E-retailers The North Face and 1-800-Flowers use Fluid's Expert Personal Shopper, also known as XPS. IBM Corp. has purchased the Expert Personal Shopper or XPS division of digital agency Fluid Inc. XPS is a web-based service that enables consumers to ask questions and receive answers and recommendations from a computer system that learns and perfects its responses over time. The companies did not announce the purchase price. XPS already is powered by IBM Watson's machine learning technology. Watson is a computer that builds upon advances in artificial intelligence so that it can engage in dialogue with people, learning over time how to improve its answers and its conversation skills, according to IBM.