Cutting edge Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing has been used to analyze over 75,000 opinions from across the web to determine a comprehensive list of the most popular online retailers in the US. Collecting text opinions from across the web – including from reviews, forums, social media, YouTube etc. – the new report found that Barnes & Noble was ranked the best eCommerce site in the US. In the first study of its kind, AI company Aspectiva, which analyzes UGC from across the web to generate insights for retailers & shoppers, applied its technology to determine exactly what shoppers liked and disliked about key US retailers. The online bookstore came top in a list of over 40 retailers. Aspectiva's analysis found that Barnes & Noble shoppers rated highly their "fast service", "prices" and "easiness" when using their website.

Basic robotic process automation isn't smart and doesn't learn, but systems that do will raise new questions for organizations. Namely, as one audience member pointed out, who is going to sign off on a recommendation made by a machine when it may not be clear how the machine arrived at the recommendation? The key is to make machine-generated recommendations as transparent as possible, Mahidhar said. He referred to it as building trust and "tractability" into the system. When a major retailer wanted to dig into the $1 billion it spends on transporting products to find out if it was being overcharged, RAGE focused on the contracts, which were numerous, complex and lengthy.

I actually picked up this book at the discount bin at a local bookstore. I had always been interested in A.I research, and this deal was irresistable. However, I think this book is worth alot more, and provides more insight into the field than many of the current popular books on the subject. This book basically goes into A.I research and leaves alot of the philosophical issues at a minimum. Basically you can look at this as a real text book about the subject of A.I.

With the rise of automation and next-gen technology all around us, it was inevitable that big data would go through a "smarter" evolution, too. At the root of it, structured data helps businesses more intelligently and accurately predict what may otherwise have seemed like an unpredictable future. Imagine knowing how to stock your inventory so well that you can cut down on product loss, increase sales, and always have your customers' favorite products in stock. With the help of machine learning and structured data, this is the future the retail industry can look forward to. "We have solved the hardest problem of delivering e-commerce at scale, which is to have robust and vast inventory. Millions of items are listed on our marketplace in any given month, and millions go away. Knowing that inventory is the most important component to deliver on eBay's brand promise," said eBay CTO Steve Fisher.

During his presentation at Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google's (GOOG) event to launch Pixel phones earlier this month, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's goal was to build a personal google for everyone. Google Home, which will be available at major retail stores starting tomorrow, is part of the company's ecosystem of devices to achieve that aim. A spate of reviews in tech publications provide more details about Google's personalization plans. Google Home is a competitor to Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) home assistant Alexa and is outfitted with Google Assistant, the AI system that will soon become all pervasive in Google's hardware products.

E-retailers The North Face and 1-800-Flowers use Fluid's Expert Personal Shopper, also known as XPS. IBM Corp. has purchased the Expert Personal Shopper or XPS division of digital agency Fluid Inc. XPS is a web-based service that enables consumers to ask questions and receive answers and recommendations from a computer system that learns and perfects its responses over time. The companies did not announce the purchase price. XPS already is powered by IBM Watson's machine learning technology. Watson is a computer that builds upon advances in artificial intelligence so that it can engage in dialogue with people, learning over time how to improve its answers and its conversation skills, according to IBM.

NowDiscover, a unique content recommendation engine built to bridge the gap between video content and e-commerce/retail, has formally launched. Following months of successful customer trials of the platform, which tailors video content into product websites to increase sales, is now full accessible to businesses worldwide in Beta. NowDiscover parses product data from any online store before scouring YouTube for videos that are likely to help consumers reach their purchasing decision and automatically integrates these videos directly into e-merchant's site. The platform has proven to boost sales and saves both e-merchants and consumers time by delivering informative tutorials, branded, unboxing and review videos via a proprietary player at the crucial moment in the shopping journey. Commenting on the launch, co-founder Vishal Kawatra said: "NowDiscover bridges the gap between content and ecommerce, giving the shopper the video experience they want. The increased amount of video content across online platforms has left consumers wanting richer more immersive experiences before they buy. NowDiscover satiates consumer desire for authentic as well as branded product videos to inform purchase decisions."

Investors poured a record high $1.05B into artificial intelligence startups in Q2'16, and AI is already affecting more areas of our lives than many people realize. Even retail and e-commerce companies are increasingly integrating the technology. Recently there's been a rush of AI announcements and acquisitions by major retailers: Just this week, Etsy acquired Blackbird to enhance its search functionality through AI, followed the very next day by Amazon acquiring Angel.ai And earlier this month, e-commerce unicorn Houzz (see our full unicorn tracker here) announced a deep learning initiative to help users find and buy products by clicking on images. Using CB Insights data, we dove into the wide array of AI startups focused on retailers and e-commerce businesses, including AI-powered personal shopping apps, natural language processing and image recognition tools for shopping websites, predictive inventory allocation tools, and more.

Danil Zburivsky is a database professional with a focus on open source technologies. Danil started his career as a MySQL database administrator and is currently working as a consultant at Pythian, a global data infrastructure management company. At Pythian, Danil was involved in building a number of Hadoop clusters for customers in financial, entertainment, and communication sectors. Danil's other interests include writing fun things in Python, robotics, and machine learning. He is also a regular speaker at various industrial events.

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos announced that drones are eventually going to deliver Amazon orders. In the past year, he brought out Amazon's Alexa artificial intelligence service, which understands speech well enough that you can say, "Alexa, I really need a waffle cone maker," and she'll put one in your Amazon online shopping cart, even though nobody needs a waffle cone maker. Both of these technologies--drones and cloud AI--are exciting today, yet still wobbly works in progress. But in coming years, Amazon or some other company is going to put them together. And that, finally, will evolve into a technology that could become as significant to humans as domesticated dogs.