With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. 'What to buy Dad for Christmas': is retail ready for the AI shopping shift? Consumer test drive: can AI do your Xmas gift shopping for you? While traditional internet search, social media - especially TikTok and Instagram - and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future of retail is local. There are over 1M independent retailers in the U.S. and Canada doing more than twice the revenue of Walmart and Amazon combined. At Faire, we're using the power of technology and data to connect a growing community of over 150,000 brands and independent retailers around the world. Picture your favorite boutique in town -- we help them discover the best products to sell in their stores. By empowering entrepreneurs with the right tools and insights, we believe that we can level the playing field so that small businesses can compete with big box and e-commerce giants.

AI took center stage in recently-announced updates to the Alexa virtual voice assistant, and in the charges this week from the European Commission that Amazon is breaking EU competition rules. During Amazon's Alexa Live event held in July, the company announced a major update to Alexa's developer toolkit that brings AI improvements. Since launching in 2014, Amazon's voice assistant has shipped hundreds of millions of units, which are targeted by a sizable developer community offering voice apps, called Skills, that extend the Alexa default feature set. Just as the Android and iOS large selections of third party applications differentiate those operating systems, so Skill plays an important role in Amazon's growth strategy for Alexa, according to a recent account in siliconAngle. Amazon added deep learning models for natural language understanding that the company said will enable Skills to recognize users' voice commands with 15% higher accuracy on average.

American Express will open a consumer experience in New York City that uses technology to show what the future of retail could look like over the next 10 years. Ahead of the financial service firm's 10th anniversary on Nov. 30, the brand conducted a survey of 1,000 nationally representative U.S. adults and found that 77% of Americans observe the holiday as a national tradition. The campaign to drive more customers to local businesses has grown into an important post-Black Friday event for independent retailers across the country. The experience and overall campaign also aim to shed light on issues small businesses face today. According to the Shop Small Consumer Impact survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of American Express in October, 73% of people feel that empty storefronts are a national issue.