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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Walmart Battles Amazon with Jetblack

Mentioned previously here, back to product selection curation.  Would be a good place to model the process of consumer interaction with needs.  The journey involved could produce places for useful interaction.   A Concierge model?  Note also the use of human agents who are training an AI.

Walmart Builds a Secret Weapon to Battle Amazon for Retail's Future 
In The Wall Street Journal   By Sarah Nassauer

Last summer, Walmart launched Jetblack, a personal-shopping company targeted at mothers and designed to compete with Amazon. Users pay $600 a year to order anything by text message except for fresh food. The orders go to Jetblack headquarters where dozens of agents field the requests. Then, couriers fetch the items and bring them back to a delivery hub, where they are packaged and hand delivered, usually the same day. Walmart is using Jetblack's human agents to train an artificial intelligence system that could someday power an automated personal-shopping service. In addition, Jetblack's software is learning to make agents more efficient, suggesting language to use for text interaction. Over time, the company aims to use these interactions to train the computer algorithms to learn to respond to requests with human-like nuance but with machine efficiency. .... "

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