RETAIL FORECAST: U.S. consumers will spend $632 billion online by 2020 Nordstrom launched its first chatbot on the Facebook Messenger and Kik messaging services to help holiday shoppers find gift items, Geek Wire reports. The chatbot helps users select gift items by asking them a series of questions about who they are shopping for. It then chooses gifts from Nordstrom's online store that match their answers. Users can also type in a request for gift ideas that are forwarded to Nordstrom customer service representatives who respond with customized gift ideas based on the request. The chatbot will available to consumers up until December 24, and was developed in partnership with Snaps, a New York-based startup that helps brands develop their own chatbots.

Those organisations who are only just realising the benefits they can bring will be playing catch up in 2017. Now that these terms have been thrust into the spotlight, are they fully understood? According to a Blue Yonder study, 77 per cent per cent of UK grocery retail directors say machine learning will make an impact, with 23 per cent saying it already is. Do companies know how it can be implemented into the business and how to harness it to get the best results possible? Machines interpreting data is nothing new.

The holiday season is upon us and, for many, this represents the most hectic shopping period of the year. Whether you're navigating crowded shopping centers or debating what gifts to buy, the in-store experience can be particularly overwhelming. To help shoppers better manage their holiday shopping needs, we've teamed up with IBM to pilot Watson-enabled mobile concierges at both Mall of America, the largest commercial shopping center in the US, and Fashion Island, a coastal shopping destination in southern California. Mall of America's "E.L.F." and Fashion Island's "At Your Service" tap into the IBM Watson Conversation API to analyze shoppers' inquiries and help them plan more personalized in-store shopping visits right from their fingertips. These solutions follow the success of our first pilot with Macy's called "Macy's On Call and illustrate how the simplicity of building with Watson's language APIs, particularly Watson Conversation, has enabled us to expand our technology in more meaningful ways to more shoppers.

If you haven't heard, Amazon just launched a promo for a storefront that sells meal kits and grocery basics with no checkout lines. It's based in Seattle and currently open to Amazon employees, with the public launch set for early 2017. While Amazon hasn't explained their "Just Walk Out" technology that powers the storefront, they do provide a video of the charming shopping experience that will leave you wishing your local grocery store was an Amazon Go. Amazon Go is Amazon's attempt to grab a foothold in the grocery industry. Even with Amazon Pantry, Amazon only controls 1% of the $800 billion US market.

British consumers are expected to spend £280 each on gifts over the weeks leading up to Christmas. More than half of these purchases will take place online. Almost a third of people will rely on online reviews to make their buying decisions, although recommendations from friends and family are still the main source of persuasion. Online shopping is estimated to rise by 24% by the end of this year. However, as consumers are looking for more sensory and immersive shopping experiences, the pressure is on for online retailers to find new ways to excite customers and keep them satisfied – and artificial intelligence (AI) is the new technology they will use.

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. People-less 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.

Amazon's voice assistant Alexa can order an Uber, check your credit card balance and even arrange for a Domino's pizza to be delivered to your doorstep. Next up, it will be able to lock your door, thanks to an integration with August, a startup that makes Internet-connected door locks. Embedded in Amazon's voice-controlled Echo smart speakers, as well as its Fire TV video streaming device, Alexa answers questions and lets users order items like diapers from Amazon.com. Over the past year, a number of home automation and smart device companies have built their own skills (the Amazon name for Alexa's apps) for Alexa, letting users turn their lights on or off, or control their thermostats with the voice assistant. Launched in 2014, August's smart lock lets homeowners essentially connect their lock to their smartphone, turning their phones into virtual keys.

Apple will allow its artificial intelligence teams to publish research papers for the first time, marking a significant change in strategy that could help accelerate the iPhone maker's advances in deep learning. When Apple introduced its Siri virtual assistant in 2011, the company appeared to have a head start over many of its nearest competitors. But it has lost ground since then to the likes of Alphabet Inc.'s Google Assistant and Amazon.com Researchers say among the reasons Apple has failed to keep pace is its unwillingness to allow its AI engineers to publish scientific papers, stymieing its ability to feed off wider advances in the field. That policy has now changed, Russ Salakhutdinov, an Apple director of AI research, said last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona, Spain, according to Twitter posts from those present.

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.

The rush to automate manual labor jobs has reached new heights in convenience stores. Self-service checkouts are hardly new, but Panasonic and Lawson have taken them one step further in Japan. The pair has developed a basket system which can detect the items you're placing inside and then, once you've reached the till, bag them up automatically. It's an elaborate concept -- the bottom of the basket slides out, allowing your chosen goods to carefully fall into a bag underneath. The basket then slides away from you, creating a space to pick up the bag and walk out.