The retail industry collects massive amounts of data every day, and this makes its key processes ripe for automation with machine learning. Along with the manufacturing sector, the retail industry likely stands to benefit the most from one particular AI technique in the next few years: machine vision, also known as computer vision.

The retail and eCommerce sectors were among the first to adopt natural language processing (NLP) in the enterprise, particularly by way of chatbots and conversational interfaces. In this article, we cover three ways retailers can use NLP to automate business processes and offer the customer a better experience. We also give examples of AI vendors that offer this technology and describe their products. The NLP capabilities we discuss include:

The retail industry could be losing nearly $1 trillion in sales annually due to business process errors that could be automated by AI, such as restocking in eCommerce. In this article, we discuss the top 3 most well-funded AI startups selling to the retail industry and how their solutions could help retailers and eCommerce sites save money lost to fraud and increase revenue through customer analytics.
Signifyd - Retail and eCommerce Fraud Detection
Signifyd is the most well-funded AI startup in the fraud detection industry for retail and eCommerce, having raised $180 million. They were founded in August 2011 and specialize in fraud detection for retail and eCommerce companies. Their most prominent offering is called “guaranteed fraud detection,” and it likely uses anomaly detection technology to recognize fraudulent transactions and prevent chargebacks. The offering was originally announced exclusively for the Magento eCommerce platform in 2017.

Many AI vendor companies offer AI-enabled products and services for pushing more and more products in front of customers. That said, it is not always clear how these solutions determine which products to advertise to which customers. Retailers and other businesses should consider what they need to do to prepare their enterprise for one of these solutions and familiarize themselves with how AI recommendations are built and trained.

Many of the top Fortune 500 retailers have begun using AI and ML to solve business problems for various departments. Walmart and Costco share one in grocery stocking, which includes the freshness and condition of the products along with timing the restocks for peak hours.

The business world has been talking about AI for several years now, and it's safe to say that it's reached a certain cultural moment among executives in areas like banking, insurance, and pharma. Government leaders have been much slower to start the conversation around the capabilities of AI, including the possibilities they offer to militaries and the ethical implications of AI when it comes to governance and the legal system.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have fueled technological innovations in marketing, eCommerce, and several other industries. Many people experience the benefits of AI and ML systems without even knowing it every time they search on Google or click on a song in Spotify.

Gesture-based interfaces are applications that allow users to control devices using hand and other body parts. Today, they are found in devices used in home automation, shopping, consumer electronics, virtual reality and augmented reality gaming, navigation, and driving, among others.

Episode Summary: AI, specifically natural language processing, has made it easier to understand text as a medium in a deeper, more efficient way and at scale. With video, the situation is quite different. AI is already being used to help industries that work in the video medium. However, searching for content within videos is more challenging because video is not just voice and sound, it is also a collection of moving and still images on screen. How could AI work to overcome that challenge?

In recent years, artificial intelligence has enabled pricing solutions to track buying trends and determine more competitive product prices. While static pricing keeps prices absolute, dynamic pricing adjusts prices to offer customers different prices based on external factors and their individual buying habits.

Event Title: Launch of the OECD AI Policy Observatory

Event Host: OECD

This article is based on a presentation given by Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella in Geneva, at the 2019 New Shape Forum: Weapons Governance for the Geneva Disarmament Platform. To learn more about Emerj's AI presentations and speaking, visit our presentations page.

In July of 2018, Daniel Faggella spoke at the Interpol--United Nations (UNICRI) Global Meeting on the Opportunities and Risks of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Law Enforcement. It was the very first event on the usage of AI in policing, security and law enforcement by the UN and INTERPOL. 

Event Title: 2019 New Shape Forum: Weapons Governance

Date: September 30, 2019 - October 1, 2019

The military is always looking for ways to innovate its technology for weapons and vehicles, and it follows that AI and ML would become part of that work in the current decade. Currently, the Army is testing autonomous vehicles and aircraft for battlefield use. However, most AI applications for these vehicles do not have clearance to operate the weapons attached to them. 

There are numerous AI initiatives in progress across the healthcare industry; some of these are for mental health and well-being. In this article, we offer an overview of how AI is facilitating mental healthcare.

Event Title: Symposium Artificial Intelligence for Science, Industry and Society

In this brief overview, we run through several use-cases for voice recognition software in the healthcare industry. Voice recognition software, built on natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, primarily finds a home in the doctor's office. Physicians use it to dictate their notes into their healthcare network's system or update patient electronic medical records (EMR).

This article was written by Sergii Gorpynich, co-Founder and CTO at Star, co-written by Perry Simpson, Managing Director of Star, and was written, edited and published in alignment with our transparent Emerj sponsored content guidelines. Learn more about reaching our AI-focused executive audience on our Emerj advertising page.

This article was written by Sergii Gorpynich, co-Founder and CTO at Star, co-written by Perry Simpson, Managing Director of Star, and was written, edited and published in alignment with our transparent Emerj sponsored content guidelines. Learn more about reaching our AI-focused executive audience on our Emerj advertising page.

This week, we speak with arguably one of the best-known folks in the domain of neural networks: Jurgen Schmidhuber. He's working on a lot of different applications now in heavy industry, self-driving cars, and other spaces.

Accenture forecast the Industrial Internet of Things could contribute $10 trillion to the global economy by 2030. The report also suggested that sensors, material tracking mechanisms, 3D printing, automated product design, robotics, and wearables could help manufacturers reduce costs and increase productivity. Predictive asset maintenance could potentially reduce equipment and machinery maintenance costs by up to 30% and result in up to 70% fewer breakdowns.

McKinsey reported that most oil and gas operators have not maximized the production potential of their assets. A typical offshore platform, according to the 2017 report, runs at about 77% of its maximum production potential. Industry-wide, the shortfall comes to about 10 million barrels per day, or $200 billion in annual revenue.

With the entrance of artificial intelligence and its capabilities of recognizing temperature, vibration, and other factors from sensors pre-built into machinery and vehicles, business leaders in heavy industry might be interested in the possible opportunities of predictive and preventative maintenance applications.

Asset and wealth management firms are exploring potential AI solutions for improving their investment decisions, and making use of their troves of historical data. In fact, according to our AI Opportunity Landscape research into the banking industry specifically, approximately 13.5% of the AI vendors in banking offer solutions for wealth and asset management.

By implementing an immersive virtual-reality environment, some AI applications claim it is possible to test products or retail ideas that have not been brought to on the market, putting them on a virtual shelf to study consumer reactions and behavior to real-time merchandising.

Episode Summary: AI, specifically natural language processing, has made it easier to understand text as a medium in a deeper, more efficient way and at scale. With video, the situation is quite different. AI is already being used to help industries that work in the video medium. However, searching for content within videos is more challenging because video is not just voice and sound, it is also a collection of moving and still images on screen. How could AI work to overcome that challenge?

Speech recognition is technology that can recognize spoken words, which can then be converted to text. A subset of speech recognition is voice recognition, which is the technology for identifying a person based on their voice.

As the web grows and we spend more and more time online, moderation becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. Content influences buyers, and businesses eager to gain the trust of those customers are likely to do whatever they can to win.

eMarketer estimates that 62% of global internet users accessed digital video in 2017, and that number is expected to rise to 63.4% by 2020. This may be marginal growth, but, essentially, consumers are expected to spend more time watching video content. 

Oil and gas companies face many of the same challenges as large banks and established insurance firms when it comes to searching through their backlogs of documents. They want to use the data stored within these documents to make decisions on where to drill and determine whether or not they’re in compliance with laws and regulations. 

Although it's apparent that AI development is slow-moving in the industry, food and beverage companies may be able to use AI for food processing, in particular:

The International Energy Agency’s latest annual gas market report, Gas 2018, estimated that global gas demand could reach more than 4,100 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2023. This is an increase from 3,740 bcm in 2017. Greater gas demands mean more oil rigs, and the machines on these rigs break down.

There's an entire artificial intelligence ecosystem for enterprise search. Most of this is in a purely digital world. Most vendors help with a layer of AI-enabled search that understands terms or phrases and is able to return the results or answers to questions that someone types in. But the problem is compounded when it comes to searching the physical world.

According to McKinsey, global gas demand is expected to reach 4,503 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2035, showing a more than 1% annual growth from 3,736 bcm in 2017. Asia is expected to be the biggest consumer of the resource at 47%, followed by the rest of the world (24%), the Middle East (16%), and the United States (14%).

Have you ever been frustrated with how Alexa or Siri don't always understand your verbal requests? If so, then you already understand the problem that our guest this struggles with. He's Tom Livne, co-founder and CEO of Verbit.ai.

AI has numerous use cases in legal, from document search to compliance and contract abstraction. This week, we speak with Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer for LegalSifter, about what's possible with AI for legal departments today and how AI applications for legal teams, such as natural language processing-based contract analysis, work. In addition, Mahler discusses how lawyers at companies and data scientists work together to train machine learning algorithms.

IT services firms are doing their best to keep up with the changing landscape as AI begins to dominate the tech conversation. Many IT services firms have recently started branding themselves as AI companies without having the requisite talent to back up their claims. In reality, many of the older IT services companies are struggling to hire PhD graduates in machine learning who would rather use their skillset at global AI firms like Google and Amazon.

This article was originally written as part of an in-depth AI report sponsored by Iron Mountain, and was written, edited and published in alignment with our transparent Emerj sponsored content guidelines. Learn more about our thought leadership and content creation services on our Thought Leadership Services page.

Episode Summary: In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Nikhil Malhotra, Creator and Head of Maker's Lab at Tech Mahindra, about how artificial intelligence changed the nature of IT services and business services in general. Malhotra talks about what businesses should consider to make themselves relevant for the future. In addition, he discusses the philosophy shift that has to happen for people to be appreciative of the process of problem-solving, and to see profit and growth from AI. We hope business leaders in the IT services industry will take from this interview the low-hanging fruit applications in the IT services industry.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation recently released an overview report on the current state of self-driving technology.

Danny Lange heads up the AI efforts at Unity, one of the better-known firms in terms of simulations and computer graphics. They work in several different industries, but this week we speak mostly about automotive.

In this article, we explore the applications of AI software within the automotive industry from production and manufacturing to insurance and transportation. We will discuss the equipment involved in collecting and analyzing data along with the potential value they offer to manufacturers, shared mobility companies, insurers, and drivers.

Although AI has broader applications in the travel and tourism industry, facial recognition kiosks at airports have been one of the most prominent applications in the public discussion about AI. Their promise: to increase security and potentially speed up passenger boarding.

In the past decade the number of people killed by natural disasters each year has ranged from as low as 14,389 in 2015 to as high as 314,503 in 2010, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Every year over 100,000,000 people are also affected by natural disasters. Government, companies, and aid organizations are all working to keep these tragic deaths as low as possible. One tool they have turned to for help in recent years is search and rescue robots.