ai eCommerce News - July 23

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These Founders Turned An MIT Class Project Into A Leading Analytics Company

“Identifying relationships between consumer behavioral attributes and product attributes to that minute level allows us to give our customers a huge and immediate impact. One of our customers saw a $125 million increase in annual revenues. Another saw a 30% increase in revenues in the first month after implementing our product.”

AI will be in almost every new software by 2020

“ ‘As AI accelerates up the Hype Cycle, many software providers are looking to stake their claim in the biggest gold rush in recent years,’ said Jim Hare, research VP at Gartner. ‘AI offers exciting possibilities, but unfortunately, most vendors are focused on the goal of simply building and marketing an AI-based product rather than first identifying needs, potential uses and the business value to customers,’ said Hare.

To successfully exploit the AI opportunity, technology providers need to understand how to respond to three key issues.”

How chatbots are helping ecommerce evolve

“There are many other chatbots that stand out from the rest. FedEx’s new Alexa app lets users track packages without having to type anything. Mitsuku, on the other hand, is the current winner of the Loebner Prize. It is hailed as the most humanlike AI bot since it passed the Turing test with flying colors. We should also mention RightClick, an innovative chatbot that creates websites based on general questions such as ‘What industry you belong to.’”

ai eCommerce News - July 11

Marketers Value, Misunderstand AI

According to the Emarsys study, another clear majority of retail and e-commerce firms polled — three out of five — said they plan to implement AI marketing technologies within the next year, and 78 percent said they plan to spend at least five percent more on AI marketing technologies within that time frame compared to years past.

However, relatively few retail organizations (11 percent) fall under the category of AI “experts,” according to the study, strategically and organizationally prepared to leverage the technology. A majority — 63 percent — said it will take more than three years to fully leverage AI marketing.

How Walmart uses AI to serve 140 million customers a week

Last quarter, Walmart’s ecommerce revenue rose 63 percent year over year, as the company’s online operations, coupled with the purchase of Amazon-rival Jet.com last summer, propelled its digital sales.

Ex-Amazonians Launch eCommerce Marketing & Analytics Platform - OnlineSales.ai

OnlineSales.ai aims at becoming retailer's operating system for user acquisition, retention & monetization. At its core, the platform gathers & mines billions of data points to build product catalog intelligence, user personas and dynamics of retail economics. This system intelligence is combined with technology automation on OnlineSales platform that now hosts connected apps across marketing, user experience and data technologies - all on a single platform.

Baidu Buys Human Machine Interaction Tech Company KITT.AI For Undisclosed Sum

In a blog post, KITT.AI said that over the past two years it has developed three products: Snowboy, NLU and chatbot engine ChatFlow. As of July, it has powered more than 12,000 developers on the Snowboy platform, who in turn created the biggest hotword library in the world with 9,000 unique hotwords in 15 major languages and has turned ChatFlow into a enterprise level software and has been looking at ways to monetize its chatbot platform.

ai eCommerce News - June 30

AI/BOT: Is AI The Key To Retail’s Survival?

“Forty-five percent of retailers are planning to use AI in the next few years, according to the latest research from Boston Retail Partners. This AI integration will be done through the use of chatbots or digital assistants and primarily used for customer enhancement services.

•    Optimizing the customer experience — 55 percent

•    Increasing customer loyalty — 50 percent

•    Improving mobile shopping experience — 45 percent

•    Creating a seamless experience across channels — 42 percent

•    Enhancing personalized service/sales assistance — 32 percent

•    Providing personalized promotions, recommendations and/or offerings — 24 percent”

Alibaba is using AI to create tailor-made shopping experiences

“While it is still early days for AI technology, Alibaba has made no secret of its ambitions in the space. However, Alibaba faces competition from its rival Chinese internet companies Baidu and Tencent, both of which are investing heavily in AI.

Baidu, which is in the process of becoming an AI-first company, this year announced a major breakthrough in technology development after successfully teaching a virtual agent to learn a language from scratch. The move is viewed as a significant step towards teaching machines to learn like humans.

Last month, Tencent announced it would open a second AI lab, basing its new centre in Seattle, as the firm steps up its research into AI, machine learning and deep learning.”