Labor Day is on Monday, but there are already many deals on electronics that shoppers can check out now. Best Buy and Amazon have sales on products from Apple, including iPads, to Amazon Echo devices. There are plenty of deals to look out for. For those who don't plan to wait for the iPhone 8, Best Buy is offering up to $300 off the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The promo works when signing up for a 24-month installment plan with Sprint.

Across the globe, in millions of storefronts, employees build displays and arrange products in a bid to get customers to buy things they hadn't planned on. It's called a store plan, and thanks to the marriage of AI data analysis and virtual reality the concept is much smarter than it's ever been. These plans are traditionally conceived in warehouses, giant physical spaces mocked up to resemble the interior of a store. This seems like a huge waste, now that technology is making it more feasible to create a virtual environment to tinker in. InContext Solutions has a better idea: get rid of the building, recreate the storefront in VR, and put AI on the shelves to aid in the creation of smarter store layouts.

Those betting big on AI making voice the dominant user interface of the future are not betting so big as to believe their respective artificially intelligent voice assistants will be the sole vocal oracle that Internet users want or need. And so Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amazon's Jeff Bezos are today announcing a tie-up, which will -- at an unspecified point later this year -- enable users of the latter's Alexa voice assistant to ask her to summon Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant to ask it to do stuff, and vice versa. Here are the pair's respective statements on the move: Quoth Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft: "Ensuring Cortana is available for our customers everywhere and across any device is a key priority for us. Bringing Cortana's knowledge, Office 365 integration, commitments, and reminders to Alexa is a great step toward that goal." Said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon: "The world is big and so multifaceted. There are going to be multiple successful intelligent agents, each with access to different sets of data and with different specialized skill areas. Together, their strengths will complement each other and provide customers with a richer and even more helpful experience. It's great for Echo owners to get easy access to Cortana."

The expected reduction in training time when batch size increases is obvious. However, why is there a drastic increase in training time when we increase batch size in Caffe?! Let's have a look at nvidia-smi for both of the Caffe experiments:

The original Amazon Echo in black is currently out of stock on the company's site, as rumors claim the online retailer will come out with a new version to compete with Apple's HomePod. Amazon has released multiple Alexa-powered Echo devices, including the Echo Look and Echo Show, which were both launched this year. However, the original Echo hasn't been refreshed in two years, and has seen its price slashed in half for Amazon's Prime Day sale. The recent unavailability and discounts on the device suggests Amazon is gearing up to release a new Echo to rival the upcoming HomePod. Apple introduced the HomePod in June, and is expected to launch the speaker in December. Amazon Echo out of stock as rumors point to new device that will rival Apple's HomePod.

Even though Walmart was founded in 1962, it's on the cutting edge when it comes to transforming retail operations and customer experience by using machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. In recent years, its patent applications, position as the second largest online retailer and investment in retail tech and innovation are just a few reasons they are among the retail leaders evolving to take advantage of tech to build their business and provide better service to their customers. Lauren Desegur, VP of customer experience engineering at WalmartLabs said, "We're essentially creating a bridge where we are enhancing the shopping experience through machine learning. We want to make sure there is a seamless experience between what customers do online and what they do in our stores." While its arch nemesis in business may be Amazon.com,

Ocado has become the first British supermarket to launch an app on Amazon Alexa meaning customers can add items to their shopping basket using their smart assistant. The service, which launched yesterday, allows customers to order food to be delivered to their homes simply by issuing a voice command. Ocado is the only British supermarket in the UK to offer an app on Alexa, the personal assistant device owned by rival Amazon, as it moves away from traditional supermarket shopping. The service, which launched yesterday, allows customers to order food to be delivered to their homes simply by issuing a voice command. As well as ordering food from the device customers will be able to add a product to an existing order or basket, find out which products are in season and receive inspiration for the best ways to include them in recipes.

Machine learning is rapidly having a big impact on ecommerce as martech and agencies invest in data science. Off the back of this, performance marketing agency iProspect got in touch to tell me about their work with keyword categorisation. I asked a few questions of Owned Media Executive Josh Carty, to find out more. Before we get stuck in, a reminder that this year's Festival of Marketing features one stage (of 12) dedicated to AI in marketing – book your tickets now and see headliners such as Stephen Fry and Jo Malone. Josh Carty: We work with one of the UK's largest online retailers on their organic search and performance content strategy.

For a long time, I have talked about artificial intelligence as an enabling tool that should help to improve the customer experience. It's a technology that helps customer service advisors and retail associates do their job better, rather than a tool that removes the need for them to even be part of the customer relationship. But AI has taken on something of a mythical quality. Leading executives such as Elon Musk of Tesla warn that systems may eventually run out of control and become more intelligent than humans. These warnings have also been echoed by scientists, such as the physicist Stephen Hawking, who once claimed that AI could be the end of mankind as we know it.

In an age where technology evolves as quickly as customer expectations rise, it's increasingly difficult for brands and retailers to remain competitive while adapting to new trends and demands. It's no longer enough for brands to merely be "present" across multiple channels, no matter how many social platforms they dabble on. In order to reach and retain today's engaged shopper, brands must, above all, be engaging in ways that are unique and customized to each shopper's needs and preferences. One of the strongest cards retailers can play to stay ahead of the curve is to integrate personalization programs into their customer experience (CX) strategy. Boston Consulting Group reports that brands with personalized experiences that incorporate "digital technologies and proprietary data" have seen revenue increase by 6 percent to 10 percent -- which is two to three times faster than brands that don't have personalization programs in place. Additionally, only about 15 percent of companies -- most of which are tech companies and digital native brands -- are considered "true personalization leaders."