AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

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.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to fall into the general pit of buzzword-vagueness. Artificial intelligence (AI) often falls into the same trap, particularly with the advent of new terms such as "machine learning," "deep learning," "genetic algorithms," and more.

Episode Summary: Ever had the perfect book recommended to you by Amazon or gave a pleasantly-surprised thumbs up for a song selected for you by Pandora? Both services are powered by recommendation engines, which are gaining steam int he commercial space. In this episode, we speak with Entrepreneur Raefer Gabriel, who works for Delvv on the commercial applications of recommendation engines. We talk about how this technology works, and how it comes to learn from reviews, ratings, and consumer interactions. Gabriel also gives perspective on how these engines might be enhanced and applied in the future, a good topic for those of you in the startup world.

"Machine learning" is a term that's heard more often in startup and big data circles than "artificial intelligence", and interestingly enough, Google Trends confirms what's already heard through the technological grapevine: