Good day. Most retailers were forced to shift gears during the Covid-19 pandemic, amid store closures and a massive spike in e-commerce. By pushing more services online and into the cloud, while accelerating efforts to digitize operations across the board, many sellers have opened a rich, wide-ranging pipeline of sales, product searches and other customer data – the fuel that drives artificial intelligence models. 

Levi Strauss & Co. has built up a massive data repository in Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, using the cache to expand its use of AI in critical business areas, such as pricing, WSJ Pro AI’s John McCormick writes. It is also pumping in external data, derived from public and private sources, that track consumer buying patterns and behaviors, weather and climate forecasts, economic trends and more.

Katia Walsh, Levi’s chief strategy and AI officer, tells Mr. McCormick that applying machine learning and automation to the data has helped the company enhance personalization of consumer marketing, make informed pricing decisions, predict demand and optimize fulfillment, all of which have helped the business. For Levi’s, it sounds like AI is proving to be a good fit.

Levi Strauss & CO. credits its use of AI-powered pricing and shipping tools, which tap a massive data repository of inventory and sales figures, for boosting revenue growth and improving its margins, WSJ’s John McCormick reports.

Getting personal. The application of machine learning and automation to the data has helped the company enhance personalization of consumer marketing, make informed pricing decisions, predict demand and optimize fulfillment, all of which have helped the business, says Katia Walsh, Levi’s chief strategy and AI officer.

Trend spotting. The software tools enable to apparel maker to spot such trends it might otherwise miss, Ms. Walsh says, hidden in sprawling data from online, as well as some 50,000 retail locations in more than 110 countries.

China’s expanding grip on data about the world’s cargo flows is sparking concern in Washington and among industry officials that Beijing could exploit its logistics information for commercial or strategic advantage, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Numbers to crunch. Control over the flow of goods and information about them gives Beijing privileged insight into world commerce and potentially the means to influence it, say cargo-industry officials.

Chinese AI giant SenseTime Group Inc. filed revised documents for a Hong Kong initial public offering and said it still plans to list before the end of the year, after the U.S. government moved to restrict American investors from buying its stock. (The Wall Street Journal) 

Stay on target. SenseTime Monday said it still aims to raise the equivalent of up to $767 million, with a maximum valuation of $17 billion—unchanged from its original offering plan. The company’s shares will start trading on Dec. 30.

Blacklisted. On Dec. 10, the day that the company was originally poised to price its IPO, the U.S. Treasury Department placed SenseTime on a list of companies that it said support China’s military, preventing American investors from buying the company’s stock.

Facial recognition. The U.S. said a SenseTime subsidiary’s facial-recognition technology was used in the Chinese government’s efforts to identify and suppress mainly Muslim ethnic minorities in western China.

There are steps that cities, states, companies and the federal government can take to make sure urban areas get a bigger piece of the emerging AI economy–aka “the next big thing”, Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at the Brookings Institution, tells The Wall Street Journal. Right now, Mr. Muro says, roughly 50% of the nation’s AI research and development is concentrated in just 15 “superstar” cities. Here are a few of the proposals Mr. Muro offers for changing that:

• City leaders and local business networks need to recognize AI’s importance and explore it as a potential economic-development opportunity.
• The federal government can and should play a role in broadening the nation’s AI map by providing more funding for AI research in new regions and different universities, with more initiatives like the National Science Foundation’s AI Research Institutes program.
• Washington could go even further by creating more regional institutes and doubling nondefense AI research-and-development spending annually, as suggested by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence last spring.
• The public sector needs to invest heavily to improve STEM education and provide thousands of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in fields critical to AI.
• There needs to be more public-sector grants to regions for stimulating the rise of local AI-innovation clusters.

Nauticus to go public in SPAC merger. Nauticus Robotics Inc., which develops robots and AI software to human-operated deepsea ships, says it is merging with special-purpose acquisition company CleanTech Acquisition Corp. in a deal that would take the ocean-task-automation firm public at a valuation of about $560 million, company officials said. (The Wall Street Journal)

Xerox taps Oracle Cloud. Xerox Holdings Corp. has struck a multiyear deal with Oracle Corp., which will provide cloud-computing infrastructure and software for use by ventures developed in Xerox’s in-house business incubator, including AI and other emerging tech startups, as the company looks for new revenue streams beyond its flagship printers and copiers. (The Wall Street Journal) 

Biotech startup Verge Genomics raises $98 Million. San Francisco-based Verge Analytics Inc., which does business as Verge Genomics, has raised $98 million in new venture capital to use AI and human genetics to uncover treatments for Parkinson’s and other neurologic diseases. (The Wall Street Journal) 

More gains in detecting dementia risks. University of Exeter researchers say an AI system trained on data from more than 15,000 U.S. patients is able to predict the onset of dementia within two years of a test with a 92% accuracy rate by spotting hard-to-detect statistical patterns. (The Daily News)

GM’s driverless car chief steps down. Dan Ammann, chief executive of General Motors Co.’s majority-owned Cruise self-driving car subsidiary, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities,” a GM spokesperson said. (Reuters) 
  
Farm equipment maker backs AI startup. AGCO Corp. says it has purchased a nearly 3% equity stake in Greeneye Technology, an Israel-based company specializing in AI-driven spraying equipment designed to reduce the use of herbicide. (Farm Equipment News) 

Intel to expand in Malaysia. Semiconductor giant Intel Corp. says it plans to invest more than $7 billion to expand its chipmaking operation in Malaysia, a move aimed at diversifying its supply chains in the face of a global chip shortage. (The Associated Press)

Algorithm learns Finnish. University of Helsinki researchers say they have taught an AI-powered system to be fluent in Finnish, which includes 23 subdialects and tends to trip up standard online translation tools. (The Helsinki Times) 
 
Firms to adopt AI bias safeguards. The Data & Trust Appliance Group, a nonprofit AI watchdog, says at least 14 large companies, together employing more than 3.5 million workers, have committed to adopting safeguards aimed at preventing algorithmic bias in recruiting, pay and employee development. (Black Enterprise) 

Oracle Corp. on Monday announced its largest deal ever, a roughly $28.3 billion purchase of electronic-medical-records company Cerner Corp. that vaults the business-software giant deeper into healthcare technology. (The Wall Street Journal)

McDonald’s Corp. said it will sell Dynamic Yield Ltd., a digital startup it acquired nearly three years ago in a bid to boost sales at drive-throughs and digital kiosks. (The Wall Street Journal)

Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Inc. and the world’s richest person, said he will pay more than $11 billion in taxes this year, making the disclosure in a tweet without offering additional details. (The Wall Street Journal) 

Nikola Corp. has agreed to pay $125 million to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to settle an investigation into allegedly misleading statements made by its founder and former executive chairman. (The Wall Street Journal)

Write to Enterprise Technology Editor Steven Rosenbush and Pro AI newsletter author Angus Loten.

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