Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything from marketing to healthcare. And this holiday season is the beginning of the future for how marketers will leverage AI to better understand, connect with, and create superior experiences for consumers. To better appreciate the impact that AI is having on retailers, I connected with IBM's first CMO, Michelle Peluso. Peluso has a strong background in retail, having served at the CEO of Gilt as well as the Global Consumer Chief Marketing and Internet Officer at Citigroup. Peluso provides her thoughts below on how Watson's AI capability is changing the way retailers impact the consumer shopping experience.

The amount of behavioural and demographic data available for individual online shoppers has increased to staggering levels. Coinciding with the increase in data, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques has become more mainstream as businesses discover the value of insights gained by these advanced techniques. With more data available than ever before, retail marketers have been given the opportunity to harness this data using machine learning algorithms that describe and predict shopper behaviour in real time. These insights can be used to drive both automated email campaigns and interactive website experiences that are relevant and personalised, leading to the creation and conversion of lifelong customers that drive increased value. Thanks to AI-driven campaigns, marketers are no longer required to manually sort through massive amounts of data in order to discover behaviours and send personalised messaging that increase shopper loyalty.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything from marketing to healthcare. And this holiday season is the beginning of the future for how marketers will leverage AI to better understand, connect with, and create superior experiences for consumers. To better appreciate the impact that AI is having on retailers, I connected with IBM's first CMO, Michelle Peluso. Peluso has a strong background in retail, having served at the CEO of Gilt as well as the Global Consumer Chief Marketing and Internet Officer at Citigroup. Peluso provides her thoughts below on how Watson's AI capability is changing the way retailers impact the consumer shopping experience.

Big data and artificial intelligence are driving the development of China's e-commerce giant JD.com Inc, and are expected to help the company provide better user experience, reduce costs and improve efficiency. Zhang Chen, chief technology officer at JD, said: "China is far ahead of other countries in the use of mobile internet. Now mobile internet usage also exceeds PC use, which indicates users' changing habits. So we need to figure out the users' real needs. "So, to better serve consumers, we must dig deeper into big data.

Despite the rise of machine-learning and other artificial-intelligence tools, it only seems to get harder and harder to find just the right gifts for the nerd in your life. We on the TR staff know just how hard to both pick gifts for our favorite techies and to have gifts picked out for us. That's why we're continuing our annual tradition of compiling the unusual, the useful, and the delightful items that we've used in the past year. Whatever your budget, we've got something for the nerd in your life. Our gift guide is sponsored by Newegg.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots ("chatbots"). Speech recognition and natural language understanding are some of the most challenging problems to solve in computer science, requiring sophisticated deep learning algorithms to be trained on massive amounts of data and infrastructure. Harnessing these technologies, Lex enables you to define entirely new categories of products made possible through conversational interfaces.

In all my fantasies, my poor hypothetical sister existed purely for the purpose of being in all the places I didn't want to be but had to (in class, at the doctor, helping my father with yardwork, or doing dishes for my mom), so I could do the things my heart desired: jam out on the piano, play with the dog, or sleep over at a friend's house. With a helpful twin by my side, gone would be the days of math homework and feigned enthusiasm for kickball. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and, thanks to machine learning, this marketer finally (sort of) has the chance to achieve her dream--and I didn't have to hire a full-time personal aid (or, I dunno, an unfortunate look-alike) to do it. Today, this branch of artificial intelligence serves as that trusted "same brain" tool that knows what I need out of my data and delivers it to me, almost without asking. With the advent of AI and its warm welcome as a new form of marketing technology, we've had a lot of information and potential thrust at us in a seemingly short period of time.

Inc. debuted new services intended to help coders build web-based applications that tap into the retail giant's artificial-intelligence capabilities. The company's cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, unveiled the offerings at its annual conference here. Amazon Rekognition will let software developers write programs that detect the number of people in a photo, spot their gender and identify objects. It can also match faces, which could be useful in comparing two images to confirm, for example, a person's identity. The company also launched Amazon Polly, which converts text to speech.

Amazon.com Inc. is developing a premium Echo-like speaker with a screen, a sign the world's largest online retailer is trying to capitalize on the surprise success of its voice-controlled home gadgets and fend off competition from Google and Apple Inc. The new device will have a touchscreen measuring about seven inches, a major departure from Amazon's existing cylindrical home devices that are controlled and respond mostly through the company's voice-based Alexa digital assistant, according to two people familiar with the matter. This will make it easier to access content such as weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and news, the people said. They asked not to be identified speaking about a product that has yet to be announced. The latest Amazon speaker will be larger and tilt upwards so the screen can be seen when it sits on a counter and the user is standing, one of the people said.

Next time you stop for gas at a self-serve pump, say hello to the robot in front of you. Its life story can tell you a lot about the robot economy roaring toward us like an EF5 tornado on the prairie. Yeah, your automated gas pump killed a lot of jobs over the years, but its biography might give you hope that the coming wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out better for almost all of us than a lot of people seem to think. The first crude version of an automated gas-delivering robot appeared in 1964 at a station in Westminster, Colorado. Short Stop convenience store owner John Roscoe bought an electric box that let a clerk inside activate any of the pumps outside. Self-serve pumps didn't catch on until the 1970s, when pump-makers added automation that let customers pay at the pump, and over the next 30 years, stations across the nation installed these task-specific robots and fired attendants. By the 2000s, the gas attendant job had all but disappeared.