While many know UK company Ocado as an online grocery retailer, it's really one of the most innovative tech companies in the world. Ocado was founded in 2000 as an entirely online experience and therefore never had a brick-and-mortar store to serve its customers, who number 580,000 each day. Its technology expertise came about out of necessity as it began to build the software and hardware it needed to be efficient, productive, and competitive. Today, Ocado uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in many ways throughout its business. Since 2000, Ocado tried to piece together the technology they needed to succeed by purchasing products off the shelf.

In the United States and Western Europe, many traditional grocery retailers are seeing their sales and margins fall--and things could get even worse. Here's how to reverse the trend. To put it bluntly, much of the $5.7 trillion global grocery industry is in trouble. Although it has grown at about 4.5 percent annually over the past decade, that growth has been highly uneven--and has masked deeper problems. For grocers in developed markets, both growth and profitability have been on a downward trajectory due to higher costs, falling productivity, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. One result: a massive decline in publicly listed grocers' economic value.

With Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, the rise of subscription meal kits, and new competition from pureplay grocery delivery services, it seems like everyone is trying to build a better grocery store. But what if the supermarket of the future is the one right around the corner? When we think about artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the retail industry, it is easy to overlook how it could affect one of the most fundamental shopping experiences around: the grocery store. Right now, the conversation and real-world applications of AI are limited to voice assistants and chatbots. But the potential goes much farther than that.

Many people are familiar with International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) and its wide variety of mainframe computers, business servers, and consulting services. Investors are probably also familiar with its more recent forays into data analytics, cloud computing, and cognitive computing solutions, represented by its AI-based Watson supercomputer. There are, however, a number of innovations that forever changed the technological landscape and paved the way for the larger societal and demographic shifts that followed. IBM has a long and fascinating history of innovation. Charles Flint, a financier in New York, arranged for the merger of several companies that developed time clocks, computing scales, and tabulating machines.