Headquartered in the US, with ecommerce sites in the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Canada, Cosabella decided to engage Adgorithms (the creator of Albert) out of frustration with its digital ad agency. "We know our brand best and communicating it to the advertising agency became time-consuming and difficult," Courtney Connell, marketing director of Cosabella, said, declining to name the agency as they really were "very lovely people" who she had no wish to disparage. Connell grew concerned when the retailer went through a flat quarter. "It was very scary, particularly when we enjoyed double-digit growth all the previous quarters." After parting ways with the agency, Connell looked around for alternatives and decided to try using an AI platform instead of building up a larger in-house team.

Talespin is a young Delhi-based startup that wants to place chatbots inside stores. The idea, according to Talespin's product head Tanay Dixit, is to help bring some of the benefits of the online shopping experience - such as personalised recommendations - offline as well, at a low cost. The idea was actually born when Dixit tried to go shopping for a t-shirt at Shopper's Stop, and after being shown a lot of different ones, he finally found something he liked, only to learn it wasn't available in his size. He realised that if there was a system to browse through the store's entire catalogue like you would an e-commerce marketplace, then he would have been able to get a better idea more quickly, and it could even have allowed him to place an order for the out- of-stock item, to be delivered to him. And so that's exactly what he set out to build.

Amazon.com Inc has launched a new programme to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research, writes Jeffrey Dastin for Reuters. The e-commerce company said it is paying for a year-long doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum. Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation. Amazon, Alphabet Inc's Google and others are locked in a race to develop and monetise artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better faster a tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

Machine learning is more than the new buzzword on Buzzfeed; it has the potential to spearhead another digital upheaval, transforming the way humans interact with technology, and the way ecommerce does business. Any business that relies on ecommerce needs to know about digital trends -- how Google's Panda updates changed SEO, how social media changed digital advertising. But machine learning is a new and even more influential beast than either of these, because it will impact everything. We take a look at some of the most impactful results of machine learning, real groundbreaking algorithms, some of which have already shaped the world of ecommerce today, some of which are only beginning to spread to the far reaches of the web in 2017. The simplest form of machine learning has been around since PageRank.

Whether you know it or not, your life is impacted everyday by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In fact, if you asked Alexa about the weather or traffic while enjoying your morning cup of coffee, you leveraged AI. This voice recognition is part of the growing field of technology that is changing the lives of consumers and our interaction with technology. The government is no exception. AI is also becoming involved in every aspect of how our country runs--national security, economics, healthcare, and other domains.

If there's any doubt as to why "big data" has become as ubiquitous in business as pens, chairs and coffee mugs, look no further than the margins. Since becoming the buzzword of the decade, big data has given countless businesses huge competitive advantages by redefining the quality of the information at their fingertips and the speed at which they can react. So why have apparel brands lagged in doing the same? In many cases, identifying the "next big thing" -- what will sell, and the rate at which it will fly off the shelves -- is still steeped in guesswork and unsupported instinct. For brands, the use case is abundantly clear.

If there's a Doomsday Clock for mankind being annihilated by violent robots, it just moved a lot closer to midnight thanks to a wildly dangerous decision from Google. As reported by Popular Science (via Gizmodo), the internet behemoth has just killed the Captcha service as we know it, opening the door for countless machines to post on our human message boards, buy from our human online retailers, and assassinate our human world leaders. Alright, that could be a little overly dramatic, but the common internet thing where you have to read the weird-looking words and then type them into a box to prove you're not a robot will soon be going away. In its place will be a new thing called "Invisible Captcha" that simply analyzes your "browsing behavior" to make sure you do more than just look up images of mainframes, wires, and human world leaders. That means it will work like a more elaborate version of the "I'm not a robot" checkboxes that a lot of websites use these days, which make sure that the way you click the box is consistent with beings who have a soul.

Wickham and Grolemund have produced an excellent book that would help a beginning R user become very efficient in explanatory analysis. Unsurprisingly the approach that they expound utilises the "hadleyverse" a collection of packages (ggplot2 for visualisation, tidyr for reshaping, dplyr for selecting and filtering, purrr for functional programming, broom for linear models etc) that dramatically speed up most of the common steps involved in an analysis. One benefit of Wickham's involvement in these packages has been a coherent philosophy that sits behind them. It can be a little tricky when learning this philosophy, but the long term benefits are enormous. The book is broken up into a number of sections that effectively builds up the ability to ingest, transform, visualise and model datasets.

Here's an analogy using a concept that we can all relate to: a supermarket. Picture the scene: Shopping list in one hand, shopping basket in the other, you're ready to tackle your weekly shopping in your local supermarket. Your items range from fruit and vegetables to washing detergent, perhaps with some free-range eggs thrown in for good measure. Quite the eclectic mix, but you know that you'll be able to find all you need under one roof. The fact that this is possible is in itself quite remarkable.

Watson captured the public imagination about artificial intelligence after defeating two world champions of Jeopardy in 2011 and bringing home a $1 million prize. Since then, Watson has gained new cognitive capabilities through APIs like Alchemy (for sentiment analysis), Tone Analyzer (for personality and emotional analysis), and Conversation (a chatbot builder) and has been embedded in hundreds of applications across financial services, healthcare, retail, and digital. "Chances are, you've interacted with Watson without realizing it," says Alyssa Simpson, Program Director at IBM Watson. "Many companies hide their use of the technology for competitive reasons. They don't want a competitor to buy it too."