A survey last year found that 98 percent of smartphone owners had used their device's artificial intelligence-based virtual personal assistant (VPA). The majority of those surveyed were inhibited about talking to their artificial intelligence (AI)-powered VPAs in public, but that's likely to change as AI becomes more firmly entrenched in everyday life. As AI becomes a part of daily living, brand leaders are realizing the potential the technology has to transform marketing. With AI, marketers can understand customers more completely and connect with them on a deeper, more personal level. This can allow brands to deliver a buying experience that is relevant to the customer.

Amazon's Echo Dot was made available for free through Amazon.com The apparent promo appeared to shut down around 4 p.m. EDT, with some users showing notifications that the product was no longer available. There is no listing of the promotion, which is applied at checkout and is listed as an "Audible Promo," presumably in reference to Amazon's audiobook service Audible. It is unclear if the deal or apparently giveaway was intended solely for Amazon Prime customers, but customers without Prime were also able to order the product for free as of Friday afternoon. When the device is added to a user's cart, it is listed at it's retail price of $49.99.

A bizarre drone designed to take the hassle out of walking your dog is being advertised by an online retailer. Drones Direct say that they have modified a popular automated aerial vehicle to allow owners to take their pet for a stroll completely hands free. The device uses GPS to lead dogs along a programmed route. Their DJI Phantom 4 Dog Drone, which the firm insists is a genuine product, costs twice the price of the regular model at £1,999 ($2,590). A bizarre drone designed to take the hassle out of walking your dog is being advertised by an online retailer.

TensorFlow enables developers to quickly and easily get started with deep learning in the cloud. The framework has broad support in the industry and has become a popular choice for deep learning research and application development, particularly in areas such as computer vision, natural language understanding and speech translation. You can get started using TensorFlow on AWS by launching the AWS Deep Learning AMI which comes bundled with TensorFlow; as well as, other popular deep learning frameworks such as Apache MXNet, Caffe, Caffe2, Theano, Torch, Keras, and the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.

People who use Box's service to store their digital documents could find it easier to deal with files with lots of pictures. The enterprise software company said Thursday that it's now using Google's (goog) image recognition technology to power a new service. That service is intended to help its customers who need to identify objects in photos and pictures in their online files. Box (box) CEO Aaron Levie said that the service is suited for companies like retail shops that store images of their department store interiors and what to outline every detail in those photos. Before, those companies would have to use people to view each photo and manually label everything in it, like each individual item on a store shelf.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But first: As more and more shopping is done online, what will become of the 16 million Americans who work in the retail industry? Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, takes a look. It's part of our series Making Sense, which airs Thursdays on the NewsHour. JENNIFER RICHTER, Former Regional Director, Macy's: This is a great, great, great basic black top. PAUL SOLMAN: This summer, Jennifer Richter opened her own clothing boutique online.

The day before a fully automated grocery store opened its doors in 1939, the inventor Clarence Saunders took out a full page advertisement in the Memphis Press-Scimitar warning "old duds" with "cobwebby brains" to keep away. The Keedoozle, with its glass cases of merchandise and high-tech system of circuitry and conveyer belts, was cutting edge for the era and only those "of spirit, of understanding" should dare enter. Inside the gleaming Tennessee store, shoppers inserted a key into a slot below their chosen items, producing a ticker tape list that, when fed into a machine, sent the goods traveling down a conveyer belt and into the hands of the customer. "People could just get what they want – boom, it comes out – and move on," recalled Jim Riot, 75, who visited the store as a child. "It felt like it was The Jetsons." Despite Saunders' best efforts, the Keedoozle's circuits frequently failed and the store closed for good by 1949.

Amazon has a sale on Logitech products today. These are not incredibly deep discounts--despite the savings claims on Amazon's sales page. Nevertheless, there are a few good buys here that are worth pointing out. Amazon's Logitech sale lasts until just before midnight on Tuesday evening. The MX Master Mouse is available for $50 today, which is a savings of about $14 off the previous price. This Bluetooth mouse has a thumb wheel for horizontal navigation.

Jeff Bezos might be the world's biggest Star Trek fan. At one point, the Amazon founder and CEO wanted to call his e-commerce platform makeitso.com, in reference to Captain Jean-Luc Picard's catchphrase. In 2016, after years of begging Paramount Pictures, Bezos made a cameo as an alien Starfleet official in Star Trek Beyond. So, when Amazon set out to build the AI assistant Alexa, Bezos envisioned finally realising the Star Trek computer - a benign, omniscient assistant, available everywhere. "We really did think of it as the Star Trek computer, where it was ambient and you could simply say: 'Computer, beam me up,'" says Mike George, Amazon's vice president of Echo, Alexa and Appstore. Clad in a black v-neck jumper and jeans, the 20-year Amazon veteran has a booming laugh and a vague resemblance to both Bezos and Picard. George bounds into the office, all unwavering eye contact, full-body laughs and wrist-crunching high fives, his preferred form of greeting. I meet him, and most of the Alexa executive team, on an upper floor of Amazon's skyscraper, Day 1, in the Denny Triangle in downtown Seattle. From here, on a blue-sky morning, the Space Needle is dwarfed by the snow-capped mountains beyond. Both seem like inconsequential theatrical set pieces to the Amazon empire below.

It's not about just about the individual jobs that are going away or how fast the rate of new jobs that will be created by Artificial intelligence, it's about entire industries becoming automated in a short-period simultaneously. So which industries are high-risk in the years to come for automation and big-scale human displacement of tasks and jobs? From robot cooks to ordering food home via delivery to automated convenience stores, it's clear the fast-food, convenience stores and the cafe sector will become automated very quickly. This is a deceptively high number of jobs. With the retail apocalypse, we've witnessed the start of a shift.