Two of the autonomous and A-I driven robots are ‘hosting and delivery’ bots and the third is a ‘disinfection’ bot.

The monthly insights show that a sizable share of consumers who shopped with a regional grocer also shopped with a mass merchant retailer in the same month. In August 2021, the crossover rate was nearly 26%, more than eight percentage points higher compared to August 2019. Why is this important to know?

Warehouse operators and logistics companies face a critical struggle to meet the ever-increasing consumer demands that far outweigh anything that could be met with human manpower alone.

Dark stores look like mini warehouses located closer to customers than the conventional fulfilment centres of online retailers, but they are much more than just storage places. Digitisation and automation are their key pillars.

Contactless commerce is being enabled by a wide range of new technologies, including machine learning, robotics, computer vision, sensors, big data analytics, augmented reality, and computer-aided holography. It is set to transform all elements of the customer experience, from product comparison to selection to checkout.

Online sales have accounted for more than 10% of total weekly grocery spending by shoppers in the United States throughout 2021, compared with less than 2% before the start of the pandemic.

Dark stores are stores that used to be for in-person shopping, but have now been converted into micro fulfilment centres. These stores were once open to the public as a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Now, they’re closed to the public and are used by staff to fulfil online orders. As more online grocery orders are processed, dark stores continue to trend and more are being purposely built rather than being converted stores.

The essence of digital transformation is to become a data-driven organization, ensuring that key decisions, actions, and processes are strongly influenced by data-driven insights, rather than by human intuition. In other words, you will only transform when you have managed to change how people behave, and how things are done in your organization.

“Everybody loves pizza.” It’s that simple observation that led former SpaceX engineer Benson Tsai on a new mission: to improve pizza for everyone.

Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expensive—and very different from human learning. A child often needs to see just a few examples of an object, or even only one, before being able to recognize it for life.