1. Ai apparatus for characterization of areas of consultant expertise, said apparatus comprising: A) a processor device executing machine-executable instructions; B) a program storage device operably coupled with the processor device and comprising the machine-executable instructions for: automatically determining shopping goals of a shopper, without said shopper having to explicitly supply the shopping goals as input, by: analyzing contents of the shopper's shopping cart; and performing a location operation to determine the shopper's location in the store; wherein said shopping goals comprise a first list of candidate products that the shopper desires to acquire in a store; listing the contents of the shopper's shopping cart in a second list; for each candidate product in the first list of candidate products, automatically: querying a database comprising a third list of potential shopping collaborators correlated to the candidate product for which the potential shopping collaborators have experience and knowledge; retrieving from the database the third list of the potential shopping collaborators with experience and knowledge of the candidate product; determining which of the potential shopping collaborators are currently online, therefore available; and ranking the available shopping collaborators by assigning a high ranking to those collaborators with attributes of: close physical proximity between the shopper and the collaborators; a positive rating of the shopper's past experience with the collaborators as stored in the database; experience in multiple product sets associated with the candidate product; recent purchase of the candidate product; and frequent purchases of the candidate product; merging the third lists of ranked, available shopping collaborators for each candidate product into a final list to eliminate duplicates of shopping collaborators relevant to more than one candidate product; and transmitting to a user interface associated with the shopper the final list of ranked available shopping collaborators; and C) the user interface for: presenting the final list of ranked available shopping collaborators to the shopper; and receiving a rating of the shopper's interaction with the shopping collaborators.