Artificial intelligence will be playing a big part in your online shopping escapades for the holidays. That's because roughly 81% of online retailers are tapping AI to boost their sales in time for the holiday rush. According to VentureBeat, these businesses have increased their artificial intelligence budgets to do just that. The businesses in question are classified as small to medium enterprises who might not be competitive with other online shopping giants like Amazon. With artificial intelligence, the businesses are tapping into its power to help manage their supply chain (which is already stretched thin due to the pandemic), protect against ecommerce fraud, and even increase their overall sales.

A NASSCOM-incubated company has come up with a product that, at your verbal command, can mine through data and provide valuable inputs to improve your business. The company, geniSIGHTS, has developed FLASH, a product that, according to Rajesh Kumar, founder and managing director, will use artificial intelligence "to run day-to-day business better." Companies rely on data to understand how their business is performing and sift through information to understand their customer profile. It is even more difficult to understand their competitor's performance. FLASH aims to make this easy.

Reflektion*–which delivers innovative "individualized commerce" technology for retailers–recently announced it has raised 18 million in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures. Here, Powered by Battery chats with CEO Sean Moran about the how the company is aiming to transform digital retail, partly by leveraging new types of artificial-intelligence technologies. Powered by Battery: We hear a lot about "personalization" and predictive analytics when it comes to online retail. How does Reflektion and "individualized commerce" fit in? What exactly do you do?