Microsoft incorporated ChatGPT technology with its Power Platform on Monday, allowing users to construct applications with little or no coding, the company’s latest integration of artificial intelligence into its products.

Power Virtual Agent, a chatbot development platform for organizations, can now link to internal company resources to provide weekly report summaries and consumer queries, reported Reuters.

From Alphabet to Baidu, major technology companies are accelerating the integration of generative AI – technology that has gained notoriety for its capacity to generate human-like text responses to questions – into their businesses.

So far, the business has revealed AI enhancements for its widely used Windows operating system and search engine Bing, but not for its Office productivity suite, which includes Word and Excel.

The uncertainty surrounding the U.S. economic outlook dampens prospects for a resurgence in demand for TVs, laptops, and other electronic devices, prompting Best Buy to join peers in providing a timid yearly earnings prediction on Thursday.

According to Reuters, retailers in the United States provided larger discounts than usual during the holiday season to stimulate demand as rising rent and food expenses hammered non-essential spending during the last year.

Best Buy’s comparable sales fell 9.3% in the holiday quarter, slightly more than expected by Wall Street.

The business anticipates a 3% to 6% drop in comparable sales this year. Economists expected a 1.9% drop on average.

“As we enter fiscal 2024, macroeconomic headwinds will likely result in continued volatility, and we are preparing for another down year for the (consumer electronics) industry,” said Chief Executive Officer Corie Barry, according to the report.

Walmart, Target, and other retailers have also offered cautious estimates, raising concerns that the Federal Reserve would boost borrowing costs more to reduce demand.

Before products and merchants can be listed on Google, they must pass stringent safety checks.

“Thanks to the Shopping Graph, our data set of the world’s products and sellers, our systems can quickly review whether a business is legitimate, the products you see are accurate, and their content follows our policies,” stated Google in a blog post.

“This automated vetting process has helped us more efficiently and accurately review a massive amount of products,” said Google.

It said that it stopped over 100 million product offers from being shown in January and disapproved nearly 300,000 accounts for not following its policies.

“For extra reassurance about a merchant, you can look for store badges, which we give to businesses on Google where you may expect a positive shopping experience,” the blog stated.

Google will show a rating for the item and sellers.

In addition to its automated system, Google has staff review merchants and listings.

Target Corp reported an unexpected increase in holiday-quarter sales on Tuesday, owing to increased store visits from bargain-hunting Americans, even as it joined other retailers in issuing a profit warning for 2023 due to an uncertain U.S. economy.

The company’s stock surged 2%, beating quarterly earnings estimates for the first time in a year, reported Reuters.

The discounts helped create a 0.7% increase in customer traffic during Target’s fourth quarter but also contributed to a 3% drop in gross margins.

Retailers like Walmart and Home Depot released conservative yearly estimates this week, citing concerns of a sharp economic downturn in the second half of the year due to increased borrowing costs.

Meanwhile, according to industry figures released on Tuesday, supermarket inflation in the United Kingdom reached 17.1% in the four weeks ending February 19, setting a new record high and giving another blow to customers suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, reported Reuters.

Illustrations in a comic novel made by the artificial intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, according to the letter seen by Reuters from the United States Copyright Office.

The author of “Zarya of the Dawn,” Kris Kashtanova, is entitled to copyright for the parts of the book she authored and arranged but not for the images created by Midjourney, according to the office’s letter dated Tuesday.

The judgment is one of the first by a US court or agency on the breadth of copyright protection for works made by artificial intelligence. It follows the meteoric emergence of generative AI software such as Midjourney, Dall-E, and ChatGPT.

In its letter, the Copyright Office stated that it would reissue its “Zarya of the Dawn” registration to remove images that “are not the work of human composition” and thus cannot be copyrighted, according to the report.

Alibaba’s efforts to reduce costs and China’s relaxation of COVID-19 limitations helped it report better-than-expected quarterly revenue on Thursday.

For its fiscal third quarter through December 31, revenue increased 2% to 247.76 billion yuan ($35.92 billion), exceeding the Refinitiv average estimate of 245.18 billion yuan derived from 23 analysts, reported Reuters.

The e-commerce behemoth has survived China’s poor economy, which only relaxed its three-year zero-COVID policy in December.

U.S. shares of Alibaba were up 1.8% just after Wall Street began, after trading as much as 6% higher in pre-market trades.

China’s retail sales decreased by 1.8% in December, while its economy achieved one of its weakest growth rates in nearly half a century in 2022, rising just 3%.

With widespread support for the OpenAi chatbot, Alibaba announced earlier this month that it was creating an AI tool similar to ChatGPT that it was testing within the organization.

After learning about ChatGPT artificial intelligence, Brett Schickler realized he could publish a book quickly.

“The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible,” said Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York, reported Reuters.

Via the self-publishing division of Amazon.com, Schickler produced a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in hours using AI software, which can create blocks of text from straightforward suggestions.

“The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing,” available for $2.99 in the Amazon Kindle store or $9.99 in print, has earned Schickler less than $100, he claims. While this may not seem like much, it motivates him to write more books utilizing the program.

As of mid-February, there were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store with ChatGPT listed as an author or co-author, including “How to Write and Create Content Using ChatGPT,” “The Power of Homework,” and the poetry collection “Echoes of the Universe.”

And the figure is growing by the day. On Amazon, there is even a new sub-genre: books about using ChatGPT that are entirely authored by ChatGPT.

One of the most effective strategies to target clients and increase conversions is still email marketing.

Yet, like many other marketing platforms, data collecting and targeting are becoming increasingly complicated. These five charts presented by Insider Intelligence/eMarketer summarize the current state of email marketing.

Top marketing pros still are investing the most in email marketing.

One reason marketers are interested in email is that it is inexpensive. According to Litmus, marketers can expect a $36 return on investment for every $1 spent on email marketing.

Email marketing is also still critical for B2B marketing.

However, according to the report, email marketing suffers from the ability to increase engagement and measure performance. Email campaigns are still effective, but measuring their effectiveness is more difficult now since open rates are less reliable than before.

Email still dominates but is losing share to push messages and SMS.

And lastly, email is favored by nearly half of US millennial shoppers.

In an effort to support content creators as they expand and create communities, Meta Platforms on Sunday announced that it is piloting a monthly subscription service called Meta Verified.

Users will be able to authenticate their accounts with a government ID and receive a blue badge through this service.

“As part of this vision, we are evolving the meaning of the verified badge so we can expand access to verification and more people can trust the accounts they interact with are authentic,” stated Meta.

The subscription bundle for Instagram and Facebook, which will be available later this week, will offer additional security against impersonation and cost $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 per month on Apple’s iOS and Android.

Meta’s entry into subscription services comes on the heels of Twitter’s announcement last month that Twitter Blue will cost $11 per month.

Shopify shares fell 16% on Thursday after the Canadian tech giant’s poor first-quarter sales forecast, and increased cost predictions heightened investor fears about aggressive spending in a weakening economy.

“Our outlook reflects the prudence that we think is necessary in this macro environment,” company president Harley Finkelstein said in an interview on Thursday, reported Reuters.

Pandemic-related delays enabled the company to briefly become Canada’s most valued firm. Still, internet demand slowed as economies reopened, forcing it to create new goods, increase investments, and concentrate on social network integration.

Shopify’s “noncommittal spend” and an operating loss prediction of approximately $85 million, according to Oppenheimer analyst Ken Wong, could impact investors’ hopes for profitable growth this year, according to the report.

Nonetheless, according to the report, a dozen analysts increased their price estimates by as much as $20, relying on the company’s growth possibilities as it draws large clients willing to pay a premium for services like website setup tools, social network integration, and fulfillment.