How to enhance a retail website with AI

David Smith — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 18:08:53 +0000

I had a great time last week presenting for Global AI Community: On Virtual Tour, a continuous 30-hour series of online presentations on applications of AI from around the globe.

My talk, Using Pre-Built AI to Solve Business Challenges was all about how developers can add AI capabilities to applications, even without in-depth knowledge of building AI models, using only APIs provided by Azure Cognitive Services. In the talk, I provide and end-to-end example of adding a shop-by-photo feature to the storefront for a hardware retailer's website, and using reinforcement learning to dynamically select the featured departments for engagement.

I also spent several minutes explaining the inner workings of computer vision systems, and how convolutional neural networks work. Even if you don't have to use deep learning directly, I think it's important to at least have a sense of what's going on under the hood, so you can know how things can go wrong, and how to fix things if they do.

We've also provided a complete collection of Resources related to the talk, including all of the slides, demo scripts, data, and even a single-click Deploy to Azure button to provision a working version of the AI-enabled website. You can explore the GitHub repository here, and if you have any feedback, GitHub issues are welcome!

DEV Community: David Smith

How to enhance a retail website with AI