Retailers are looking for technology solutions that can meet a particular need, whether it’s improving the customer experience, enhancing productivity or increasing revenue. I was excited to see some of the latest entries in the field in January at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention.

Retailers, vendors and industry experts at the event demonstrated an array of solutions and shared their perspectives on how technology will affect the industry this year. Here are four takeaways from Retail’s Big Show.

Today, we’re in the age of usage-based insurance. With modern automobile technology and new data-gathering methods, insurance companies can answer many questions about drivers: How fast does a person accelerate? How hard does he brake? What time of day does she typically drive? Using AI and data analytics, insurance carriers can correlate this data with the likelihood of a driver filing a claim, leading to personalized pricing, safe-driver discounts and more.

Practically the entire retail industry may be using AI by the end of 2020. And yet, AI is still in its infancy in most deployments, with many retailers uncertain about exactly how the technology can improve their businesses.

That’s why I’m looking forward to a number of AI-focused sessions at this year’s annual convention of the National Retail Federation.

The technologies used to create deepfake media — artificial audio, images and video generated by deep learning neural networks — have advanced significantly in the last two years. Many security experts have warned of the potential impact this false media could have on upcoming elections. Some researchers have begun to analyze the threats posed to…

By next year, over half of midsized and large enterprises will be using chatbots, Gartner predicts. It’s easy to see why: Chatbots leverage advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), and benefit from the fact that roughly 40 percent of all customer questions are about the same things. Those are two reasons…

Artificial intelligence is the hottest technology trend of this decade, and it’s appearing in a wide variety of applications. From approving mortgage applications to identifying potential customers, AI allows organizations to improve their effectiveness, increase their productivity and control costs. It’s no surprise that AI tools and techniques have also found their way into the…