This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows: 0:00 Introduction 2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation 4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene 7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development 10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving 12:18 Navigate on Autopilot 13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy 17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot 20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance) 23:13 Driver monitoring 24:30 Operational design domain 26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning 28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence 30:10 Physics view of love 31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a very geeky interview with Elon Musk on autopilot and the future of self-driving cars. Thoughtful, structured and informative it brings to light a very strong point: the value of a car lies in its capacity to self drive and every Tesla has this feature already builtin. Basically it means that cars will soon cross the threshold of autonomy, opening a whole new era for personal transportation. But more importantly I believe for businesses that rely on delivery logistics: ecommerce of course but also groceries, medical supplies, etc.
At the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas this week, billed as the world’s largest conference for retail and e-commerce innovation, fashion tech startup Heuritech launched the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) service that can predict fashion trends based on the analysis of millions of images shared every day on social media.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: retailers do not need to worry about AI too much: all product vendors will include AI into their products. However retailers need to start collecting and cleanup their data because without it AI will not deliver expected results.
WHY IT MATTERS: retailers do not need to worry about AI too much: all product vendors will include AI into their products. However retailers need to start collecting and cleanup their data because without it AI will not deliver expected results.
Average open rates are between 15% and 25% range, depending on industry, so for the 75% to 85% of recipients who do not open any given email they receive, the subject line IS the email. The ultimate email marketing guide is free to discover the trends that will impact email marketing in 2019.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a recent survey provides numerous insights into email marketing tools and techniques. A great reference with numerous examples, tools and technologies. One highlight of the report are all the tools available that include AI and machine learning technologies to help craft the best content.
Beyond the world of email marketing in the wider world of business, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity and employment has risen to prominence in the last two plus years as more affordable systems have become available from vendors. This has naturally prompted marketers to review the potential marketing applications of AI. To answer this question, in our guide to marketing applications of AI , Smart Insights has reviewed the opportunities and tools for AI across the customer lifecycle. This report highlights the critical trends and techniques that will help you transform your brand-customer relationships using the most powerful channel in your marketing mix: email!
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a recent survey provides numerous insights into email marketing tools and techniques. A great reference with numerous examples, tools and technologies. One highlight of the report is the role that AI plays in the creation and delivery of email campaigns in the coming years.
Automation to lower order assembly costs Hyper local operation to lower last mile costs
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this new solution from takeoff in the US proposes to build a series of automated windowless hyper-local micro-warehouses that automatically prepare grocery orders that you can pick up quickly in your car. Listen to the video for more.
The Albertsons Cos. is embracing robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and save costs on ecommerce fulfillment.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: warehouse automation is a major component of retail ecommerce digital transformation. As more orders go online, the speed and cost of order preparation must be reduced. Amazon has invested heavily in the field buying KIVA robots in 2014. Now other retailers, especially in the grocery field, are also moving from manual picking to automation because they have the volume. In fact, this may be a sign of the future: grocery retailers may become leaders in the digital transformation, moving away from their current position as dead last.
After hinting at the tech-heavy store concept this summer, the big-box club retailer said it will soon open a store that banks on scan-and-go tech.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the technology that 2 years ago was since fiction is now becoming more common grounds. See http://fmcs.digital/?s=amazon+go for other retailers and solutions that will provide a similar solution than Amazon GO.
Ocado's new warehouse has thousands of robots zooming around a grid system to pack groceries. The thousands of robots can process 65,000 orders every week. They communicate on a 4G network to avoid bumping into each other. Is this the future of retail?
Daisy Intelligence is one such artificial intelligence vendor. The Toronto-based company focuses on retail merchandise planning: promotion, pricing and demand forecasting optimization. We spoke with Gary Saarenvirta, CEO of Daisy Intelligence with the intention of finding answers to the following questions: Why might grocery vendors or supermarkets need AI? How can retailers leverage AI for optimizing merchandising decision making?
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the article presents possible use cases for AI in grocery Big Data analysis.
"When you have rising monetization, rising growth and rising data collection, it drives a lot of regulatory scrutiny whether it’s related to data privacy, competition or safety in content."
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is the annual presentation to level-set everyone on the Internet, mobile, ecommerce, cybersecurity, epayment, personalization, etc. She covers everything and shows that digital transformation is in full swing. Just WOW. Again.
The Alexa voice platform and other deep learning projects have made Amazon an AI leader.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: if you are a retailer Amazon is your competitor. How are you going to compete with it if all you do is have a mediocre website, little social media presence, after-thought eCommerce? Well today you have to include AI in the mix because otherwise all your other efforts will be useless.
Here's how the system works. Its proprietary AI system is built, in part, with TensorFlow, Google's open-source AI kit. The lab has 20 cameras overhead, which are used to track people and products. Fisher says it first trains the AI on products with a two-minute long video capturing event they call the "SKU-dance." Once an item is filmed from every possible angle, the AI will be able to identify it in the future.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this startup is developing an AI system to replace checkout registers and enable any store to become like an Amazon GO, the concept store from Amazon showcased in December 2016. Retails stores will transform in the near future with technologies such as this one but also others such as location beacons, new floor plans, etc. More on Amazon GO:
Picking stuff up and putting it away sounds like child's play, but to online retailer Amazon.com, it is a high-tech, high-stakes game. This year, contestants competed in timed stowing and picking operations -- simple enough for humans yet nearly impossible for robots to perform reliably. For stowing, each robot was rated on how efficiently it could pick up items and put them on a shelf. In the picking phase, the robots had to put specified items into the proper boxes. The top eight advanced to the final round.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: robots will soon replace humans in Amazon warehouses, as there are already 45000 kiva robots and growing. Moreover, the tasks that robots can perform is expanding and Amazon is pushing the limits of what's possible with this annual robotics challenge.
Majority of websites are generic, one-size-fits-all, and unvarying. And email isn’t much better with manual input, static cadences, and fixed content. Marketers and audiences deserve better, though. As big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and deep learning become larger influences and more attainable, now is the time for digital marketers to seize upon the potential these technologies offer. Brands can now build custom on-site and email experiences for individuals that are automated and personalized by incorporating predictive modeling, journey mapping, and algorithms.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS
Learn from the best online retailers on the best ways to personalize your website and ecommerce.
The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Key takeaways:
Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.
China remains a fascinating market, with huge growth in mobile services and payments and services like on-demand bike sharing. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's China slides.)
While internet growth is slowing globally, that’s not the case in India, the fastest growing large economy. The number of internet users in India grew more than 28 percent in 2016. That’s only 27 percent online penetration, which means there’s lots of room for internet usership to grow. Mobile internet usage is growing as the cost of bandwidth declines. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's India slides.)
In the U.S. in 2016, 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. Those companies include tech titans Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
This is an annual bag of goodies.
Highlight #1: retail stores are closing at record pace while Amazon opens stores. This is such a huge trend because it transforms stores from a mini-warehouse into something else: a destination for experience, service, and training. Think Apple store with the highest sales per square foot, genius bar, classes and a showroom. Amazon has pushed its Amazon GO, no lines, no registers concept and it is rolling it out slowly. This is just the beginning...
As B2B ecommerce matures and evolves, we’re beginning to see businesses transition beyond traditional commerce channels (online and offline). One area where we’ll see rapid innovation is in “browserless” commerce, which is quite simply removing the traditional browser interface from a range of purchasing / service scenarios.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
It is true that Internet permeates every single fiber of the digital strategies and we often forget to think outside the box. In this case, how can we perform eCommerce transactions without the use of a browser? AI, internet of things, chatbots are great ways to explore the opportunities.
The Artificial Intelligence Revolution isn’t around the corner—it’s here. A common remark is that as soon as some new form of AI is possible, it’s no longer AI, it’s just what computers “do”. And while we won’t notice most of AI’s effects in our world, there will be visible signs as digital technology is infused with AI. Through the lens of commerce, it’s easier to see AI’s deep effects as progress continues. Here are a few examples.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Very proud to share an article I recently co-authored on CloudRaker blog with Simon Hudson. It sheds lights into the potential impacts that AI will have on retail stores.
As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?
Farid Mheir's insight:
Amazing insights into the mobile industry state and trends.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Andreessen Horowitz, and Benedict Evans in particular, have been known to spot trends long before everyone else. Here again, it appears they are making predictions about retailing - following in the steps of the print industry when Internet came along. Not certain I agree about the parallel but I agree that mobile and AI and other technologies will impact and transform the retail world in the near future. However, as opposed to the print media, retailers often sell physical goods that cannot, for now, be 3D printed at home. So either you pick them up in the store or get it delivered by FedEx or a drone.
That being said, retail stores are bound to transform in showrooms and service centers as I wrote about in the past. And this is a major shift that many will fail to take.
Subscription e-commerce uses AI to offer personalized, low cost, convenient products. It’s working.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Simple and efficient, I wonder why this concept has not caught on with grocery as my tastes and what I buy is often way more predictable than clothing or other items.
Amazon Go is a new kind of store featuring the world’s most advanced shopping technology. No lines, no checkout – just grab and go! Watch the video: amazon.com/go
Farid Mheir's insight:
Take a minute to watch the video. This is the future of retailing.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Amazon has disrupted many industries with its online business. Recently, as other digital leaders have done, Amazon is trying to bring digital revolution in the world to blend our physical and digital experiences - think Google self driving cars, Starbuck mobile phone payment and geofencing app, Apple stores that are more showrooms and help centres than stores because eCommerce is there to fulfill orders to your door, etc.
Amazon has been focussed on grocery for the past 10 years to use this weekly recurring, low cost, high volume shopping trip to the supermarket as its pathway to bring digital into the real world and blend it with online e-commerce.
With Amazon Fresh for examples they have been busy putting trucks on the road to deliver groceries to your door overnight with minimal costs. Why grocery? Because its high volume guarantees that trucks will be on the road everyday in all areas. And once trucks are running around carrying groceries they can also bring other items - books, TVs, etc. - at little or no cost, effectively making FedEx irrelevant or at least giving Amazon huge negotiation power.
Here with Amazon GO, it addresses some of the major pain points of customers in grocery stores: waiting in line at the cash register. As they've done online, Amazon focusses on its customer issues to smash them or make them so irrelevant that they are not issues anymore. See "amazon secret sauce" for insights on this: http://sco.lt/979c4P
Take Amazon Prime for example. It addresses the delivery fee issue: we do not want to have to pay for delivery. So they make it a non issue, providing 2-day delivery for free for an annual fee. Side effect: if you've paid for prime, then you spend up to 5x more at Amazon (300$ annually for average client, 1500$ for prime member), basically becoming a loyal shopper. Wow.
Back to Amazon GO and why it is important. The grocery industry has not seen a major disruption since Costco started top sell grocery in bulk format years ago - grocers ost 10% market share with that new player in the field. But today, grocery stores are the same, the layout is the same, the process is the same than it was 50 years ago. There has been little or no innovation in stores recently (last one may be the barcode in 1970s) but GO shows that there may be a perfect storm of technologies that combine to make physical stores transformation a reality:
1- mobile phones are on every customer back pocket;
2- electronic payment is everywhere, making cash almost irrelevant;
3- loyalty programs and big data allows retailers unprecedented customer knowledge and forecasting trends;
From the concept store video and the Amazon description, all that GO is doing is applying these new technologies on a new problem set: adding and removing items to shopping basket and speeding the checkout process.
Of course, at the end of the day, the winner will not be the grocer with the best technology. It will be the one with the lowest prices and the best selection (best marketing and customer service won't hurt either). On those fronts (price & selection) Amazon GO faces huge headwinds from established grocers that have long standing relationships with suppliers and way more volume than Amazon. But it does not mean Amazon cannot provide customers with a more enjoyable, easy, fast experience - especially to millennials - which may give GO 5% or 10% of the market (the "good" 5% by the way, those that spend more and spend on higher margin items) from established retailers. And this will hurt established grocers like hell.
and the plans for Amazon to open up to 2000 store in the future if GO concept works: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-2000-grocery-stores-10-years-2016-10
Amazon recently came out with another feature of their company called Amazon Fresh. This addition to the company propelled their business into the grocery industry. As a part of this new feature, Amazon incorporated the phrase amazon go. Once again, they promoted this feature via video.
Startups are outfitting retailers with augmented reality, beacons, wearables, and more to bridge the gap between digital and physical shopping.
Farid Mheir's insight:
An inventory of technologies that can be deployed in retail stores.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Retail stores are being transformed by digital technology. Apple stores have shown that retail space today is more than a warehouse where customers fulfill orders. Today's store must also demonstrate products, educate customers and provide customer service. Store must also fulfill orders, although that should preferably be done online. In that context, stores leverage technologies to communicate with their customers, inform them, as well as provide an omni-channel experience.
Choosing the right technology to deploy is a challenge, but my experience has shown that the overall retail store business model must be reviewed to ensure the right content, support and service is made available.
An inventory of technologies that can be deployed in retail stores.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Retail stores are being transformed by digital technology. Apple stores have shown that retail space today is more than a warehouse where customers fulfill orders. Today's store must also demonstrate products, educate customers and provide customer service. Store must also fulfill orders, although that should preferably be done online. In that context, stores leverage technologies to communicate with their customers, inform them, as well as provide an omni-channel experience.
Choosing the right technology to deploy is a challenge, but my experience has shown that the overall retail store business model must be reviewed to ensure the right content, support and service is made available.
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WHY IT MATTERS: this is a very geeky interview with Elon Musk on autopilot and the future of self-driving cars. Thoughtful, structured and informative it brings to light a very strong point: the value of a car lies in its capacity to self drive and every Tesla has this feature already builtin. Basically it means that cars will soon cross the threshold of autonomy, opening a whole new era for personal transportation. But more importantly I believe for businesses that rely on delivery logistics: ecommerce of course but also groceries, medical supplies, etc.