Amazon a story of how AI became the beating heart of a business

I have written about Amazon in all of my books but especially in 'AI for learning' and 'Learning Technology', as arguably the single largest digital disruptor on the planet. What they did was extraordinary, to take a bricks and mortar sector and turn it into a global, digital service. They have redefined retail, not just in books but for almost everything. They are also in digital services such as AWS. The deep technology behind all of this is AI. They are the masters at using customer focused AI, as well as manage and scale their business. 

1. Amazon’s retail business is one great recommendation engine. Their product recommendations are on all services, focused on the home page. Their interface is finely tuned and personalised using AI. Bezos was fanatical about having AI as the new UI to improve customer performance, first with one-click but then hundreds of other small adjustments and services. Fed by data from their massive customer base it is constantly improving.
2. Amazon Prime’s interface is AI and data driven, tiled and personalised, as is Amazon Music. It uses collective and individual data to recommend what you may want to watch, as well as promote Prime as a service. 
3. Amazon put AI into the home with Amazon Echo - Alexa. They created the home device sector with machine learning text to speech and speech to text in a consumer setting.
4. The hidden hand of AI optimises logistics, storage, waste packaging and delivery, a massive worldwide distribution service. They are the masters of logistics. Computer imaging is used in product selection in their warehouses. Their logistics also includes forecasting product needs and supply through predictive AI software. 
5. AWS delivers broad and deep and pre-trained AI and ML services to their IT customers, more than any other cloud offering. They are number one, delivering. Others are; Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent. Most companies will obtain AI capabilities through cloud-based enterprise software. 
6. AWS is optimised using AI and is 16% of Amazon business but delivers 41.5% of the cloud computing market -- greater than all of its competitors combined -- Microsoft Azure (29.4%), Google Cloud (3.0%).

 

AI is the heart that beats within Amazon, the core technology behind all of its services. It is what drives them forward, increasing customer growth through better service and lower prices, as well as dominate cloud computing.