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.

The sprawling Amazon fulfillment center in DuPont, Washington, seems more like the set of a science fiction flick than a warehouse crammed with consumer goods. Thousands of bright orange robots haul heavy stacks of pallets and packages across the slick concrete floor, while hulking yellow robotic arms retrieve and return inventory to sky-high shelves. Yet human workers still roam the DuPont center, fulfilling tasks too complex or granular for the center's fleet of automatons. Around 500 full-time employees help decide which boxes go where and how to arrange products. Unlike the robots, the humans have two key tools -- hands -- for essential warehouse operations like packaging and stowing goods.

It's getting to be a busy time for Brighterion, the fraud prevention engine at the heart of Worldwide and of Worldpay, the largest card acquirer in Europe. The company says there is a "huge business need for inexpensive, adaptable, real-time, cross-channel fraud detection and prevention solutions. However, most existing solutions are built on antiquated technologies such as business rules, neural networks, data mining and statistics. Decision trees are stagnant while fraud schemes continue to evolve." Its relationship with MasterCard began in 2004 when the card company, dissatisfied with its fraud prevention system for detecting too few frauds and creating too many false positives -- denying a purchase to a legitimate customer with a valid credit card -- invited software companies to show what they would do with two years of anonymized MasterCard data.

TaylorMade, an Adidas subsidiary, has three titanium drivers in its 300 Series, the most popular line with professional golfers. But the company doesn't know which $499 club will score best with plain old duffers. To find out, TaylorMade is turning to a fortune-teller: demand management software. Businesses have spent billions in the past few years automating their supply chains. Now many are focusing on the other end of the spectrum: demand.It poses a much tougher challenge and, potentially, a far richer payoff.

Online-only supermarket Ocado is a household name in the UK, and some of you undoubtedly rely on the service to deliver your weekly shop. Something you're unlikely to be aware of, however, is Ocado's work in cutting-edge robotics research. A special division of the company looks at technology that'll ultimately benefit its grocery delivery business. And currently, that arm is involved in developing a robot that would make the most advanced automatons around right now look like Furbies. The SecondHands program aims to build a robot that'll effectively become an Ocado warehouse employee, aiding technicians that work in these mammoth sorting offices with equipment repair and all manner of other tasks.

IN THE old days, knowing your customers was part and parcel of running a business, a natural consequence of living and working in a community. But for today's big firms, it is much more difficult: a big retailer such as Wal-Mart has no chance of knowing every single one of its customers. So the idea of gathering huge amounts of information and analysing it to pick out trends indicative of customers' wants and needs--data mining--has long been trumpeted as a way to return to the intimacy of a small-town general store. But for many years, data mining's claims were greatly exaggerated. Customer-loyalty cards, which allow retailers to gather information not just about what is selling, but who is buying it, sound like a great idea. Yet Safeway, a British retailer, eliminated its customer-loyalty card when it realised it was gathering mountains of data without being able to use it.