Amazon Go and Starbucks Pick Up stores in New York City offer frictionless buying. Walk in, take what you want and go – you pay via a full-skeletal body scan + storewide AI doing mass data captures + a data match to your account. Amazon (now being sued) then shares what they learned with Starbucks.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.