The application of AI is very interesting and fantasizing in the domain of healthcare, defense, and security. However, we do not see a lot of commercial applications reaching end-users. The papers are promising but very difficult to implement on the scale, also because of the regulations. However, in the Retail domain, the stakes are not that high as healthcare, hence, can be experimented with. Retail encompasses shopping malls to online purchases and from transportation to stacking of items in warehouses.

The success and fast expansion of Amazon Go has led other retailers and venues to seek startup help ... [ ] for their own cashierless checkout-free stores. On Amazon's jobs site, a keyword search query for Amazon Go yielded 3,500 results, seeking to fill positions manning the cashierless stores and looking for a head of marketing for the concept and a wide variety of engineers and program managers. Meanwhile, six months after the first Amazon Go opened in New York in May, six stores are in operation in the city, including four located less than a mile from one another in Midtown Manhattan. Two more are scheduled to open soon in the city. Those job postings and the fact that Amazon Go is cropping up in busy commercial sections of New York are just the latest signal of the Seattle giant's ambition to further expand its Just Walk Out Shopping concept, which features in-house-built computer vision, sensor fusion and deep machine learning technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars.

Symphony RetailAI's space planning solutions are enhanced through the advanced VR technology of InContext Solutions' ShopperMX platform, enabling retailers to streamline the space planning process and drive more effective use of physical store real estate. The resulting outcome is 5-10% improvement in category performance. "Historically, retailers have found investment in store-layout optimization to be prohibitively expensive," said Pallab Chatterjee, Symphony RetailAI CEO. "However, by virtualizing the process of category- and store-planogram design and testing, Symphony RetailAI and InContext Solutions are able to help retailers create agile store layouts that keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions. In addition to saving time and money building new store environments, retailers see instant and measurable impact through improved category growth and customer outcomes, visualized by easy-to-use overlay analytics on performance." Through this partnership, optimized planograms developed using Symphony RetailAI Store Planning and Optimization are integrated with InContext Solutions' ShopperMX 3D Content & Curation platform to make multi-user virtual reality testing possible.

I came to retail at a time when the retail landscape was dramatically changing. At the time, computer city superstore was the first big box concept for technology. But the interesting part was that the retailers only sold B2B technology in a self-service environment during the first time when consumers were starting to shop for technology. The whole concept of these big box stores with huge assortment was the first in integrating a lot of professional services and interesting amenities within the retail environment. Moreover, the interesting part was that retailers could no longer follow the rules of their predecessor; they had to create new ones. They now had to invent what would work, listen to the customers, and adapt to the practices of the task in new ways to meet unique demands.