AI Weekly: Walmart's machine learning advantage

Here's this week's newsletter: Last week, VentureBeat invited Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and other giants of AI into a big tent with brands like Coca-Cola, The New York Times, Tumi, and Walmart, as well as such promising startups as Bark.us, The gathering was MB 2017, and the need for practical AI was on nearly everyone's mind. Walmart, for instance, is using machine learning to better serve its 140 million weekly shoppers and to make new services possible. Laurent Desegur, vice president of customer experience engineering at WalmartLabs, explained the role of data science to make possible so-called Pick-up Towers within stores, which allow customers to order and pay online for items and then retrieve them, skipping the checkout lines. Desegur also described a 20-store pilot of Scan and Go shopping, a self-serve experience.