AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

Episode Summary: We've interviewed a number of guests on Emerj, but very few who have had a serious part of their career in selling automobiles. But Michael Perry did just that for 5 years before founding Kit, his third startup - an AI-powered Virtual Employee that works in marketing for small businesses and was acquired by Shopify in April 2016. In this episode, Perry speaks about how Kit and Shopify leverage AI on a daily basis, and how a “non-tech” person with no formal background in AI or data science can build a team for an AI project.

Expertise: Data science and economics

Brief Recognition: Elena Grewal leads a team of data scientists responsible for the user’s online and offline travel experience at Airbnb. Her team partners with the product team to understand and optimize all parts of the product, using experimentation and machine learning in a wide variety of contexts. Prior to Airbnb, Elena was a doctoral candidate in the Economics of Education program at the Stanford University School of Education. She received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, with distinction, from Yale University, and a Masters degree in Economics at Stanford University. She was also the recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.

Episode Summary: At Facebook headquarters, I learned there are 1 billion active users every month. In a more recent interview at eBay headquarters in San Jose, l learned that the well-known digital store has over 1 billion products for sale. eBay is, without a doubt, the world’s largest marketplace, and there’s enough incoming data to keep a large team of data scientists busy for years. I speak with Zoher Karu, eBay’s chief data officer, about how eBay leverages data and machine learning to create a better experience for its customers and also their sellers, shedding light on important lessons for anyone looking to sell a product online.

It's been over a month since our last major artificial intelligence consensus (which covered 33 AI researcher perspectives on the 20-year risks of AI), and we decided that this time around, we'd speak with AI executives directly about the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning in consumer tech.
The media is awash with buzz-stories about autonomous vehicles, speech recognition, robotics, and more, but it seems difficult to glean a perspective on which consumer AI tech trends are likely to make the biggest impact in the coming 5 years.
While there's certainly no crystal ball, our preference as a market research firm is to combine research and news analysis with a strong consensus from dozens of experts in the field. When it comes to AI for consumer tech, we decided to ask executives and founders of artificial intelligence companies what they believe to be the most important AI consumer tech trends in the next half decade.
You can see a full list of the answers to our "AI Consumer Tech Trends" below in our large infographic.

Episode Summary: While we’ve featured quite a few companies that use and implement AI systems, we’ve more rarely gone behind the scenes with companies or consultants providing AI-related services to companies. In this week’s episode, we talk with Machine Learning Consultant Charles Martin, a data scientist and machine learning expert who has done freelance consulting on machine learning systems at companies including eBay, GoDaddy, and Aardvark. In this interview, Charles talks about the areas in AI that he believes are ripe for implementation in a business context, and where he sees businesses getting AI ‘wrong’ before getting to the hard work of implementing systems that work for them.

Episode Summary: This week's in-person interview is with Dr. Adam Coates, who spent 12 years at Stanford studying artificial intelligence before accepting his current position of Director of Baidu's Silicon-Valley based artificial intelligence lab. We speak about his ideas around consumer artificial intelligence applications and impact and what he's excited about, as well as what he thinks may be more 'hype' than reality. He gives a an idea about applications that Baidu is working, to potentially influence billions of mobile and computer users worldwide. If you're interested in the developments of speech recognition and natural language processing, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

In the first week of 2016, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post that his goal for the year was to “build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work.” He clarified, "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.” Zuckerberg went on to describe his plan to explore presently available smart home technologies, implement them into his home, and train the system to coordinate with his family life and workaday. (Interestingly, Zuckerberg’s AI may utilize a number of devices, but he refers to the technology as a singular system, implying that he intends to develop a unified AI to oversee the many individual devices.)

How emotions influence consumer buying habits has long intrigued and evaded the business sector. Face recognition technology, once limited to security and surveillance systems, has made it possible to gauge more specific metrics to allow companies to predict consumer behavior and accelerate revenue growth.