 2019, artificial intelligence will change how 25% of merchants, marketers, planners and operators work, improving productivity by 30% and KPIs by 10% to 20%. AI will help teams work better together."