Axios

Coach Inc. is buying Kate Spade for $2.4 billion, per Reuters.

• The deal: Kate Spade announced it was considering a sale in February since it wasn't achieving competitive profit margins. Coach said it expects to work out $50 million in savings over three years from the deal.
• The millennial appeal: Kate Spade's brightly colored handbags are popular with millennials, which could help Coach's position in the crowded market.
• The trend: Coach bought luxury shoe brand Stuart Weitzman in 2015 after a failed attempt to create a new brand, Reed Krakoff. Coach reported strong earnings in Q3 of 2016, indicating this strategy of acquiring luxury brands might be working (compare that to Michael Kors, which decided to sell higher quality bags to remedy its dip in sales). Analysts are saying Coach's next move could be a buyout of Burburry or Jimmy Choo.

By May of next year, artificial intelligence algorithms in the EU will be legally required to provide users an explanation "every time it uses [their] personal data to choose a particular recommendation or action," writes AI lawyer John Frank Weaver :

• For example: Weaver gives us Amazon's usually reliable Alexa, which recently cued up Sir Mix a Lot, to the befuddlement of its owner.
• Why AI owes an explanation: Weaver says the U.S. should follow suit, in order to promote transparency and greater user control over the technologies that play an increasingly important role in their lives.
• Why we should tread carefully: Thomas Burri, an assistant professor of international and European law at the University of St. Gallen, told Weaver "If the first thing you need to consider when designing a new program is the explanation, does that stifle innovation and development? . . . Some decisions are hard to explain, even with full access to the algorithm...."

Last year Chinese consumers spent about $750 billion online, outspending both U.S. and UK consumers' online purchases combined, and beyond that, China has been a standout in adopting e-commerce as a driving habit in retail, according to Boston Consulting Group. The rate of growth of e-commerce as a portion of retail in China is particularly striking; it's going to grow twice as fast as the U.S. and UK at about 20% annually.

Why it matters: Retailers dealing with the impending death of the U.S. mall could take a hint from the Chinese marketplace and the habits of its consumers.

Why China is outspending: Digital shopping hit the internet in the 1990s, which coincided with a growth in disposable income in China, whereas in the U.S., shopping in brick-and-mortar stores had already been ingrained as a habit. BCG posits that's why e-commerce habit adoption has been slower in the U.S.

Despite widespread fears that artificial intelligence and automation will create mass unemployment, job losses due to technology are at historic lows, according to an analysis published Monday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The stats: Levels of occupational churn in the United States — defined as the rates at which some occupations expand while others contract — are lower during this decade than at any point since the 1850s.

Sound smart: Despite the potential for unprecedented labor-market displacement brought on by recent developments in artificial intelligence, a central problem of the economy today is actually too little displacement, as evidenced by statistics showing slow productivity growth. Without gains in productivity that result from the application of new technologies to business, the value an individual worker produces can't rise significantly, and that means that his wages likely won't rise, either.

Jeff Bezos said last week that the "golden age" of artificial intelligence and machine learning had enabled new products like Amazon's Alexa and sharpened the company's core businesses by improving search results, product recommendations, and inventory management.

Bezos now wants to bring techniques enabled by AI to businesses large and small, as well as nonprofit and government institutions. "Right now, deploying these techniques . . . is difficult," he said. "It takes a lot of expertise, and so you have to go compete for the very best PhDs in machine learning and it's difficult for a lot of organizations to win those competitions."

Why it matters: AI is the latest front in the "cloud wars," with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM competing for market share in the rapidly growing market for leased computing infrastructure and services that enable businesses to manipulate and leverage data stored there. The first-mover advantage in this space is mind-bogglingly large, as these firms effectively compete to own what will be the most important infrastructure in the 21st-century global economy.

Though more companies are choosing to IPO, tech's biggest startups are holding off on going public as they fear that their sky-high valuations from private funding rounds might dip on the open market, per the Wall Street Journal.

• "A slew of companies are preparing to go public later this year."
• "Conspicuously missing ... are some of the highest-profile private companies, such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc., which aren't expected to come to market before 2018."
• Be smart: "[S]ome investors and underwriters say there's concern that the public markets are being used as a last resort..."
• Why it matters: "It's symptomatic of a decades-long trend that's seen the total number of public companies in the U.S. decline sharply as more entrepreneurs and others choose to avoid the increased disclosure and other perceived drawbacks of broad ownership."

The promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning has kept management consultants like Deloitte Chief Technology Officer Bill Briggs busy as companies race to try to make their operations more efficient with these powerful new technologies. Axios sat down with Briggs to learn how we can expect our workplaces to change as a result.

How work will change: The accelerating pace of technological change has forced businesses to adopt tools like artificial intelligence faster than ever before. "If your value is exercising a rote, prescribed job, and that's all you care to do, hopefully you're 60, and approaching a time you can gracefully tap out because not many jobs are going to look the same in a few years," he says.

Axios spoke with Justin Hendrix, executive director of NYC Media Lab, which brings together universities, publishers, agencies and telecom companies to test media and digital innovation. Per Hendrix, AR/VR investment is slowing:

"I do think we're seeing a little bit of a wobble in the kind of commercial enthusiasm around AR and VR," Hendrix said. "The dip suggests investors have cooled since realizing emerging area market adoption not there. Investment should bounce back in 2018."

Per Crunchbase, the first quarter of 2017 marks the lowest quarterly number of financings and investment total in AR/VR technologies in over a year.

Robot sales are surging in North America, with automotive and other companies snapping them up at a record pace for a second straight year. According to industry figures, robotics companies made $516 million in sales in the first quarter, up by about 28% over the same period in 2016.

Between the lines: The report follows a record 2016 for robotics sales, and consensus forecasts of continued double-digit revenue increases for the industry for the next five years. This gives a hard foundation to projections of a vast robotization of industry and job categories over the coming years, with the potential for a massive impact on employment.