Retail

In a new report, business leaders share their machine-learning successes and struggles. Many businesses plan to increase their use of machine learning, but their efforts so far don’t always yield the results they seek.

FamilyMart, a chain of Japanese convenience stores, plans to employ robots to fill shelves with beverage bottles at 300 locations.

AI startups are creating high value across a wide variety of industries. CB Insights, which tracks tech startups, published the latest edition of the AI 100, its annual list of 100 notable AI startups.

With prices on the rise, an app analyzes user data to deliver cash back on retail purchases. Upside, a startup based in Washington, D.C., works with gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants to offer personalized discounts to consumers.

Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar clothing store is getting ready to deliver automated outfit recommendations. The ecommerce giant announced plans to open a flagship Amazon Style location at a Los Angeles-area mall this year.

Until recently, big data processing has been dominated by batch systems like MapReduce and Spark, which allow us to periodically process a large amount of data very efficiently.

Walmart aims to deliver goods via self-driving vehicles this year.What’s new: The retail giant will test autonomous delivery in three U.S. cities. Cars built by Ford and piloted by Argo AI will ferry merchandise

Shoppers at Amazon’s newest grocery store can skip the checkout line. Amazon opened its first full-scale supermarket that monitors which items customers place in their cart and charges them automatically when they leave. It calls the system Just Walk Out.

AI startups continue to roared ahead, global pandemic or no. Tech industry analyst CB Insights published its fifth annual list of the 100 most promising private AI companies.

Computer vision is helping people resell their used designer handbags. Rebag, a resale company for luxury handbags, watches, and jewelry, launched Clair AI, an app that automatically appraises second-hand bags from brands like Gucci, Hermes, and Prada.

Covid-19 wreaked havoc with models that predict retail sales — but China’s biggest annual e-commerce event showed that they’re back in business.

Marketers are using computer vision to parse customers by skin color and other perceived racial characteristics. A number of companies are pitching race classification as a way for businesses to understand the buying habits of different groups.

A major retailer’s AI-powered surveillance program apparently targeted poor people and minorities. Rite-Aid, a U.S.-based pharmacy chain, installed face recognition systems in many of its New York and Los Angeles stores.

Need a wardrobe upgrade? You could ask the fashion mavens at Netflix’s Queer Eye — or you could use a new neural network. Researchers at Amazon propose Category-based Subspace Attention Network (CSA-Net) to predict and retrieve compatible garments and accessories that complement one another.

Why search for “a cotton dress shirt with button-down collar, breast pockets, barrel cuffs, scooped hem, and tortoise shell buttons in grey” when a photo and the words “that shirt, but grey” will do the trick? A new network understands the image-text combo.