When Sodexo, a company that operates over 400 university dining programs, was looking for a futuristic, seamless experience to provide students in place of the usual buffet meal options, it wasn't necessarily thinking of AI and computer vision. The only thing the corporation knew was that they wanted to build shop-and-go platforms, a.k.a shops with no cashiers, similar to Amazon Go. That is a store where customers may stroll in, choose products off the shelves, and leave without waiting in line at the register or swiping a code at a self-checkout. "Students today want things they can partially or fully prepare in their room or apartment, with organic, highly-local options. We also wanted to remove friction, but many solutions still require the interaction of the guest with a cashier – this generation really doesn't want to talk to a lot of people in their service interactions," said Kevin Rettle, global vice president of product development and digital innovation at Sodexo.

And walk right out again, without stopping to check out. In just the past three months, California-based AiFi has helped Choice Market increase sales at one of its Denver stores by 20 percent among customers who opted to skip the checkout line. It allowed Żabka, a Polish convenience store chain, to provide faster checkout for morning train commuters. It helped pro-racing team Penske and Verizon run a dinky 200-square-foot store at the Indy500, so race fans could quickly get back to the action. And on Wednesday AiFi announced an expanded partnership with Loop Neighborhood to introduce its computer vision, camera-only platform into stores in California, starting with two Bay Area locations.

Artificial Intelligence and quantitative investment techniques are disrupting investment management in unprecedented ways. We are seeing the evidence all around us. In the hedge fund industry, 8 of the top 10 largest managers are now quantitatively focused. More and more fundamental managers are announcing their adoption of quantitative and AI techniques. Investment professionals who know how to implement AI tools are in demand, yet there is a gap in training and education for those wanting to enter the field.

Cashierless stores are all the rage. You need look no further for evidence than Amazon's rapidly expanding Amazon Go chain and the tens of millions of VC dollars startups like Trigo Vision and Zippin have snatched up in the past year. Some, like Grabango, offer plug-and-play systems designed to accommodate warehouse-style installations -- i.e., stores up to 100,000 square feet. But checkout-free platforms come in all shapes and sizes, and retailers on the hunt for tech with a smaller footprint can take advantage of AiFi's latest innovation. AiFi, a Santa Clara startup that emerged from stealth in February and beat out more than 900 submissions in Visa's 2018 Everywhere contest, today unveiled the NanoStore.

The visual data sets of images and videos amassed by the most powerful tech companies have been a competitive advantage, a moat that keeps the advances of machine learning out of reach from many. This advantage will be overturned by the advent of synthetic data. The world's most valuable technology companies, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu, among others, are applying computer vision and artificial intelligence to train their computers. They harvest immense visual data sets of images, videos and other visual data from their consumers. These data sets have been a competitive advantage for major tech companies, keeping out of reach from many the advances of machine learning and the processes that allow computers and algorithms to learn faster.

Nvidia is tracking more than 2,800 companies through its Inception program, which was created to identify the best artificial intelligence startups. It does so to find investment opportunities, but the world's biggest standalone maker of graphics processing units (GPUs) also knows that these startups will use its technology for AI computing. I headed out to Nvidia's new headquarters in Santa Clara, California, last week to watch pitches from 12 companies in a Shark Tank-styled judging event. The 12 presenters were chosen from 200 applicants and are vying for a $1 million prize pool. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced a panel of four judges and said he was glad that he didn't have to go through this kind of process when he cofounded Nvidia in 1993.

Following the launch of Amazon's cashless, cashier-free Amazon Go convenience store in Seattle, a startup called AiFi is emerging from stealth today to announce the availability of its own checkout-free solution for retailers. But unlike Amazon Go, AiFi claims its A.I., sensor and camera network-based system can scale from a small mom-and-pop all the way up to a big retailer with tens of thousands of square feet and a hundred thousand products. Based in Santa Clara, AiFi was founded in January 2016 by Steve Gu and Ying Zheng, a married couple whose previous experience includes time spent at both Google and Apple. Gu, a PhD in computer science from Duke, worked on 3D Touch and Force Touch technologies while at Apple. He later went to Google X where he developed technologies for Google Glass. Zheng, also a PhD in computer science from Duke, first worked at Google Research, then later went to Apple, where she was a senior research scientist.