AI Articles and Analysis about E-commerce

Episode Summary: Over the last couple of years there has been a definite but small shift from mobile as the primary interface focus for businesses to voice. With home assistant devices like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home becoming more commonplace, we aim to focus on how voice based AI applications are being used by businesses today and what this adoption will look like in the future.  

AI is being likened to a "Fourth Industrial Revolution" because of it's potential for creating profound change in people’s lives, much like the invention of steam engines (First Industrial Revolution), electricity and mass production (Second Industrial Revolution), and the rise of the digital age (Third Industrial Revolution) had in the past.

A 2017 report by the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of the American public use some type of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others.

Episode summary: In this week's interview on the AI in Industry podcast, we speak with Amir Konigsberg, the CEO of Twiggle, about the future of product search - and how eCommerce and retail brands can use natural language processing (NLP) to improve their user experience.

Artificial intelligence has found its way in different areas in the entertainment industry from offering customized recommendations on your Friday night movies (as in the case of Netflix) to delivering sports match highlights during live TV coverage. In the latter, this was made possible in the 2017 U.S. Open Tennis Championships when IBM Watson Media used its AI tool to showcase play highlights right after they occur.

Episode summary: This week, AI in Industry features Dr. David Franke, Chief Scientist at Vast. David talks about how AI can work with scarce transaction data to derive meaningful analytics for big purchases, such as cars and houses. He elaborates on how the AI can glean information from user interaction and marketplace data to provide customers with the relevant product fit, deals and recommendations on big purchases. He also discusses the future trends and business benefits for early adopters of AI for purchase recommendations of high-cost items. 

The U.S. music industry is an economic staple generating an estimated $7.7 billion in retail revenue in 2016, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The year 2016 also marked the first time that music industry revenue was generated primarily from “streaming music platforms.”

Expert systems and machine learning are two ends of a spectrum working to solve similar problems quite differently. One one hand you have if-then scenarios and a logical approach, and on the other you have vast neural networks and a big data approach. Some companies exist to try and bridge the gap between the if-then rule systems and the massive piles of data. They hope to find a middle ground of sorts, one that mitigates their individual disadvantages. One such company is Montreal’s fuzzy.ai.