Robots and artificial intelligence set to upend the art of making a sale

As soon as you approach Pepper, a four-foot-tall robot, she starts sizing you up. Thanks to facial recognition capabilities, Pepper can determine your gender and age bracket. And as you begin asking her questions, she can draw from a vast volume of cloud-based information to give what she thinks are relevant answers. If you smile, she can tell the conversation is going well and that you're finding her answers helpful. If you don't, she might ask you if she's misunderstanding your requests.