Artificial Intelligence

Upscale brands are grabbing the attention of holiday procrastinators.   Three in 10 shoppers are still scrambling to finish holiday shopping, according to the National Retail Federation, and many are jumping online in search of their perfect, albeit “last minute” holiday gifts.   

7-Eleven has completed 77 autonomous drone deliveries to customer homes in the United States.   Through its collaboration with Flirtey, a service that supports commercial drone deliveries to customer homes in the United States, the convenience store chain conducted regular weekend deliveries to mobile shoppers during November. A dozen select shoppers used a custom app to place orders, which were fulfilled from a dedicated 7-Eleven store, the company said.  

For the past five years, retailers and millennials have been in a very one-sided relationship.    Big budgets were spent to capture and engage with this highly sought-after group of consumers through intelligent advertising, a carefully curated social media presence, and viral marketing campaigns. And in true millennial fashion, the response was indifferent.    But retailers, it’s no longer all about millennials.   

With most of the business community absorbed in the quadrennial D.C. parlor game of parsing cabinet picks and what they might mean for their industry's agenda going forward, little attention has been paid to what lies ahead for the labor community.  

Amazon Prime is transitioning mobile commerce to the big screen — the television screen, that is.   A new Apple TV application called “Amazon App: Browse, Search and Shop” enables Prime members to browse, search and buy products on Amazon’s site directly through Apple TV, Techcrunch.com reported.   

Rent-A-Center has appointed Lety Nettles to fill the newly created position of VP of digital integration.   Most recently she served as a technology executive designing integration framework and change practices for Walmart.      

For a long time, social wasn’t a closed-loop system; but with the shift of e-commerce to mobile-first, brands can now use the data and features of social media to create hyper-personalized connections that get users to buy. And as a result, retailers can better track in-channel purchases, as well as multi-touch attribution.