Amazon just acquired a training ground for retail artificial intelligence research

Amazon didn't acquire an iconic grocery store brand just for the quinoa: Whole Foods operates hundreds of retail data mines, and Amazon just married a world-class artificial intelligence team with one of the best sources of in-store consumer shopping data in the U.S. There are lots of reasons, to be sure, why Amazon would want to spend $13.7 billion on Whole Foods. But the quintessential online retailer has been trying to establish a physical store presence for a few years now, and with one big check, it will now control more than 400 sources of prime data on consumer behavior. Big-box grocery stores are easy sources of data on human purchasing behavior. Any modern retail outlet monitors activity such as customer flow through the aisles, brand affinity, and, of course, the customer loyalty cards that do as good a job of profiling a person as anything.