AWS Brings Personalization and Automation to Retail at Scale

AWS Brings Personalization and Automation to Retail at Scale

This IDC Market Note covers a recent AWS tour of Amazon Fresh, Neiman Marcus, and the Nike store. It also covers some of the technologies that enhance customer and associate experiences alike. In IDC's view, the technology innovations that AWS and other vendors are helping to drive can offer retailers the ability to personalize at scale and make shopping more efficient while simultaneously making it more engaging for the customer. These innovations also enable retailers to move repetitive and non-value-added tasks to automation, thereby making smarter use of their workforces by enabling them to interface directly with customers and to do so with the data they need — literally at their fingertips. "Regardless of the specific applications, tech stacks, and data used, retailers need to modernize their businesses through cloud, automation, and analytics/AI, moving away from legacy technology to enable the personalization, speed, and other services that today's consumers expect," said Jordan K. Speer, research director, IDC Retail Insights. "Whether they are looking for information from a sales associate, looking online for inventory in their size and the ability to reserve and pick it up in store, or counting on personalized offers that cater to their interests, consumers tell us that they will go elsewhere when their expectations are not met."

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