Five Dutch companies Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, NS and Philips aim to further boost the AI ecosystem in the Netherlands by accelerating and promoting the development of AI technology and nurturing AI talent in the country. This effort will add educational capacity, foster the development of the AI community in the Netherlands and reiterate the position of the Netherlands as a competitive and relevant global AI hub. The goal of Kickstart AI, is to bridge the AI gap between the Netherlands and other countries, like the UK, the US and China, that have made notable progress in this area. In order to keep the country's position as a pioneer and inventor of technologies, the Dutch government, companies, organizations and universities have ground to cover in terms of structural investments and availability of global AI talent. The five companies "kickstarting" AI are, for the first time, uniting forces in this kind of joint initiative and taking highly needed decisive action.

Five Dutch companies Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, NS and Philips aim to further boost the AI ecosystem in the Netherlands by accelerating and promoting the development of AI technology and nurturing AI talent in the country. This effort will add educational capacity, foster the development of the AI community in the Netherlands and reiterate the position of the Netherlands as a competitive and relevant global AI hub. The goal of Kickstart AI, is to bridge the AI gap between the Netherlands and other countries, like the UK, the US and China, that have made notable progress in this area. In order to keep the country's position as a pioneer and inventor of technologies, the Dutch government, companies, organizations and universities have ground to cover in terms of structural investments and availability of global AI talent. The five companies "kickstarting" AI are, for the first time, uniting forces in this kind of joint initiative and taking highly needed decisive action.

Five Dutch companies including Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, NS and Philips aim to further boost the AI ecosystem in the Netherlands by accelerating and promoting the development of AI technology and nurturing AI talent in the country. This effort will add educational capacity, foster the development of the AI community in the Netherlands and reiterate the position of the Netherlands as a competitive and relevant global AI hub. The goal of Kickstart AI, is to bridge the AI gap between the Netherlands and other countries, like the UK, the US and China, that have made notable progress in this area. In order to keep the country's position as a pioneer and inventor of technologies, the Dutch government, organizations and universities have ground to cover in terms of structural investments and availability of global AI talent. The five companies "kickstarting" AI are, for the first time, uniting forces in this kind of joint initiative and taking highly needed decisive action.

The grocery story business is beginning to use AI to try to gain a competitive edge. Salt Lake City-based Associated Food Stores (AFS), for example, has 500 stores in the western and southwestern US. It found itself dealing with a growing number of SKUs that stores managers were having difficulty tracking and prioritizing, according to an account in ChainStoreAge. AFS began using an AI solution from CB4 to analyze point of sale data, to identify when physical issues in a store are hold back sales. These could be products not easily visible and out of stock conditions.

At Ahold Delhaize, there is an interest in using more complex machine learning techniques for sales forecasting. It is difficult to convince analysts, along with their superiors, to adopt these techniques since the models are considered to be 'black boxes,' even if they perform better than current models in use. We aim to explore the impact of contrastive explanations about large errors on users' attitudes towards a 'black-box' model. In this work, we make two contributions. The first is an algorithm, Monte Carlo Bounds for Reasonable Predictions (MC-BRP). Given a large error, MC-BRP determines (1) feature values that would result in a reasonable prediction, and (2) general trends between each feature and the target, based on Monte Carlo simulations. The second contribution is the evaluation of MC-BRP along with its outcomes, which has both objective and subjective components. We evaluate on a real dataset with real users from Ahold Delhaize by conducting a user study to determine if explanations generated by MC-BRP help users understand why a prediction results in a large error, and if this promotes trust in an automatically-learned model. The study shows that users are able to answer objective questions about the model's predictions with overall 81.7% accuracy when provided with these contrastive explanations. We also show that users who saw MC-BRP explanations understand why the model makes large errors in predictions significantly more than users in the control group.

Ahold Delhaize will explore potential retail applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in a partnership with the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), a project of the University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam. The Zaandam, Netherlands-based global food retailer said its partnership is the first lab within the ICAI, which was launched yesterday at Amsterdam Science Park. Dubbed the AIRlab, the joint ICAI-Ahold Delhaize industry lab will have seven PhDs researching socially responsible algorithms that can be used to make recommendations to consumers and transparent AI technology for managing supply chain flows, according to Ahold Delhaize. The retailer's Albert Heijn and bol.com brands will participate in the research. In addition, the AIRLab will focus on talent development.

Ahold Delhaize is partnering with the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence to optimise the company's supply chain and improve the customer experience. In the joint ICAI-Ahold Delhaize industry lab, the Artificial Intelligence for Retail Lab (AIRLab), scientists will conduct research into socially responsible algorithms that can be used to make recommendations to consumers and into transparent AI technology for managing goods flows. The research will take place at Albert Heijn and bol.com, both brands of Ahold Delhaize. In addition, AIRLab will focus on talent development tracks. "Ahold Delhaize, Albert Heijn and bol.com look forward to working with ICAI," said Frans Muller, deputy chief executive officer of Ahold Delhaize.