Artificial Intelligence

Curt Garner, who first announced he would leave his current role as CIO of Starbucks Corp. in June, has revealed his next professional stop.

Garner will join Chipotle Mexican Grill as CIO effective Nov. 23, and become the company’s first executive with that title. Chipotle appears to want to duplicate some of the IT-related success Starbucks has had in areas such as store operations and customer experience.

Brick-and-mortar analytics provider RetailNext Inc. is expanding into the marketing space.

RetailNext has acquired Pikato, http://www.pikato.com/ a Chicago-based company whose cloud-based software enables personal, one-to-one mobile customer interactions.

Instacart is taking a step beyond partnering with specific retailers to provide same-day grocery deliveries.

The online delivery platform is partnering with food-focused social network Allrecipes to deliver fresh ingredients from Allrecipes’ highest-rated, most popular recipes on-demand. With the click of a button, consumers can add all necessary ingredients from Allrecipes meals and have them delivered straight to their doorstep in as little as one hour.

No matter how good a retailer’s seamless experience is, without the correct product it falls apart.

Sears Holding Corp. is trying to ensure the right products are picked for the right customers with new Honeywell Vocollect voice-directed picking solutions. The retailer is working with Speech Interface Design (SID) to implement the solutions in two of its regional specialty distribution centers (RSCs) and its largest retail distribution center (RDC) in the coming months.

Amazon.com now allows sellers to promote products with keyword targeted ads and cloud-based e-commerce solutions provider ChannelAdvisor is ready to help sellers take advantage of the sponsored products feature.

ChannelAdvisor Corp. announced its support Monday for Amazon’s Advertising API (application programming interface), becoming the first e-commerce solution provider to offer this support.

Irvine Company is making history as the first major real estate company in the world to plan portfolio-wide use of energy storage.

The Irvine Company on Monday announced an initiative to become the world's first major real estate company to create a fleet of hybrid-electric buildings powered by state-of-the-art energy storage systems from Tesla Energy.

The company recently signed a memorandum of understanding for the ground-breaking environmental initiative with San Francisco-based Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS).

The world’s largest social network is testing new e-commerce eatures, including a dedicated shopping section, Re/code reported. Facebook’s push comes as other social sites, including Twitter, are exploring social shopping.

If you were to read an article about leaders in savvy energy and sustainability management programs and initiatives, who do you think that would be? Government? Manufacturing? Actually, it’s the retail industry, which has been a leader in energy efficiency investments since 2008.