Artificial Intelligence

Hoffman Estates, Ill. – Sears is offering a new service called Get Advice to members of its Shop Your Way omni-channel loyalty program. Shop Your Way members can post online requests for advice on shopping decisions and receive answers from both Sears associates and other loyalty members.

In addition to posting answers, members can also vote on answers they think are the most helpful. The service is designed to generate answers within minutes and currently is only open Shop Your Way members shopping at Sears and not Kmart.

Canadian Tire plans to manufacture digital innovation at a new “App Factory,” that is part of the retailer’s recently open Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre.

Located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the 28,000-sq.-ft.- facility serves as the core digital hub for the Canadian Tire family of companies and a store network of roughly 1,700 locations. The center will possess 20 times more computing power and 10 times more network bandwidth than the company’s existing technology infrastructure.

Waconia, Minn. - Mackenthun's Fine Foods is rolling out a suite of nutrition tools through a partnership with ShopWell, a personalized nutrition app. Shoppers in Mackenthun's will be able to learn about the health benefits of foods, find healthier alternatives for their nutrition goals, and avoid allergens.

Armonk, N.Y. -- IBM said Tuesday that its Watson unit has invested in Fluid, a digital commerce firm, to develop personalized shopping applications using IBM’s cognitive computing tools.

Kroger has unveiled a bold initiative to digitize every aspect of its physical store in an effort to measure a breadth of operational metrics to enhance the shopper experience.

New York – Nine basic attack patterns that vary from industry to industry are the source of 92% of the 100,000 security incidents analyzed by Verizon since 2004.

Back in October, I commemorated my six-month anniversary as technology editor of Chain Store Age with a column looking at how retail IT has been disrupted in recent years. Now that I have a full year under my belt, I thought it would be interesting to look at how customer expectations of retail IT have been disrupted in recent years (and don’t worry, there will be no 18-month anniversary piece). Three paradigm-shifting changes in how retailers must now engage with customers using technology stand out.

Every Man is an Island

Whole Foods is experimenting with transforming food waste generated at stores into organic fertilizer by using a piece of equipment called the WISErg Harvester.

The Harvester is a piece of equipment with a footprint about the size of a typical pallet that promises to change the way retailers dispose of food waste. The Harvester unit ingests food scraps from overripe produce and unsold prepared foods and converts them into a liquid that can be made into an organic fertilizer.