China's AI-infused corner store of the future

Why it matters: Alibaba says that over the last year, it has redone about 1 million mom and pop shops like the Huangs' across China. It has done the same with about a hundred superstores. Big and small, these outlets buy all their goods through Alibaba's platform and pay using its affiliate Alipay app. A picture of the future: These stores are examples of an expanding battleground among China's cutthroat tech giants, and petri-dishes of the future of business around the world. Among the central ideas is that in the future, shoppers will not view e-commerce and brick-and-mortar as distinct things, but as a single merged organism -- as simply "commerce."