AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

In early 2017, Amazon unveiled a new application of AI outside its online domain: Amazon Go, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered grocery where there are no cashiers and checkout lines. Shoppers activate the store’s smartphone app upon entering the store, grab the items they need, and leave through the same “gates” they enter without pausing to pull out a credit card or cash. Their Amazon account is automatically charged for what they take.

Episode summary: In this episode of AI in Industry, we speak with Khalifeh Al Jadda, Lead Data Scientist at CareerBuilder, about the applications of machine learning in improving a user’s search experience.

Just as chatbots are being created for consumers in the hospitality and fast-food industries, technology companies are also serving those restaurants that wish to take advantage of this emerging technology to better their customer service and maximize their productivity—and profitability.

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.

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.

This year has been marked by an increase in artificial intelligence interest from new business sectors. Just one years ago, we hardly had any visitors or subscribers from the food services sector - and this year we have a strong interest from food processing and food services leaders, which has come as a surprise.

After a presentation at the Shop!Association’s national conference late last year, I had plenty of time to chat with retail business people about their own ideas about AI’s uses, and the trends that matter most. This prompted me to gather my thoughts and combine the ideas of retailers with the AI-in-retail research we’ve done, and put together a piece to help retail vendors make sense of the next 2-3 years of AI’s influence in retail.