Box subscription companies are reinventing retail using personalization and artificial intelligence. In recent years, amid a lackluster shopping environment, an unheralded retail phenomenon has taken off quite dramatically -- with growth rates exceeding 1,000%. The startups representing this evolving segment are collectively grouped under the label of subscription e-commerce. With such evocative names as BarkBox, Birchbox, Blue Apron, Harry's, OwlCrate, Trunk Club, and Winc, these online companies mail monthly boxes containing specially curated items in beauty, fashion, food, personal grooming, and pet products priced between $10 and $80 per box right to their subscribers' doorsteps. Attention was brought to this category when consumer giant Unilever snapped up one of the best-known startups -- Dollar Shave Club -- in July 2016 for an eye-popping $1 billion -- five times its annual revenue.

I wrote not too long ago that there is obviously a tech bubble and pointed to subscription companies as proof. Economist Matthew Martin posted recently on twitter that these subscription companies are not "tech startups", because subscription companies "go way back and there has been essentially no innovation". On the one hand, I'm happy to say "fine they are just startups and what I mean is there is a startup bubble". I don't really care about quibbling over the definition of a tech company, and my point is that there is bubbly corner of the economy filled with startups and many of them look alike, whatever you want to call them. On the other hand, no, I am right.

Box subscription companies are reinventing retail using personalization and artificial intelligence. In recent years, amid a lackluster shopping environment, an unheralded retail phenomenon has taken off quite dramatically -- with growth rates exceeding 1,000%. The startups representing this evolving segment are collectively grouped under the label of subscription e-commerce. With such evocative names as BarkBox, Birchbox, Blue Apron, Harry's, OwlCrate, Trunk Club, and Winc, these online companies mail monthly boxes containing specially curated items in beauty, fashion, food, personal grooming, and pet products priced between $10 and $80 per box right to their subscribers' doorsteps. Attention was brought to this category when consumer giant Unilever snapped up one of the best-known startups -- Dollar Shave Club -- in July 2016 for an eye-popping $1 billion -- five times its annual revenue.

Box subscription companies are reinventing retail using personalization and artificial intelligence. In recent years, amid a lackluster shopping environment, an unheralded retail phenomenon has taken off quite dramatically -- with growth rates exceeding 1,000%. The startups representing this evolving segment are collectively grouped under the label of subscription e-commerce. With such evocative names as BarkBox, Birchbox, Blue Apron, Harry's, OwlCrate, Trunk Club, and Winc, these online companies mail monthly boxes containing specially curated items in beauty, fashion, food, personal grooming, and pet products priced between $10 and $80 per box right to their subscribers' doorsteps. Attention was brought to this category when consumer giant Unilever snapped up one of the best-known startups -- Dollar Shave Club -- in July 2016 for an eye-popping $1 billion -- five times its annual revenue.

Kristina: Why should subscription-based software companies care about machine learning? Matt Fleckenstein, SVP Products and Marketing, Amplero: Today's connected customers demand that companies provide a service to them that is personalized, connected, memorable, and one that provides ongoing value (the more I use it, the more value I receive). Traditional marketing tools simply can't scale to deliver against these connected customer demands, as rules-based marketing automation solutions require a human to set up complex rules trying to account for thousands of different contexts across the customer journey. Humans simply can't manage and implement, let alone continually optimize, for thousands of customer contexts across the journey, so marketers are increasingly looking to computers and machine learning for help. Kristina: How do machine learning marketing capabilities play into the priorities of SaaS subscription companies?