Amazon continually looks at every aspect of their vast business and asks “What can we automate today?” Now they are increasingly looking around at other markets and asking themselves “Can we automate that?” If you are not doing the same as an executive in your enterprise then you are missing the vast opportunities inherent in the 4th Industrial Revolution and will not be around long.
Amazon is truly an “AI First” company. The problem is that too many executives at Amazon competitors think that AI is only about data. A couple of years ago that was mostly true, today it is about so much more. The 4th Industrial Revolution is about data AND intelligent machines. So just focusing on data is, over time, a losing business strategy.
Sure Amazon uses AI on their data to a stunning and impressive effect. The way they do it is so impressive that it makes sense that other CXO’s would try and emulate it. But again, that is missing the opportunities increasingly available today to business leaders.
Does anyone still doubt that Amazon will eventually become an almost fully automated vertically integrated company stretching from the manufacturing floor to your doorstep?
Yes, Amazon will predict which products to ship to you using data, but almost more impressively, they will use automation at an ever increasing level in their supply chain to get those products to you with little or no human touch. And for products that you don’t want shipped, i.e. groceries, they have created Amazon Go, a grocery store with no people where you just go and grab what you want and walk out. And similar to how they moved from books to toothpaste online once they figured out the system, figuring out automated brick and mortar retail through their Amazon Go trial will allow them to move into other retail segments where the incumbents aren’t automating quickly enough.
So yes, Amazon is about data, but it is also, maybe more so, about automation.