Highlights included keynote speeches from Dan Schulman (CEO, PayPal) and Julie Sweet (CEO, Accenture North America), track sessions exploring how the payments industry requires collaboration between different industries and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak speaking on the importance of banking and technology. These are the five key takeaways from the conference. Financial inclusion was a topic on the mind of leading fintech companies and leaders. Working collaboratively as an industry and tackling the unbanked and underserved and to better serve those in the financial markets was a key focus at the conference. Dan Schulman opened his keynote presentation on day two of the conference by addressing the importance of the movement.

As the e-commerce industry continues on its path of innovation, AI has taken to the forefront of innovating the customer experience. What was once science fiction is now very much a reality- and online retailers are jumping on board and trying out new ways to implement this into their business models. This webinar, "Machine Learning 101 and Predictive Buyer Scoring: How to Personalize your UX for Conversion" will delve into these topics, teaching you how to use AI that learns about your customer's behavior from the time they land on your page. Our guests, Jerry Abiog and Suresh Mahadevan of DXi will give you insight into the world of AI and its implications for e-commerce UX personalization.

China's second-biggest e-commerce company after Alibaba, sent robots to deliver items for the first time yesterday (June 18), on the last day of a two-week-long shopping bonanza that recorded sales of around $17.6 billion, according to a spokesman with the company. It's the first time that the company has used delivery robots in the field. JD tested its first delivery robot in November, when the research and manufacturing cost of a single robot was almost the price of an Audi Q7 series car, around 600,000 yuan ($88,125) (link in Chinese), JD's driverless program engineer Zhang Chao told CCTV. Robots can reduce the delivery cost from 7 yuan ($1) per human delivery to 1.5 yuan ($0.2) per robot delivery, said Zhang.

We live in a world where consumer attention span is getting shorter and shorter: 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and the average shopping cart is abandoned more than 68 percent of the time. Software platforms that drive ecommerce websites are creating visual search capabilities which allow consumers to upload an image and find similar/complementary products. The offline to online experience requires minimal steps to shop and purchase, providing a sense of autonomy to the consumer. Brands are creating more interactive shopping experiences to provide product recommendations based on natural conversation and cognitive data derived from AI.

It combines the advantages of highly expressive human negotiation with the advantages of electronic reverse auctions. The idea is that supply and demand are expressed in drastically greater detail than in traditional electronic auctions and are algorithmically cleared. We have hosted $35 billion of sourcing using the technology and created $4.4 billion of hard-dollar savings plus numerous harder-to-quantify benefits. The suppliers also benefited by being able to express production efficiencies and creativity, and through exposure problem removal.