There are eyes on you, behind the bright lights and mirrored panels. Pick up a boot and a camera will make sure you don't slip it into your bag. Cross the threshold into a department store and there is a tacit understanding that you will be watched, but new technology is leading retailers to grow a different set of peepers – eyes less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex, size, head, shoulders, knees and toes. A few months ago, IT firm Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) put out a report that claimed around 30% of retailers use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. It is technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database.

This fall, customers cruising the aisles of Lowe's home improvement stores in the San Francisco Bay Area may see a new type of employee taking inventory and assisting shoppers. You won't find a nametag on this worker, but you won't confuse it with other employees, either. The new kid in town is the LoweBot, an autonomous retail service robot that scans and audits store inventory on the floor. It uses voice recognition to identify products for customers and lead them to the right shelf -- in multiple languages. The retailer is deploying LoweBots at 11 of its Bay Area stores over a seven-month period using NAVii robots made by Fellow Robots, following a successful two-year pilot program of a first-generation robot called OSHbot that was tested at one of Lowe's Orchard Supply Hardware stores.

Shopping online from the comfort of your desk chair is certainly easier than traveling to a store and lugging home heavy bags. But for all its effortlessness, online shopping falls short when it comes to finding something you weren't looking for but would like to buy. Recommendation systems, such as those built by Amazon, try to uncover these gems, but many fall short of appropriately catering to an individual shopper. Now a Seattle-based startup called Cleverset thinks it has the secret to the next-generation recommendation system: a type of computer modeling found mainly in artificial-intelligence research labs. Cleverset's system weighs the importance of the relationship among individual shoppers, their behavior on the site, the behavior of similar shoppers, and external factors such as seasons, holidays, and events like the Super Bowl.

The mobile phone has long ceased being a simple two-way communication device: today's handheld is a mini personal computer, complete with multimedia players, maps, and Web browsers. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) want to push the phone farther. They have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

Most of us only dream about a robot that will pick up pizza boxes and assemble furniture, but Andrew Ng, an assistant computer science professor at Stanford, is building one. Leader of the STair -- or Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot -- project, Ng, 30, believes every home eventually will have one. There are four concrete challenges: to have the robot able to clean up after a dinner party, clear the table, load the dishwasher; be able to fetch items from around the office or home; to assemble an Ikea bookshelf; and to give a tour of this research lab. Within a decade we would like to develop the technology. A year ago I said 15 years.

In another sign that more warehouse workers could be displaced by machines, Hitachi has created a mobile logistics robot that can use two arms to handle inventory. Developed to meet increasing demand from online shopping orders, the machine can move around on wheels, autonomously fetching merchandise and carrying it to a shipping container. Because its arms can hold objects of many different shapes and sizes, the robot could be used to replace human staff doing repetitive picking work in high mix, low volume warehouses, where it would not be cost-effective to use dedicated robots for each different product. Hitachi has developed an autonomous two-armed robot that can work in warehouses that ship goods for online retailers. For the robot's appendages, Hitachi used two Epson ProSix C4-A901S industrial robot arms, which have six degrees of freedom of movement, and equipped them with cameras that use a computer vision system to recognize merchandise.

Amazon has added some additional robotic muscle and computer-vision chops to its warehouses ahead of the tide of holiday shopping orders. The retailing giant said Monday it has 10 of these latest fulfillment centers in operation across the U.S., featuring software and mechanical innovations. The total number of Kiva mobile robots, which transport large vertical racks containing inventory, has topped 15,000 across the U.S., Amazon said Monday. The company agreed to buy Kiva Systems in 2012 and has been adding robot platforms to its warehouses to improve efficiency. Amazon also said it had deployed an inventory-moving robotic arm dubbed Robo-Stow, which according to a press photo is an M-2000iA, made by Japan's Fanuc robotics.

In a previous column I mentioned the Amazon Echo ($179 on Amazon.com) as a useful device for listening to music and podcasts. But, after using the Echo for the past month and hearing others talk about it at CES, I've come to the conclusion that it's far more than that. I bought the Echo as a music player because I was impressed at how easy it is to use your voice to play songs from your own music library that you've uploaded to Amazon Music along with the million or so songs on Amazon Prime Music, your Pandora playlists and the podcasts, music and online radio stations on TuneIn and iHeartRadio. You address the Echo as "Alexa," Amazon's persona that's equivalent to Siri or the OK Google voice commands for Android devices. Amazon also gives you the option to address Echo as "Amazon," but I prefer calling her Alexa.

Convenience store chain Lawson and electronics maker Panasonic Corp. have started testing a staff-less register for which a machine settles the transactions and packs purchased items into a bag. The system, dubbed Reji Robo, short for register robots, debuted at an outlet of Lawson in Osaka Prefecture on Monday. Lawson plans to eventually introduce the machine at its stores nationwide to alleviate a staff shortage and for peak-time congestion. Autonomous cashiers have been introduced at some supermarkets in Japan, but shoppers have had to bag products by themselves after payment. The system introduced by Lawson is believed to be the first in which the packing is also automated.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIFORNIA – Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told a crowd of tech leaders this week. While Musk's description of an injectable human-computer link may sound like science fiction, top tech executives repeatedly said that artificial intelligence was on the verge of changing everyday life, during discussion at a conference by online publication Recode this week. It is no secret that tech companies are diving into AI analytics research, an industry that will grow to $70 billion by 2020 from just $8.2 billion in 2013, according to a Bank of America report citing data from market researchers IDC. AI, which combs through large troves of raw data to predict outcomes and recognize patterns, is already used in web search systems, marketing recommendation functions and security and financial trading programs. The technology will spread to driverless cars and service robots in the future, the Bank of America report said.