Amazon Rewrites Its Success Story by Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Is it excellent sales or powerful marketing, strong business strategies, implementation of modern technologies or superior customer service that makes Amazon so unique and helps the company stay atop? Over the years, Amazon as a company, has been pushing the boundaries of innovation, setting new trends in customer experience and bringing about revolution as a market leader. The company has embraced emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which further elevates its success. Let us take a tour of Amazon Inside.

Amazon uses a Strategy to Manage Artificial Intelligence known as The Flywheel

Amazon has christened its approach to AI as a flywheel. In engineering terminology, a flywheel is a deviously simple tool designed to efficiently store rotational energy. The tool works by storing energy when a machine isn’t working at a constant level. Instead of expending energy switching on and off, the flywheel maintains the energy at a constant level and spreads it to other parts of the machine.

The work culture at Amazon is amazing. The flywheel approach keeps AI innovation pulsating along, which encourages energy and knowledge to disseminate to other areas of the organization. Amazon’s flywheel approach implies that innovation around machine learning in one area of the company ramps up the efforts of other teams. Those teams use the technology to drive their products, which impacts innovation throughout the entire organization. Essentially, what is created in one part of Amazon acts as a catalyst for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning growth in other areas. Amazon is not a novice when it comes to AI. The company was one of the pioneers to use the technology for driving its product recommendations. But as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are experiencing exponential growth, the flywheel approach has become the key-focus to Amazon’s expanding business, a pivotal point at the centre of the organization, connecting all the teams with each other. This is particularly unique at a time when many companies keep their AI efforts isolated and don’t integrate them into the overall organization.

Artificial Intelligence is not Specific to Single Amazon Office

At Amazon, AI is located in all offices, and information is distributed across departments. Machine Learning technology is used by the product recommendation team to improve its product roadmap and predictions, and those insights are shared throughout the company. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning empower three popular Amazon products, namely Alexa, the Amazon Go Store, and the Amazon recommendation engine.

The Amazon Echo, which features AI bot Alexa, has been one of the company’s most popular stunt with machine learning. Amazon faced challenging moments in the beginning, especially as it was one of the first companies to venture into creating a voice-powered virtual assistant that could fit on a countertop. Once the technology started to pick up momentum, departments across the company realized that Alexa could be beneficial for their products. Some of the initial skills for Alexa were integrations with Amazon Music, Prime Video, and personalized product recommendations from an Amazon account. Many companies now have Alexa skills that add value to the customer’s life such as Liberty Mutual and Capital One. Liberty Mutual provides auto insurance information to customers and Capital One enables them to make a payment through their Amazon device.

The Amazon Go store operates in a cashier-less mode, as this smart store too, took advantage of the richness of data to track customer shopping trends. Amazon uses data from customers’ smartphone cameras to track shopping activities and it not only helps Amazon Go, but can also be shared with the machine learning team for continued improvement in development.

Artificial Intelligence also plays a vital role in Amazon’s recommendation engine, which generates 35% of the company’s revenue. Using data from individual customer behavior, preferences and purchases, browsing history and items that are related as well as regularly bought together, Amazon can create a personalized list of products that customers actually want to purchase.

Amazon has Created an Integrated Superior Quality Customer Experience with AI

Data from the aforesaid three primary pillar-products of the company work cohesively to create a rich customer experience. A customer can visit the Amazon Go store to get a few items for lunch, ask Alexa to search for a recipe and the product recommendation engine can determine that the customer probably needs to buy a certain type of cookware. Instead of competing against each other, different departments share their innovative knowledge to provide a customized and superior quality customer experience.

Amazon has come a long way since its early beginnings in AI and ML. The company now sells its machine-learning approach through Amazon Web Services to clients including NASA and the NFL. By taking advantage of AI advancements and applications in other areas of the company, it offers personalized AI solutions to large and small business enterprises. Indeed Amazon is a world-class leader to have broken down all barriers to encourage innovation and growth throughout the organization, setting a classic model for other upcoming companies to follow.