Michelle Harrison Bacharach, the cofounder and CEO of FindMine, an AI styling company, has designed a technology, Complete the Look, that creates complete outfits around retailers' products. It blends the art of styling with the ease of automation to represent a company's brand(s) at scale and help answer the question'how do I wear this?' The technology shows shoppers how to wear clothes with accessories. The company uses artificial intelligence to scale out the guidance that the retailer would provide. FindMine serves over 1.5 billion requests for outfits per year across e-commerce and mobile platforms, and AOV (average order value) and conversions by up to 150% with full outfits. "I'm picky about user experiences," Bacharach explains.

There was plenty to behold at the National Retail Federation's Big Show, hosted at the Javits Center in New York City from Jan. 14-16. After years of "omnichannel" being the buzzword du jour, "artificial intelligence" (AI), "machine learning," "computer vision," and "chatbot" were the mantra for exhibitors and attendees alike. But there was evidence aplenty that other emerging technologies are further penetrating the enterprise and influencing not only the way business will get done in the years ahead but also how consumers will interact with brands. To date, IBM has invested $25 million in blockchain R&D, which has produced a real-world application focused on food safety and developed in partnership with heavyweights ranging from Tyson Foods and Unilever to Kroger, Nestlé and Dole. Walmart built its own food safety platform on the backbone of IBM's blockchain technology.

Artificial intelligence isn't coming to terminate traditional retailers -- just like in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," it's actually here to help. That was a key takeaway from a panel on robotics and AI held at NRF 2018: Retail's Big Show in New York City on Jan. 14. Instead of seeing AI as a threat that eliminates jobs through automation, retailers should embrace the technology as a tool that can solve their business problems, retail AI experts said. Michelle Bacharach, co-founder and CEO of FindMine, a company that uses supervised machine learning techniques to create complete outfits around each product an apparel retailer sells, said on the panel that AI should not be an end in itself. "If you start there, you've already failed," she advised retailers.