More than 70 million customers will have grabbed a bargain on Cyber Monday with companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. This was on top of demand from Black Friday the week prior. To ensure customers get products on time, Amazon has turned to AI for help.
The company says up to 400 million products are shipped per day between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This comes as people look for that bargain on headphones or a chance to grab a cut-price iPad.
To beat the rush Amazon uses an AI tool called SCOT to ensure it has enough of any single item in stock, robotics to pick and pack items, and intelligent route mapping to speed up delivery.
Amazon vice president for last-mile delivery, Scot Hamilton, described Cyber Monday as "our Super Bowl", that requires months of training. "AI helps us with everything we do leading up to this day and on the day itself,” he added.
Using generative AI to predict demand
Before a single order is placed Amazon says its goal is to ensure it has enough of everything in stock to meet the demand. This is not an easy task, especially with billions of items likely to be shipped over the week.
This is where SCOT comes into its own. The full name ‘Supply-Chain Optimization Technology’, SCOT does most of the heavy lifting in this area. Made up of a series of deep learning and massive datasets, it decides which products to stock in which warehouse.
AI helps us with everything we do leading up to this day and on the day itself.
Scot Hamilton, Amazon
"It is meant to be something you don’t see or feel, but it’s as critical as oxygen. When you don’t realize it’s there, that means it’s working perfectly," said Hamilton.
Using similar natural language processing techniques to those in ChatGPT, Amazon can now make broader predictions beyond what has been purchased before and into what customers use, looking at responses, speed of sale and even what is looked at and not purchased.
Getting it to the customer
Amazon says a combination of better stock prediction, improved robotics inside the warehouse, and AI-powered driver route planning has meant time from order to delivery is faster than ever.
The company claims that packages in same-day warehouses can be prepared for dispatch in just 11 minutes of an order being placed.
Tye Brady, Amazon Robotics' chief technologist said, "AI will touch just about every piece of our supply chain.”
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