Retail Real Estate is experiencing greater change than ever before. The impact of changes in real estate and the consumer retail world is comparable to tectonic plates shifting across the surface of the earth, producing an energy force that few know how to harness or predict the outcome. The way we conduct retail and real estate are rubbing, creating friction & forces, sometimes against, and sometimes in harmony with each other. Year-end 2016 came and went with little time to pause and reflect as Amazon Go made the headlines in the final few weeks and continues to do so. We asked some of the Movvo team to share their predictions for 2017, the trends & innovations that will have an impact on retail real estate as we know it. "2016 is going to be remembered as the year a retail platform came from nowhere to hit Apple & Google where it hurts. Alexa from Amazon is an intuitive AI interface already flexing its muscle and proving incredible popular. Alexa is already present in 4% of US households and dozens of Alexa-enabled devices launched at CES Las Vegas from fridges to cars. It's an early vision of the death of the keyboard as an interface & will have an impact on the way consumers shop".

In its last financial quarter, it sold $32bn (£25.6bn) That "other" category encompasses everything from crucifixes to sex toys, board games to plyboard, and mousemats printed with the faces of obscure TV and Radio personalities. It has also diversified beyond its simple shopping business: the company will sell you something to be delivered in less than one hour, food from restaurants, and even digital content to be watched on your TV or listened to on your phone. And, of course, it has a hardware business which many other companies would kill for, producing ebook readers and tablets, and single-handedly creating the product category of "smart speaker" with the Echo. But there's another chunk of Amazon that you're less likely to know about.

There was a media frenzy when Amazon Go was announced in December 2016. A grocery store based initially in Seattle, it enables shoppers to literally just walk out with whatever items they choose thanks to sensors recording what they pick up and charging back to their Amazon Prime accounts. Facilitated by first swiping the Amazon app on your smartphone, it nods to the automated future of retail, but more than that the growing potential ahead for the phone to control the entire commerce experience. A wake-up call to retail execs around the world, the question on many people's lips is whether that concept is equally applicable to other verticals? From a value proposition, not to mention strategic business perspective, it's something that makes a great deal of sense for grocery, where both the barrier to entry and level of associated risk, is low.

My situation as an online shopper is somewhat like this, "I know what I need but not sure where to buy em…" Over and above, most of the online shoppers experience a very similar perplexity. And I know how much pain purchasing a set of socks can cause if you are not a brand maniac. Continuing to how web personalisation can heal the aforementioned agony, it is the process where you customize your website to the needs of a specific user (This will curtail the online shopping fatigue). By using the insights you gain from analyzing user navigational behavior on your website. In correlation with other info accumulated in the form of structure, content and user profile data. There are two ways to collecting data on a user's interest and activities on a website.

Technology has long since advanced to the point where it can make decisions better than people can, and yet grocery managers are still happy to use their own experience to drive decision-making, sacrificing speed, efficiency and savings. By optimising key strategic areas of pricing and replenishment, and automating decisions using machine learning, retailers can combine the speed of their decisions with their KPIs (margins, volumes, mark downs). Yet still retailers are not currently marrying the two in a responsive and effective way. As part of Blue Yonder's recent survey of 750 grocery retailers across the globe, we asked some probing questions about decision making and customer service. The research revealed that grocery retailers believe robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence will be some of the key game changers for the industry.

Machine-learning is all the rage in fraud detection, with industry analysts, academics, businesses and technology media examining the advantages of algorithms and big data in the fight against e-commerce fraud. Especially for fraud analysts working in companies with small budgets, machine-learning tools are seen as a cost-effective way to tighten fraud controls while maintaining fast decision times, as Forrester noted in its 2015 cross-channel fraud report. There's no question that machine-learning tools can be an effective component of fraud reduction program, but relying on them to save staffing costs may not be cost-effective in the long run. That's because while machine learning is an invaluable tool in the fight against fraud, it relies on human input and insight to create a comprehensive solution that yields the best results. Algorithms are useful for identifying potential fraud quickly, but due to variability in consumer behavior – such as making online purchases while traveling abroad -- some transactions will be falsely flagged for decline.

If the basics of retail are elementary, then it should be no surprise that a technology named Watson is leading what may be one of the biggest trends in 2017. Watson is the name of an artificial intelligence technology (AI) by IBM; many may remember Watson for its $1 million winning streak on "Jeopardy." Today, several major retailers -- from Macy's to 1-800-Flowers.Com -- are using or testing the supercomputer's cognitive computing capabilities to more acutely predict (and serve) customer wishes. Most recently, Staples announced plans to implement Watson technology to bring to life its Easy Button. Infused with the technology, the button can now take Staples orders by voice, text, email, messaging app or mobile app.

From Alexa to Amazon Go, we use deep learning extensively across all areas of Amazon, and we've tried a lot of deep learning engines along the way. One has emerged as the most scalable, efficient way to perform deep learning, and for these reasons, we have selected MXNet as our engine of choice at Amazon. MXNet is an open source, state of the art deep learning engine, which allows developers to build sophisticated, custom artificial intelligence systems. Training these systems is significantly faster in MXNet, due to its scale and performance. For example, for the popular image recognition network, Resnet, MXNet has 2X the throughput compared to other engines, letting you train equivalent models in half the time.

If the basics of retail are elementary, then it should be no surprise that a technology named Watson is leading what may be one of the biggest trends in 2017. Watson is the name of an artificial intelligence technology (AI) by IBM; many may remember Watson for its $1 million winning streak on "Jeopardy." Today, several major retailers -- from Macy's to 1-800-Flowers.Com -- are using or testing the supercomputer's cognitive computing capabilities to more acutely predict (and serve) customer wishes. Most recently, Staples announced plans to implement Watson technology to bring to life its Easy Button. Infused with the technology, the button can now take Staples orders by voice, text, email, messaging app or mobile app.

Shopping in the future may feel a lot like shoplifting does today -- without the risk of getting nabbed -- if two artificial intelligence startups have their way. New Zealand's IMAGR and Silicon Valley's Mashgin aim to make checking out of grocery stores and company cafeterias a walk in the park. Many supermarkets offer self-checkout to save shoppers time. IMAGR founder William Chomley wants to skip the checkout altogether, so you can just walk right out the door. It's similar to the idea behind Amazon Go, being tested in a grocery store in downtown Seattle, which lets customers shop without ever stopping at a cashier on the way out.