A few weeks ago, you found the perfect Father's Day gift -- a T-shirt of your dad's favorite band. You bought it online and had it shipped to his house. This week, the same online store keeps suggesting Phish T-shirts, size large, instead of the women's athletic tops you're actually looking for. The algorithm can't distinguish between shopping for your dad or yourself. Not if Diane Keng has her way.

Over the past 15 years, the traditional retail model has been dramatically disrupted by online retail. With the introduction of online retail, shopping is gradually being transformed from an offline activity to an online one. That was the first retail disruption, but it's not the last. Increasingly online retailers and offline retailers are evolving to provide an immersive, seamless, and personalised shopping experience. Customers don't want a fully digital experience while shopping; rather they want a digital shopping experience that is so seamless as to not seem like a shopping experience at all.

NEW YORK – It would have been easy to turn on their computers at home over plates of leftover turkey and take advantage of the Black Friday deals most retailers now offer online. But across the country, thousands of shoppers flocked to stores on Thanksgiving or woke up before dawn the next day to take part in this most famous ritual of American consumerism. Shoppers spent their holiday lined up outside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, by 4 p.m. Thursday, and the crowd had swelled to 3,000 people by the time doors opened at 5 a.m. In Ohio, a group of women was so determined, they booked a hotel room Thursday night to be closer to the stores. In New York City, one woman went straight from a dance club to a department store in the middle of the night.

Buzzwords like "big data" and "artificial intelligence" have become commonplace in many of today's business conversations, but what exactly do they mean--and what do they mean for the luxury consumer? The Chinese government's "Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" was established in 2017, making artificial intelligence (AI) a national priority for China. Simply put, today's high-net-worth buyers still want a traditional tailor-made buying experience, but they want it fast and hassle-free. Artificial intelligence and big data are what will help give them that. Big data is a term for the huge volume of varied and unstructured data (sounds, images, texts, messages, transactions, videos, social networks, etc.) that companies collect both online and off, from employee counts to weather histories.

Artificial intelligence might just spawn a whole new style trend: call it "predictive fashion." In a paper published on the ArXiv, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Adobe have outlined a way for AI to not only learn a person's style but create computer-generated images of items that match that style. The system could let retailers create personalized pieces of clothing, or could even be used to help predict broader fashion trends. First, the researchers trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn and classify a user's preferences for certain items, using purchase data scraped from Amazon in six categories: shoes, tops, and pants for both women and men. This type of recommender model is common in the online retail world, usually showing up in an "Other items you might like" area at the bottom of a page.

We have witnessed in the past few years how the digital age brought the physical world closer to everyone. Ecommerce industry was born at the term of the 20th century, and while still in its infancy, made tremendous progress. It's worth noting that the early adopters of ecommerce were not driven by economies of scale or reduced cost but by convenience. This is exactly why Artificial Intelligence will get acceptance in ecommerce. AI will not only transform buyer-seller interactions but also present certain challenges that would keep pilling faster than they are solved.

In just a few years, Artificial intelligence (AI) has successfully maneuvered itself into the daily vernacular of people worldwide. Then, by utilizing newly created AI algorithms to power a fashion search engine and real-time trending feeds, users can stay up to date with the latest in fashion. As we've seen with the Google search engine, deep algorithms that give us more relevant results based on our search terms have changed how we use the internet. By employing AI algorithms, image searches are able to take any given image and pull up a plethora of relevant and useful information through a database of billions of other photos.

In just a few years, Artificial intelligence (AI) has successfully maneuvered itself into the daily vernacular of people worldwide. It takes countless shapes and forms, and has altered the way that we view the world and technological possibilities. There's no way of telling just how much development will take place in the next decade. But, one of the places in which AI has been truly impressive has been the world of online retail. We've seen a huge surge of companies using AI to increase their bottom line while providing enriched customer experience.