The next time you order a takeaway, it might be flown directly to your door. Today, Deliveroo has launched its first drone delivery service for customers in Ireland. Drones travelling at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) will carry food from restaurants to customers in as little as three minutes. Upon arrival, the drone will hover above the customer's home and gently lower the food to the ground on a tether before returning to the delivery hub. Launching in Blanchardstown, on the outskirts of Dublin, the trial will cover a 1.8-mile (3km) radius, reaching up to 150,000 people.

On a bluff south of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an electric motor whips a drone built by startup Zipline off a catapult launch ramp beside me and into the air on a test flight. The aircraft, with a fixed-wing design resembling that of a conventional airplane, pilots itself north, plans its approach based on the wind direction, makes a sweeping turn and drops a box of Band-Aids, Advil and Tums by parachute onto the grass a few yards in front of me. Drone deliveries could be dropping into your life, too, as the technology involved matures and expands beyond isolated test projects. In 2023, drones could replace vans and your own trip to the store when you need medicine, takeout dinners, cordless drill batteries or dishwasher soap. Today, Alphabet Wing drones reach hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, Finland and Texas and will expand its service in 2023, according to Jonathan Bass, who runs marketing for the business.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Digital twins began as a way to harness engineering simulation to improve product design. The Omniverse opens digital twins tools and techniques for a much broader set of use cases. At Nvidia's recent GTC conference, executives from Lowes and Kroger explained how digital twins are transforming retail, customer experience and logistics. The biggest takeaway is how digital twins make it easy to visualize complex relationships between physical things, including product placement, physical customer journeys and the paths robots might take down store aisles for inventory and floor cleaning.

Nuro already has a third driverless delivery vehicle on the way, and this model is focused as much on protecting others as it is hauling goods. The newly introduced version, simply called Nuro, includes a host of 360-degree sensors including cameras, LiDAR, radar and thermals, but also includes a giant external airbag to protect pedestrians. We still wouldn't risk stepping in front of this machine (you'll still hit the ground, after all), but this should reduce the chances of a serious injury. The new vehicle also carries twice the cargo, and offers both temperature-controlled compartments and modular inserts to help shuttle a wider variety of goods. Nuro didn't say when this latest self-driving vehicle would be ready, but the North American branch of China's BYD will help produce units at a Nuro factory due to go online later in 2022.

The Morning Ledger provides daily news and insights on corporate finance from the CFO Journal team. Private-equity firm Permira and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board in 2015 took the company private in a transaction valued at $5.3 billion after roughly 15 years as a public company. The company has since moved its on-premises products to a cloud-based platform and built a subscription business. Permira and CPPIB will control about 85% of the company after its IPO. Informatica, which lists drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co., consumer-goods giant Unilever PLC and supermarket chain Kroger Co. among its customers, helps companies connect and manage their data across the cloud and on-premise systems, allowing organizations to better analyze the data they collect.

Who invests a database worth of intelligence into the price of a chocolate bar? Turns out, it could be more than half of all retailers. In 2020, 58% of top retailers said they planned to implement some form of AI pricing technology by the end of 2021, according to research conducted for Revionics, a pricing technology company. That compares with 34% in 2020. It's likely they are implementing the technology as pandemic-related inventory delays cause customer-infuriating price hikes: 90% of shoppers said in a recent survey that they plan to switch brands, seek lower prices or cut back on discretionary spending because of higher prices.

One of the most frequently-used phrases at business events these days is "the future of work." It's increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring substantial changes in work tasks and business processes. But while these changes are predicted for the future, they're already present in many organizations for many different jobs. The job and incumbents described below are an example of this phenomenon. Steve Miller of Singapore Management University and I are collaborating on these stories.

Kroger Co. has spent years--and hundreds of millions of dollars--investing in technology to give it a digital edge in the grocery business. But when the coronavirus changed customers' buying habits overnight, the grocery chain wasn't as ready for the online shift as some of its competitors. The nation's biggest grocer, Kroger has poured money into projects ranging from a self-driving grocery delivery robot to a partnership to sell goods in China through Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. It also bet that a delivery model using remote fulfillment centers, popular in Europe, would resonate stateside. Yet, when the pandemic sent a tsunami of customers ordering groceries online for the first time, it was unable to meet higher demand. The wide-ranging investments slowed adoption of technology for grocery delivery, leaving Kroger behind some of its competitors, said former executives, current employees and a vendor.

Amazon's radical new approach to buying foods and speeding up the checkout process goes the next mile today, with a full-size grocery store here. The Amazon Go Grocery opens Tuesday, with more than four times the space of the original, 7-Eleven-style, on-the-go type stores first opened in 2018. The e-tailer, which also owns Whole Foods, launched the Go stores as a way for local workers to get in and out, with a just basics menu that bypassed essentials like fruit and frozen foods. "We believe'Just walk out' technology," makes shopping a better experience, says Cameron Janes, vice-president of Amazon's physical stores division. He gave USA TODAY a sneak-peek tour of the new concept Monday.

It's a cloudy day in early October and I'm circling my rented Jeep Wrangler around a maze of industrial buildings in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton is a small city 30 miles north of Cincinnati with a population of just over 62,000 people. Like much of Ohio, farming is important here. I'm on my way to a farm called 80 Acres, but it isn't the sprawling midwestern wheat field you're picturing in your mind. This tech-centric farm is indoors, housed entirely in a nondescript 10,000-square-foot warehouse.