INTRO:
Good afternoon.
I am really excited, very pleased to be here. My name is Toby Knight and I am a Solutions Architect Manager at Amazon Web Services. I lead a team of Solutions Architects at AWS, helping our customers in the UK retail sector to build and deploy applications on the AWS cloud.
TK INTRO:
Today we are going to introduce AWS and our retail customers, then dive into our topic Store of the Future.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.
The growth we have seen since AWS launched in 2006 is phenomenal, we now have more than 1 million active customers. This is especially true in the retail sector, with many of the top retailers and up and coming startups choosing AWS to run business critical workloads.
Ocado use Ocado AWS to build secure, loosely coupled microservices.
River Island chose AWS because it allows them to innovate at speed and scale its systems to handle major demand peaks on Black Friday.
TK INTRO:
Many of the other businesses within Amazon use AWS, including Amazon Fresh, Amazon retail and others. We value the feedback we get on AWS services from our customers in the Amazon.com business and as you’d expect, they are a demanding customer that pushes the boundaries in terms of availability, performance
Many of us are familiar with Alexa and have an Amazon Echo or similar device in our home.
Amazon.com is now well known for driving innovation and introducing new customer experiences, such as the Just Walk Out experience in Amazon Go.
STORY BACKGROUND
Based in Atlanta, GA with offices in London, England
Customers across six continents
Needed a provider that would provide the flexibility to scale and innovation that would prove to be a competitive advantage
SOLUTION AND BENEFITS
Using more than 700 EC2 servers
“Most of our competitors use a fixed hardware model and end up having to do much simpler calculations with much less data—which means the end results aren’t nearly as good.” Ian Watson, EVP
Using Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Glacier
What does the store of tomorrow look like?
There are a number of high profile examples of frictionless shopping, from Amazon Go, Auchan Bingo Box in China to the Sainsbury’s SmartShop app.
Consumers benefit from lower queues and a faster, simpler shopping experience.
For retailers, this presents an opportunity to increase customer throughput, reduce staffing costs and increase customer satisfaction. However, most require the consumer to have a compatible mobile device with the appropriate app, so it would not support customers that want to pay in cash or cheque.
Voice, chat, virtual reality and augmented reality offer customers new ways to engage with the retailer at a time and place of their choosing.
Amazon.com and others provide AR view, to allow you to visualise the product in your own home.
Metail – tech provider in retail to visualise clothing COMPLETE.
Optician website allows you to view glasses on your face on their website.
Personalisation has been one of the fundamental shifts during the Internet-era. Many B2C businesses (just in retail) now use product recommendation engines based on a shopper’s personal history and the buying patterns of other customers that bought the same products.
Opportunity to use data on individual consumer’s behavior, have unparalleled insight into your customer and tailor their experience and your offers to them. Example on hobby, e.g. climbing store… COMPLETE.
There is an opportunity to bring many of these techniques into bricks and mortar retail stores. For example, pushing a mobile notification to a shopper as they enter a store, with a personalized discount offer based on their purchase history and preferences.
To deliver products to customers more quickly, efficiently and in greater volume many retailers are investing in automation in the store, warehouse and across logistics and supply chain. This requires integrated systems and investment in order management, warehouse management and delivery networks. Real time data insights from the operational business allow a seamless, timely customer experience, for example, customer can view in real time the progress of their delivery driver.
CHECK WITH SHIRI IF WE SHOULD INCLUDE THIS SECTION ???
Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, and the service can identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial recognition on images and video that you provide. You can detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.
Retail use cases – In store analysis of number of customers, sentiment, demographics.
Opportunity to recognise a regular customer in-store and make a targeted offer.
Used as a component to create automated, frictionless in-store experience.
The connected retailer – use cases abound at the edge. In store, in warehouse, in delivery vehicle, collection points. Cost efficient low power compute devices to manage the edge.
Collect telemetry data. Doors, products, fridges, collect information back from in-store devices.
Amazon Sumerian lets you create and run virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D applications quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. With Sumerian, you can build highly immersive and interactive scenes that run on popular hardware such as Oculus Go, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro, Google Daydream, and Lenovo Mirage as well as Android and iOS mobile devices.
For example, you can create a VR or AR shopping experience and create a virtual shopping assistant host.
Call out Netflix product recommendation engine.
ADD SLIDE HERE Netflix screenshot with recommendation engine.
Call out Netflix / Amazon Video.
Lower service charges
Lower maintainencace changes – patching,
Elastic, scalable to handle peak demand periods.
Bustle.com is a news, entertainment, lifestyle, and fashion website catering to women. They decided to explore using Lambda and API Gateway to run an entirely serveless website.