With millions of Echo and Echo Dot devices sold last holiday season, and a projected 10 million units in homes by the end of 2017, it's clear that Amazon's voice-activated personal assistant, Alexa, is rapidly gaining widespread consumer adoption. Alexa is an illustration of Amazon's ability to meet consumer demand for speed, convenience and ease, while pioneering a new way to shop. Alexa can play music, make appointments, change TV channels and more, but the most valuable feature for Amazon is that the software enables consumers to shop directly by voice. This is great news for Amazon, but it will also inevitably change the way retailers market and sell their products. Most retailers and brands will have to act fast to prepare for ecommerce via digital assistant, and their biggest hurdle will be providing a voice-controlled shopping experience that is both intuitive and valuable for consumers.

What is Jeff Bezos "Day 1" philosophy? "The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind"--Jeff Bezos A recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Amazon Exhibit 99.1 statement [1] is really quite interesting. Also known as the 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos sketched out a philosophy that he calls "Day 1" and "Day 2". This idea came about in the very early days of Amazon. He occupied a building called "Day 1", named as a reminder that the company should always be in "Day 1" mode.

The DJI Mavic Pro is a small yet powerful drone that turns the sky into your creative canvass easily and without worry, helping you make every moment an aerial moment. Its compact size hides a high degree of complexity that makes it one of DJI's most sophisticated flying cameras ever. FROM YOUR POCKET OcuSync is an all new DJI designed long range transmission technology capable of up to 4.3mi (7km)* of transmission range, HD 720p long range, and Full HD 1080p short range video streaming - far surpassing the capabilities of any Wi-Fi transmission system. Every time you fly, OcuSync scans a range of available frequencies to find and use the one with the least interference to give you more reliability and control. Tightly integrated with DJI GO, OcuSync transfers vital statistics of the Mavic to you in real time, and can also be used to download photos and videos while you fly at a maximum speed of up to 40Mb/s. NO BUMPS AND SCRAPES An unprotected drone could hit obstacles during long distance flight or when descending from an inadequate height in Return to Home mode.

Among the big fields, A.I. will have a substantial impact on its logistics, and no industry knows how to manage these better than the retail industry. Below is an interesting article showing what a major German retail company is doing in terms of logistics, leading the field and exemplifying real-world A.I. applications. A GLIMPSE into the future of retailing is available in a smallish office in Hamburg. From there, Otto, a German e-commerce merchant, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its activities. The firm is already deploying the technology to make decisions at a scale, speed and accuracy that surpass the capabilities of its human employees.

Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business. Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force in at least five different giant industries: retail, logistics, consumer technology, cloud computing, and most recently, media and entertainment. The company has had its share of missteps -- the expensive Fire phone flop comes to mind -- but is also rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have put it ahead of competitors in promising new industries. This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the mid-2000s, and more recently the surprising consumer hit in the Echo device and its Alexa AI assistant. Today's Amazon is far more than just an "everything store," it's a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And its insatiable appetite for new markets mean competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.

America's retailers are closing stores faster than ever while demand for warehouse workers by online retailers is higher than ever. Retailers and logistics companies have been opening facilities at a record pace and in this fast-paced world, warehousing and logistics managers are looking for robotics solutions to remain competitive. Chicago's huge McCormick Place Conference Center was once again home to the Automate and ProMat trade shows. Over 900 exhibitors covered 350,000 sq ft at ProMat while 400 companies exhibited at the Automate show. Most of the companies listed below exhibited at one or both of these two shows.

Email marketing is in for a complete overhaul. With AI, email marketing isn't limited to rule-based triggers but has evolved into a means of more in-the-moment personalization. AI has filled in the missing gap between traditional shopping and online shopping with 1:1 personalization. Here are four of the ways AI has changed email marketing for better. You have three seconds to seize the shopper's attention.

Top executives from Target, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Alibaba and many other innovators shared their views on the future of commerce at the second annual Shoptalk, which drew more than 5,000 attendees. Simplification, the elimination of friction, the magic of mobile devices and the evolution of shopping were recurring themes through the first several days of Shoptalk. "Our members absolutely love Scan'n Go," Iannone said, explaining how it allows members to avoid the checkout line and simply show their mobile receipt as they exit the building. "It has helped drive frequency and sales and has been a really helpful innovation for us." As is the case at Sam's Club, Target Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell shared a retail world view that envisions the seamless integration of physical and digital.

Amazonians and investors alike, rest assured: Jeff Bezos knows artificial intelligence is a big deal. The Amazon CEO took a few paragraphs in his annual shareholder letter to explain how the company is using AI throughout its business, having recognized and embraced the "external trend." The letter itself focuses on the idea that Amazon is still in "Day 1," still a startup that's well aware that irrelevance and excruciating decline begins when you reach Day 2. Bezos outlined three major categories that artificial intelligence falls into at the company: visible products and moonshots, core operations, and enterprise cloud. "The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind," Bezos writes.

Lenovo Group Ltd said it plans to pour $1.2 billion into the research and development of artificial intelligence, the internet of things and big data over the next four years－as the Chinese tech group scrambles to breathe new life into its PC, smartphone and other hardware businesses. Chairman Yang Yuanqing said in an interview with Japanese news outlet Nikkei that the Beijing-headquartered company aims to find a new growth engine through heavy R&D investment and partnerships with global giants such as Google Inc and Amazon.com The company is expected to unveil a new handset that comes with Amazon's voice recognition technology Alexa, and it now already sells a smartphone that uses Google's Tango augmented reality computing platform. Lenovo, which controls 20 percent of the global personal computer market, has been struggling to revive its profits amid a shrinking demand for PCs and intensified competition with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in the smartphone sector. But as the global artificial intelligence technology made significant progress in recent years, the Chinese company's chairman said his group realized that hefty investments into AI can help it reduce its reliance on PCs and raise the contribution of smartphones and other new business to 50 percent of total sales from the current 30 percent.