Amazon said on Wednesday that it's rolling out new online ordering methods for Prime members, including the ability to bundle standard orders and groceries in one same-day shipment. The company is also adding more combined Amazon / Whole Foods fulfillment centers and trialing a store where robots pack your Amazon orders while you shop for groceries. Customers there can shop "tens of thousands of grocery items" (including fresh ones) alongside regular Amazon orders for things like AirPods or Lego sets. The items will be bundled in one order and arrive together in a user-selected, same-day or overnight delivery window. The company plans to expand the combined same-day model to more areas after it tests and learns from the Phoenix trial.

Every day, financial organizations need to analyze news articles, SEC filings, and press releases, as well as track financial events such as bankruptcy announcements, changes in executive leadership at companies, and announcements of mergers and acquisitions. They want to accurately extract the key data points and associations among various people and organizations mentioned within an announcement to update their investment models in a timely manner. Traditional natural language processing services can extract entities such as people, organizations and locations from text, but financial analysts need more. They need to understand how these entities relate to each other in the text. Today, Amazon Comprehend is launching Comprehend Events, a new API for event extraction from natural language text documents.

Andy O'Brien, CEO of M&M Food Market, is photographed in the company's Toronto offices. At M&M Food Market, the most valuable product isn't necessarily the food, but the mix of different ingredients the company uses to grow in Canada's highly competitive grocery and prepared meals sector. The recipe isn't complicated: Take a well-known brand – M&M Meats until the company rebranded in 2016 – add a helping of customer data and sprinkle it with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence tools. A company that has gone from a niche purveyor of bacon-wrapped filet to a data-driven prepared-food business tuned into customer habits and desires. M&M's mission today is to be agile and attentive to the appetites of millions of regular customers across Canada, says its chief executive officer, Andy O'Brien.

A sense of impending doom has intensified in recent years, with various news reports and television dramas depicting a near-future of fallible humans being forced onto the breadline, replaced by a superior workforce of robots. While this dystopian theme has long been the fare of science fiction, for many, the prospect of C-3PO delivering their P45 is fast becoming a reality. Indeed, the BBC's'Will a robot take your job?' report - collating data from Deloitte, the Office for National Statistics, and an Oxford University study on the future of employment - indicates several vocations are destined for automation, including telesales, typists, and testers: While most marketers will sleep easy at night, safe in the knowledge that AI is some way off mimicking the human ability for creative thinking, planning and strategising – marketing professionals rank 223, and marketing directors 347 on the list, out of 365 job titles – there is one group that may have cause for concern: content writers. Needless to say, any self-respecting content writer wouldn't label themselves as mere'typists' or'keyboard related workers' - great content relies on imagination, research and skill. However, there's clearly some overlap, and with that particular subset of professionals facing a 98.5% risk of automation, the alarm bells could be ringing, especially with automated writing software on the rise. As a business owner, I can see the attraction of automated content; it has the potential to save time and cash.

Tesla has solar projects on smaller islands, and Musk thinks they should be scalable to larger ones like Puerto Rico. Pixelbots swarming to show a rainbow dinosaur. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The same goes for large businesses -- putting all of your company's effort into a single product can lead to stagnation and stale ideas. Exploring new ideas is one way to keep your company relevant for the long haul, even if the side business doesn't have much to do with your main operations. You're about to see some examples of this from large household names in the American business world.

Amazon is having a rough week. The e-commerce powerhouse has celebrated a string of victories this year. Its stock price broke above $1,000 for the first time; it is presiding over an unprecedented retrenchment within the retail space as more than 8,000 brick-and-mortar stores are expected to close in the US this year, and the company announced plans to acquire yuppie favorite Whole Foods Market, promising to transform the company's stores into laboratories for automation and AI where advanced sensors will perform tasks previously reserved for human cashiers. It also revealed that its "Prime Day" sale was the "Biggest Global Shopping Event in Amazon History", surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. But the string of good news came to an abrupt halt last week when Reuters reported that the top Democrat on the House antitrust subcommittee, David Civilline, has voiced concerns about Amazon's $13.7 billion plan to buy Whole Foods Market and requested in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee a hearing to examine the deal's potential impact on consumers – the first stirrings of what could metastasize into an anti-trust probe.

SAN FRANCISCO – When Amazon made a bid for Whole Foods earlier this month, a company that's been a huge but largely online presence for consumers suddenly seemed to be everywhere, raising the question, "Is it getting too big?" In most of the areas Amazon has recently entered, be they groceries or streaming video or India, Amazon is far from dominant. But some observers fear that as Amazon's breadth grows, the power of its ecosystem could stifle competition and erode jobs. "Imagine getting your pay-TV service, groceries, banking, insurance, etc. all through one company. That's the threat that Amazon poses," said Michael Greeson, director of research at business analysis firm The Diffusion Group.

This article originally appeared on the Motley Fool. Stocks inched back into record territory last week thanks to a mix of strong corporate earnings reports and economic data showing a healthy U.S. job market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: DJI) passed 21,000 points while the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: GSPC) notched a 7% gain so far for the year. Earnings season rolls on over the coming week, with a few of the most anticipated reports set to be released coming from Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), and Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ:WFM). Here are a few trends for investors to watch in the announcements.