Yansong Chen, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Ricardo--an environmental, engineering, and strategic consulting company--says advanced technologies are changing the way the industry looks at its value proposition, at a fundamental level. "They're also changing the way that the industry perceives its role in interacting with the customer." The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) clearly shows how change has swept across the auto industry over the past decade. Global sales of passenger EVs in 2022 exceeded 10 million for the first time ever. One in every sevenpassenger cars bought globally in 2022 was an EV, compared with just one in every 70 cars sold in 2017.

This week marks the start of a series of talks about the iFetch project that I'll be giving. Our goal with iFetch is to create a trustworthy multimodal conversational agent for the online fashion marketplace. How do you get away from question-answering chatbots? How can multimodality be used to address various customers' intents? What should be the best policy to address our customer's goals and be capable of responding in the right tone?

After more than 20 years in the retail business, Switzerland-based online marketplace Ricardo wanted to fix some of the problems its users had buying and selling items. Ultimately, Ricardo settled on a system based on the Ray open source Python framework developed by AI vendor Anyscale. Like most such marketplaces, Ricardo previously used a category business model in which the items sellers listed for sale were placed under different categories. However, sometimes end users clicked on the wrong categories and were unable to find the items they wanted. Also, since Switzerland has four official languages, sometimes customers were describing the product they wanted in a language that was different from what the website was picking up.

Ricardo Diaz is a machine learning engineer. He works for a great company in Peru, and he's a graduate of no less than four Nanodegree programs! But just two years ago, it was a different story. He was still in Venezuela, struggling to learn new skills. He was short of money, and his prospects for making a full-time salary weren't great.