References to machine learning seem to be everywhere these days. From new university-level courses to magazine articles and social media posts, daily we encounter new information on artificial intelligence and machine learning. But how can those new technologies be applied to improve retail operations? One of the main ways that machine learning can help retail is when it comes to quantifying data that previously came as individual pieces of information while surveying stores, such as images. Image recognition in retail is one of the best examples of the use of machine learning in merchandising applications. Machine learning allows images to be fed by programmers into a mobile merchandising system in order to train a neural network to identify product faces on outlet shelves. Then, field staff can simply take pictures of the store shelves on their mobile merchandising apps and the system will be able to identify - with accuracy that reaches 95% - the number of faces of t...