That's key, since inconvenience is the enemy of sales. The pandemic wreaked havoc on supply chains, which, coupled with consumer reluctance to buy nondiscretionary items, reduced data earlier this year. Retailers that could afford AI could adjust, often by tapping nontraditional data. "Mobile is the new mall," says Cowen analyst Oliver Chen, who notes that machine learning allows brands to build one-on-one relationships with consumers at scale. That's part of the rationale behind Walmart's bid for TikTok, which provides data on how younger shoppers engage with brands via social media.

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration and China declared a temporary truce Friday in their 15-month-long trade war. However, the grievances that led them to impose tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each other's goods remain largely unresolved. The administration agreed to suspend a tariff hike on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports that was set to take effect Tuesday. And China agreed to buy up to $50 billion of U.S. farm products. The de-escalation in tension between the world's two largest economies was welcomed by financial markets.

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that Google's work in China is not a security concern. As he told CNBC, "I don't see any area -- again the president and I did diligence on this issue -- and we're not aware of any areas where Google is working with the Chinese government in any way that raises concerns." Google's most disturbing Chinese initiatives involve the co-development of technology. Cooperation of this sort is so injurious to the United States that it should be criminalized, by emergency presidential order. Google, the Alphabet Inc. unit, also believes its projects in China are benign.

It's been just over 30 years since the last major overall of the U.S. tax code. In that time the world has been transformed - the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell, dot coms boomed and busted, terrorism struck and launched the U.S. into the longest war in its history. A financial crisis shook the country and the world to its knees, and the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, genomics, new materials, cloud computing, blockchain, the sharing and gig economies, and many other new, advanced technologies and business models signaled the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In that time, tax law and accounting practices have struggled to keep pace with innovations, sometimes leading to a wild West free for all for businesses and consumers, some of who managed to profit while others lost or were swindled of their life savings. Even today tax laws still fail to address the issues that the Age of Computer and the Internet brought, such as the internet sales tax, which may be heading to the US Supreme Court in the next year or so. As President Trump and the U.S. Congress are poised to pass and celebrate the passage of reforming the U.S. tax code for the first time in 30 years, missing from the discussion by both parties is how tax law and accounting principles should be altered to account for the realities of how AI, automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are reshaping businesses and the labor markets today and will continue to transform them in the years to come.

Members of a U.S. national security panel are locked in a dispute over a hostile takeover bid for chip giant Qualcomm Inc., QCOM -0.06% pitting officials in the departments of Justice and Defense against Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. In a meeting Tuesday, members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as CFIUS, debated whether the panel has the right to weigh in on Singapore-based Broadcom Ltd.'s AVGO -1.28% bid of $117 billion for Qualcomm before a deal is struck, according to people briefed on the matter. Qualcomm is a leader in semiconductor technology and the development of standards for 5G, the next generation of wireless technology that could enable self-driving cars and other innovations. Some members are concerned that if Broadcom buys Qualcomm, it could sell parts of the company and hobble American prospects of eclipsing China in the race to develop the technology, the people familiar with the matter said. CFIUS, which can advise the president to block takeovers by foreign companies on national security grounds, is chaired by the Treasury Department and includes members from other agencies, including Justice, Homeland Security, Defense and Energy.

From Silicon Valley's perspective, Brexit, President Trump, and populist revolts around the world are incongruous to what is really going on. Large numbers of workers are getting left behind in the wake of automation and artificial intelligence and most governments are not nearly nimble enough to react. Most people have a skewed perception of their role in a situation, as well as others' motives. The majority will happily take credit for positive outcomes, while often feeling victimized by negative ones. There's a push to return to the days where people weren't feeling choked economically.

With the political world deeply focused on the question of whether the Trump Administration comprises a gang of Russian pawns, less attention has been devoted to more mundane questions such as: what ever happened to Trump's economic policy? As it happens, economists are keeping their eye on that ball, and their conclusion is that it's in a bad way. Most specifically, they recognize that Trump policy is aimed heavily at achieving annual economic growth of more than 3%. During the Presidential campaign, Trump promised growth of 3.5% a year, and sometimes even 4%. There's no disagreement that a sustained growth rate of this magnitude would be a significant achievement.

A few weeks ago the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took some public flak for suggesting, in response to an interviewer's question, that he was "not worried at all" that artificial intelligence would threaten the jobs of human workers, because in his view it is "50 or 100 years away." It's not clear why Mnuchin would say that, but with respect, I have to correct him. The original question to Mnuchin was rooted in popular worries that AI will eliminate jobs in the near future. However there's growing evidence that as companies embrace AI to stay competitive, which they will, in the end these changes will create more jobs than they destroy. Earlier this year, ServiceNow commissioned a survey of senior executives at 1,874 companies of varying sizes across numerous industries in seven global markets.

Reporters called it the robot, but its physical presence was hardly felt. It was almost invisible, just a Microsoft Excel macro that could write a fairly detailed stock-market report that could then be edited and polished by a human journalist. But when Reuters introduced the robot to its newsroom in 2007 -- just before the financial crisis -- it was an early sign that manufacturing was not the only industry that automation was infiltrating. White-collar workers in fields like journalism, finance, medicine, and law are seeing an increasing use of machines, but one much less damaging to workers' job prospects. Unlike in manufacturing, where machines can take over entire factory floors in a physical, almost menacing way, machine learning and artificial intelligence so far are playing fairly benign roles in the professional world.

From driverless cars to smartphone apps offering instant translation, the evidence of rapid progress in artificial intelligence is now clear to see. On this week's Tech Tent we report on two tech giants, Facebook and Baidu, which are spending heavily on artificial intelligence research. And we meet the man who was among the first to predict just how disruptive the automation revolution was going to be. When a book called The Second Machine Age was published in 2014 it had a far greater impact than most academic works. But the timing of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book about the wave of automation sweeping through the workplace was perfect, as the world woke up to the rapid progress of computing and robotics and grew anxious about it.