Microsoft's Cortana could already help you with shopping thanks to image search and sales reminders. Now, it might help you get the most for your money too. In the latest Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft has rolled out a pilot feature in Microsoft Edge where Cortana can help you find the best price for a product you're interested in buying. Right now, this feature supports 14 retailers, which includes Amazon, Walmart and eBay, as long as they're within the US. So, let's say you're on a product page for a vacuum cleaner on Walmart.

So how can companies tell if they are really ready for AI and other advanced technologies? First, managers should ask themselves if they have automated processes in problem areas that cost significant money and slow down operations. Companies need to automate repetitive processes involving substantial amounts of data -- especially in areas where intelligence from analytics or speed would be an advantage. Without automating such data feeds first, companies will discover their new AI systems are reaching the wrong conclusions because they are analyzing out-of-date data. For example, online retailers can adjust product prices daily because they have automated the collection of competitors' prices.

In retailer management, the Newsvendor problem has widely attracted attention as one of basic inventory models. In the traditional approach to solving this problem, it relies on the probability distribution of the demand. In theory, if the probability distribution is known, the problem can be considered as fully solved. However, in any real world scenario, it is almost impossible to even approximate or estimate a better probability distribution for the demand. In recent years, researchers start adopting machine learning approach to learn a demand prediction model by using other feature information. In this paper, we propose a supervised learning that optimizes the demand quantities for products based on feature information. We demonstrate that the original Newsvendor loss function as the training objective outperforms the recently suggested quadratic loss function. The new algorithm has been assessed on both the synthetic data and real-world data, demonstrating better performance.

It was a very good sign that Warren bought Apple. Either he's gone crazy or is learning. I prefer to think he's learning.

This is really just half a book, as the first half is a decent review of current technology and trends, and the second half contains unsubstantiated, poorly rationalized prognostications. The predictions are not really credible because the author expresses lack of understanding and abundance of shallow thinking, undermining the entire second half. For example, the author seems compelled to mention Bitcoin and 3D printing, without grasping their true impact or tractability in future economies. They are among the latest tech buzzwords, so rah, rah. Another case, did you know that Google Wikipedia omniscience?

Recent advances in voice recognition technology, in the form of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, are revolutionizing the way that humans interact with machines. But while Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have produced some of the most popular general speech recognition software available, it doesn't mean that smaller companies can't compete. A new voice AI platform called Voysis, headed by Ian Hodson, Google's former head of global text to speech efforts--responsible for powering things like Google Assistant, Google Maps, and Android apps--is giving enterprises an option for customizable voice recognition software to fit specific needs. Using Alexa, for instance, which is trained on general speech, makes it "difficult to get those tailored in a very good way to another entity's product line or intentions," said Hodson. "A furniture store might have 10,000 items in your inventory, but it's a very specific set of items and with specific pronunciations, descriptions and spellings."

Amazon's best-known side ventures have been consumer electronics devices like the Echo and Fire, but the online retailer is potentially looking into a redo of a product at which it has failed: smartphones. Amazon is developing a smartphone series named Ice, Gadgets360 reports. The series will be powered by Google Android and intended to be a low-cost model for developing markets like India. Internally, the phone's specifications are expected to fit this mold. As Gadgets360 noted, one of the phones potentially will include a 5.2-inch to 5.5-inch display.

They took the NYC Data Science Academy 12-week full-time data science bootcamp program from Sep. 23 to Dec. 18, 2015. The post was based on their fourth in-class project (due after the 8th week of the program). Walmart uses trip type classification to segment its shoppers and their store visits to better improve the shopping experience. Walmart's trip types are created from a combination of existing customer insights and purchase history data. The purpose of the Kaggle competition is to use only the purchase data provided to derive Walmart's classification labels.

Amazon has been able to disrupt traditional retailers because its technology is so advanced, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday. "They're going to have robots building robots. And then we're really going to have nothing. We may be naked," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." That kind of hyperbole may not be too far from reality as artificial intelligence continues to build on what computers can do, and Amazon continues to automate its warehouses while using big data to manage inventory.

As the shopping experience becomes more and more integrated, retailers tend to adopt an omnichannel sales approach. This means that a customer may seamlessly switch across the multitude of sales channels, shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks and mortar stores. Not only does this allow customers to get the best out of their shopping, but it also provides retailers with an enormous amount of data generated by customers. This digital trail left by customer's interactions with the retailer, both online and offline, provides marketers exabytes of data. Bluetooth beacons in-stores drove $4 billion in sales in 2015 alone.