During its largely AI-focused annual Surface event on Thursday, Microsoft announced that its generative AI assistant, Copliot, will also be available to help with shopping on Bing and Edge. Broadly speaking, the company plans to make Copilot a part of all its flagship products, including Windows, Edge and more. When it comes to shopping specifically, Copilot can help you decide on a style, locate a specific item and, of course, eventually buy it. But the new launch may be more about playing catch-up with its competitors than actually innovating. Google Lens, for example, lets you find products to buy by just snapping a picture of them.

NLP is leveraged to improve search results by filtering and contextualizing them, making the results more relevant for shoppers. This can also be done by focusing on visual elements in a search. Thanks to machine learning, AI software tags, arranges and searches visually for content by categorizing image and/or video features. This technology also allows shoppers to not just find products that match, but those that complement them too. So to purchase an item, a customer need not search and browse endlessly, simply upload an image. It often happens that sales teams fail to follow up with marketing leads, allowing qualified potential customers to get lost in the system.

The dominant public narrative about artificial intelligence is that we are building increasingly intelligent machines that will ultimately surpass human capabilities, steal our jobs, possibly even escape human control and kill us all. This misguided perception, not widely shared by AI researchers, runs a significant risk of delaying or derailing practical applications and influencing public policy in counterproductive ways. A more appropriate framingbetter supported by historical progress and current developmentsis that AI is simply a natural continuation of longstanding efforts to automate tasks, dating back at least to the start of the industrial revolution. Stripping the field of its gee-whiz apocalyptic gloss makes it easier to evaluate the likely benefits and pitfalls of this important technology, not to mention dampen the self-destructive cycles of hype and disappointment that have plagued the field since its inception. At the core of this problem is the tendency for respected public figures outside the field, and even a few within the field, to tolerate or sanction overblown press reports that herald each advance as startling and unexpected leaps toward general human-level intelligence (or beyond), fanning fears that "the robots" are coming to take over the world.

WhatsApp is the new buzzword for digital conversations as the post-pandemic world gets more digital-savvy and contactless shopping emerges as the new trend. According to a Statista report, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform with more than 2 billion active users outranking Facebook Messenger at 1.3 billion and WeChat at 1.2 billion users. Not only this, it has become the world's third-largest social networking platform after Facebook and YouTube. Given the popularity and demand of this new messaging channel, businesses too have started to turn their ships, the WhatsApp way. Also, recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) make WhatsApp more profitable for businesses.

Big-box retailer Walmart is using artificial intelligence (AI) to aid customers and personal shoppers and better handle still-surging online demand for groceries amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In a blog post Thursday, Srini Venkatesan, Walmart's global tech executive vice president, noted that as Americans increasingly turned to the internet to shop for essentials, stores like Walmart were presented with a "unique challenge." The alternate shopping method combined with the volume of in-store shoppers – especially in the months of March and April – resulted in popular items quickly selling out. Last July, Walmart corporate affairs said the company had hired more than 400,000 new associates to mitigate the sudden "customer rush on essentials as lockdowns spread across the U.S." "Walmart's solution was to use artificial intelligence to help both customers and Personal Shoppers choose the best substitute for an out-of-stock item," said Venkatesan. An illustrated video included in the blog post shows a Walmart personal shopper who needs to make a substitution for an online order.

It's no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on both Google Play and the App Store. But even as pandemic restrictions have eased, consumers are still using ordering groceries for delivery or pickup more frequently than they were pre-pandemic. As Walmart's grocery delivery services have continued to boom, posing competition to companies like Amazon and Instacart, the tech that Walmart uses has expanded too. Today, Walmart shared information about how it's training its AI to make smarter substitutions in online grocery orders.

When you picture a personal assistant, you probably envision a celebrity -- or at least someone very wealthy -- walking around with a "shadow" who takes her messages, makes her travel plans, helps her pick out the perfect outfit, and eliminates other daily tasks from her lengthy to-do list. If you've ever wished you could have a personal assistant of your own, then you're in luck. Personal assistants are quickly becoming accessible to the masses -- thanks to AI and other emerging tech. In fact, technology really has been an equalizer when it comes to providing everyday people access to personal concierge services. Besides Siri or Google on your smartphone, Amazon's Alexa and Google Home may be some of the first digital "personal" assistants that come to mind.

When you picture a personal assistant, you probably envision a celebrity -- or at least someone very wealthy -- walking around with a "shadow" who takes her messages, makes her travel plans, helps her pick out the perfect outfit, and eliminates other daily tasks from her lengthy to-do list. If you've ever wished you could have a personal assistant of your own, then you're in luck. Personal assistants are quickly becoming accessible to the masses -- thanks to AI and other emerging tech. In fact, technology really has been an equalizer when it comes to providing everyday people access to personal concierge services. Besides Siri or Google on your smartphone, Amazon's Alexa and Google Home may be some of the first digital "personal" assistants that come to mind.

No one wants to go grocery shopping. It's all heavy carts, complex layouts, and unfathomable product placement decisions – why is the sherry vinegar next to the olive bar? The daunting, sisyphean task takes up enough time to make you resentful. Making you hate it less, and helping you find exactly what you're looking for, is Instacart's raison d'etre, says Jeremy Stanley, the company's VP of data science, and chief wielder of the machine learned algorthims behind the scenes. See the full line-up and grab last-minute tickets.] Instacart represents an advancement in online grocery shopping service: It gives you millions of products from hundreds of retail partners, and then hooks you up with a personal shopper who makes that grocery list land on your doorstep.

Now that frenetic Black Friday and crazy Cyber Monday are behind us, I've decided to complete my Christmas shopping. And this year, I'll be doing it with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). With the tech giants, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, increasing their investments in AI and news of Alibaba's $15bn investment in it, I wanted to find out what the customer experience is really like. And, most importantly, does it live up to all the hype? The term AI was first used back in the 50s and was based on the principle that'every aspect of learning or any other features of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.'