I've just come out of a long-term lockdown. Instead, they crave the friendships and social groups they have been starved of over the past year. That's the verdict of dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, which are launching or acquiring new services focused entirely on making and maintaining friends. "There's a really interesting trend that has been taking place in the connection space, which is this desire to have platonic relationships," said Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. "People are seeking friendship in ways they would have only done offline before the pandemic."

Before we get into the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and where it is set to take digital commerce, I think we should begin by unpacking a definition of digital commerce – what does it mean? It can be defined as the process of selling and buying products and/or services using digital channels. It includes the people, processes and technologies necessary to execute the offering of product, promotions, pricing, analytics, customer acquisition plus retention, and customer experience at all touchpoints throughout the buying journey. This definition can be applied to all sectors of business irrelevant of area of operations, so it includes banking, retail, automotive, etc. Sector is irrelevant in a world of digital transformation at the speed of COVID – all businesses seek digital channels to market their goods. Today, digital channels have been expanded to relate to digital transformation that is inclusive of people, processes and technologies used throughout the customer buying excursion.

Over the past two decades, recommender systems have attracted a lot of interest due to the explosion in the amount of data in online applications. A particular attention has been paid to collaborative filtering, which is the most widely used in applications that involve information recommendations. Collaborative filtering (CF) uses the known preference of a group of users to make predictions and recommendations about the unknown preferences of other users (recommendations are made based on the past behavior of users). First introduced in the 1990s, a wide variety of increasingly successful models have been proposed. Due to the success of machine learning techniques in many areas, there has been a growing emphasis on the application of such algorithms in recommendation systems. In this article, we present an overview of the CF approaches for recommender systems, their two main categories, and their evaluation metrics. We focus on the application of classical Machine Learning algorithms to CF recommender systems by presenting their evolution from their first use-cases to advanced Machine Learning models. We attempt to provide a comprehensive and comparative overview of CF systems (with python implementations) that can serve as a guideline for research and practice in this area.

Something is wrong with me, and TikTok knows it. I can tell because its recommendation algorithm keeps providing me with videos that only a horrible person would like. One morning last week, the app recommended a video of a girl in a red dress saying slowly, "I'm officially at the age where I can date you … or your dad." In the next video, a "doctor" tried to sell me some kind of coffee-based weight-loss drink. An "age reveal" came after, from a woman who looked like she was in her 20s but was actually 43.

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The pandemic could have doomed online dating. Instead, it sent singles swiping more than ever before. Sanctions on in-person meetups drove the adoption of new products, like video dating, and persuaded more people to pay for premium features. All in all, the industry had a chartbusting year. "Acceptance and normalization of online dating was already underway before Covid-19," says John Madigan, an analyst at business research firm IBISWorld, but tailwinds from the pandemic have accelerated growth.

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Marketers see great potential value in using artificial intelligence (AI) to support the use case of recommending highly targeted content to users in real time. That use case scored the highest among 49 use cases presented to marketers in the 2021 State of Marketing AI report by Drift and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. That use case scored a 3.96, putting it on the cusp of "high value" (4.0), with 5.0 being "transformative." "Most websites you go to today for businesses, a human is writing the rules to say which content to recommend," Paul Roetzer, CEO and founder of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, told CMSWire in a CX Decoded Podcast. "What are the related articles? There is some basic tagging system for if they read this, then read that. Most of them are human-powered. They don't have a Netflix or a Spotify type algorithm that's actually learning preferences, knows the last 15 articles someone read, and how far along he got into them. Therein lies potential, however it's something marketers and customer experience professionals remain hopeful about: 54% of them told CMSWire researchers in the State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report they see AI having significant impacts on digital customer experience over the next two to five years. And most of them see "gaining actionable customer insights" (27%) as the area where they see the most potential. Roetzer said it is hard to find really good solutions to do this out-of-the-box. Noz Urbina of Urbina Consulting agreed, calling the technology nascent. The bigger question for marketers beyond what kind of tools are out there is do we have the data to support the use case, according to Roetzer. And do we have a strong foundation of metadata, content tagging and content taxonomies, according to Urbina. "You need enough data, for one," Roetzer said. "Sometimes the problem is smaller data, not necessarily the cost.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a greater part of multiple industries, including groceries. From product placement on store shelves to pricing adjustments, AI is affecting grocery stores and services across the world. Investments in AI are also increasing as more companies look to technology to remain competitive, and more consumers continue to shop online. Now, Hungryroot, an AI-enabled grocery service, has announced its Series C funding round of $40 million. The company has a $750 million valuation and offers a personalized online grocery service that uses AI and user quizzes.