CMR Shopping Mall, a subsidiary of the CMR Group, is a known brand in Andhra Pradesh with a strong presence in textiles, jewellery, and real estate. While pandemic has put a dent on the shopping mall business, CMR is picking up momentum, with an average footfall of 4,000-10,000 every day. However, as a large retailer, CMR Shopping Mall's technology adoption was subpar. Due to the scarcity of skilled workforce amid pandemic, the retailer had to bear the brunt of fraudulent activities and inefficiency in its supply chain management. Moreover, CMR Shopping Mall was beset by price wars and was struggling with tax structure complexities.

Shopping centre owner Hammerson is utilising its CCTV cameras for more than just security, as it looks to better manage its space and support business growth for its tenants and itself. Working with Deepnorth – a company that says it provides artificial intelligence (AI) for a physical world – the property group is tracking anonymised footfall and counting people going in and out of particular zones. The aim is to gain deeper insights into flow and traffic numbers around its centres, using AI-enabled technology that grows in sophistication the more it is used. The group said in July that it had started a trial at Westquay shopping centre to monitor customer behaviour, but Kathyrn Malloch, head of customer experience at Hammerson, has provided Essential Retail with more details. Against the backdrop of some high-profile controversial deployments of facial recognition systems in the UK, she points out Hammerson's decision not to use such technology despite its availability.

Offline retail is here to stay," says founder of in-store experiential service. Retail tech startup RealTell is launching its flagship product "Realtell Retail" for fashion and lifestyle brands. "Offline retail is here to stay," said Ashish Mittal, chief mentor at Turning Ideas Ventures (which incubated RealTell) "and this startup helps retailers, primarily the fashion and apparel brands, to drive footfall and increase basket size by gamifying the offline shopping experience." The company was started by two young college entrepreneurs from Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) Delhi University, Sanyam Gupta and Shivendra Misra. In a statement, the company said its kiosk solutions will help shoppers to discover new combo prices for the fashion and other retails products every day, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, driving footfall to stores and turning the buying experience into a game. Press materials released by the brand observed that while online retailers have detailed information about shoppers – because every click can be tracked – offline retail stores lose out on valuable shopper insights due to the lack of proper infrastructure and technology. With its patented technology, RealTell Retail gamifies the shopping experience by letting shoppers discover a dynamic price for products of their choice. "Imagine walking into a store, scanning your items at a kiosk and saving money at each visit," said Misra. "What's exciting is that the prices and the offers change every day.

After retailers suffered a bad year with bankruptcies, store closures and lower store footfall, we discuss why now is the time for retailers to invest in data and advanced technologies to boost consumer relations. Bricks and mortar retailers would sooner forget 2018. The year that brought 16 U.S. bankruptcies, falling share prices for leading European brands, and the UK's worst festive sales in 10 years isn't an industry high point. But it does offer a crucial lesson for those struggling in a tough climate: the need to harness digital. While footfall in stores continues to decline, online retail continues to thrive globally, with annual sales exceeding $2.4 trillion.

AI is a regular feature of news stories across nearly every industry. But, says Stephen Upstone, the headlines hide the fact there's a big human role in making AI work effectively. From healthcare, to driverless cars, to cyber security, AI is increasingly seen as the Holy Grail for innovation, productivity and profitability. At the other end of the spectrum, nay-sayers preach the coming obsolescence of humans with the rise of the job-killing robots. But in reality, the use of AI – in marketing and advertising, at least – is not immediately as clear cut as the sensationalising headlines suggest.

After months of anticipation, the iPhone X will finally go on sale to users around the world tomorrow. Apple's 10th anniversary device has a range of new features, including facial recognition, animated emoji and wireless charging capabilities. Long queues have already formed outside Apple stores around the world, full of people eager to get their hands on the device. MailOnline has put together a list of everything you need to know about the iPhone X, including cost, key features and whether it's worth braving the queues. Experts predict that sales of the iPhone X will be huge.

This week Amazon took the wraps off a new incarnation of its Alexa voice assistant, giving the AI an eye so it can see as well as speak and hear. The Echo Look also contains a depth sensor that's being used, in the first instance, to create a bokeh effect for a hands-free style selfies feature that Amazon is hoping will sell the device to fashion lovers, by making their outfits pop out against the bedroom wallpaper, and making them more eager to socially share. The Echo Look app is where users can view the style selfies (and videos) they've asked Alexa to record for them (she indefinitely stores a copy for Amazon too). But the flagship feature of the app is a fashion feedback service, called Style Check, which Amazon says will utilize machine learning to rate fashion choices and help users choose between outfit pairs. And ultimately, presumably, give their entire wardrobe a score.

Customer volume prediction, which predicts the volume from a customer source to a service place, is a very important technique for location selection, market investigation, and other related applications. Most of traditional methods only make use of partial information for either supervised or unsupervised modeling, which cannot well integrate overall available knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method titled GR-NMF for jointly modeling both implicit correlations hidden inside customer volumes and explicit geographical knowledge via an integrated probabilistic framework. The effectiveness of GR-NMF in coupling all-round knowledge is verified over a real-life outpatient dataset under different scenarios. GR-NMF shows particularly evident advantages to all baselines in location selection with the cold-start challenge.