Make the most of AWS re:Invent 2020 – Retail Attendee Guide

AWS re:Invent routinely fills several Las Vegas venues with standing-room only crowds, but in 2020, it was an all-virtual and free event. We had an exciting program for the Retail industry with five keynotes, 18 leadership sessions, and over 500 breakout sessions beginning November 30, 2020. The sessions provided insights into how AWS experts and talented members of the Retail industry are using cloud technology to transform their businesses and innovate on the behalf of their customers.

You can find more information on re:Invent here or see the available sessions on YouTube.

Retail at re:Invent 2020

How are today’s leading retailers leveraging cloud-based solutions to innovate faster and scale new capabilities? In these sessions, you’ll hear best practices directly from retail leaders and innovators on how they are partnering with AWS to improve operations and transform customer experiences. You’ll come away with practical guidance on how to leverage unique capabilities on AWS to reinvent retail.

Retail sessions

RET201: Building the future of Retail on AWS
Available on YouTube here
Discover how Sainsbury’s, one of the world’s leading grocers, is redefining its retail business strategy through the cloud. In this session, you’ll hear about the key industry-optimized services and solutions AWS is delivering to reshape the future of the retail and grocery sectors. You’ll also hear from Phil Jordan, Group CIO at Sainsbury’s Tech, on how his team is modernizing its IT architecture to enhance business agility, transform customer engagement, and deliver new services.

RET401: How Stich Fix is delivering personalized experiences
Available on YouTube here
How can organizations deliver dynamic personalized customer interactions? Hear how the platform engineering team at Stitch Fix is transforming customer interactions by delivering a highly concurrent and scalable solution for real-time product recommendations. You’ll also come away with an understanding of the architectural requirements for leveraging DynamoDB to optimize near real-time machine learning workloads to deliver the right user experience.

ENT207: How Zalando tracks business performance in near real-time
Available on YouTube here
In 2016, Zalando — Europe’s largest online fashion platform — started migrating its SAP systems to AWS to increase agility, simplify IT maintenance, and build a future-ready data architecture as part of their digital transformation. With a hybrid data lake on AWS that is tightly integrated with one of the world’s largest SAP S/4HANA systems, they have reduced their cost of insight by 30% while improving customer satisfaction. In this session, we will look at both their S/4HANA implementation and how they built their data lake with services like Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon S3, and more.

AIM213: Pioneering personalized user experiences at StockX with Amazon Personalize
Available on YouTube here
Many retailers struggle to implement effective personalization recommendation systems for use in their websites and applications due to data, integration, and resource challenges. But those who do realize significant improvements in business outcomes such as customer engagement and sales. In this session, learn how StockX, a start-up based in Detroit, developed a personalization engine for website with Amazon Personalize, and the results they saw.

DAT215: Zulily Drives Discovery-based Shopping with Amazon DocumentDB and KDA
Available on YouTube here
In this session, learn how Zulily approaches delivering solutions for its customers by using AWS services like Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA) to innovate faster and reduce total cost of ownership. Zulily is a global online retailer that applies a unique approach to ecommerce; launching thousands of new products every day, all at incredible prices and value. Zulily built a search experience with Amazon DocumentDB and KDA that enables shoppers to see what top brands, categories, and keywords are currently trending. This fun new way of browsing gives shoppers an engaging way to discover unique finds, hot items, and debut brands, all while exploring the great products Zulily has to offer.

AIM202: Discovering insights in customer survey’s at McDonald’s
Available on YouTube here
Your customers give you feedback in different places. Given the volume of responses across a variety of sources, it is often difficult to identify what customers are actually saying. Being able to spot emerging topics lets you address problems while they are still small. Learn how McDonald’s processes customer surveys with Amazon Comprehend to unearth trends in customer sentiment and convert them into business insights.

AIM206: Recreating KFC’s Colonel Sanders using Amazon Polly’s Brand Voice Solution
Available on YouTube here
KFC is using AWS services such as Amazon Polly to re-create the iconic voice of KFC’s Founder, Colonel Harland Sanders. KFC is the first global quick service restaurant (QSR) to use this sophisticated text-to-speech technology from AWS to provide fans with a truly unique ordering experience. So, whether fans are looking to feast on a 12-piece bucket with friends and family, or dine solo for one, just ask and the Colonel will deliver. In this session, we walk through architecture, Amazon Polly Brand Voice solution, and business impact of the solution.

SVS302: How LEGO.com accelerates innovation with Serverless
Available on YouTube here
After experiencing scaling issues on Black Friday, the LEGO team fully refactored their monolith to serverless microservices on AWS. In this session, LEGO Senior Engineering Manager and AWS Serverless Hero Sheen Brisals will show you how LEGO.com rebuilt a monolith into an event-driven architecture with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions at its core, and how designing with a serverless-first mindset can provide surprising benefits. You’ll learn about successful architectural patterns, but also see how LEGO.com manages and grows their serverless team to deliver more in less time at the scale of millions of customers.

(New addition) AWS on Air – Industry Live: Retail
Available on YouTube
Join Tom Litchford, AWS WW Lead for Retail and Paul Fryer, AWS CTO for Retail, as they discuss current trends and recently released services that are relevant to the retail sector.

Additional sessions relevant to retail attendees:
AIM210: Building a successful inventory planning solution with Amazon Forecast
Available on YouTube here
Learn how to save millions of dollars building an inventory management solution powered by Amazon Forecast. Retail companies today use everything from simple spreadsheets to complex planning software to attempt to accurately forecast future product demand. These tools build forecasts by looking at a historical series of data, an approach that struggles to produce accurate forecasts. In this session you will learn how Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to provide more accurate forecast for inventory management, including a real life deep dive on how More Retail saved millions of dollars by building an inventory management solution with their technology partner, Ganit, on Amazon Forecast.

CPG201: Driving innovation in Consumer Packaged Goods with Coca-Cola
Available on YouTube here
Discover how Coca-Cola Freestyle is partnering with AWS to rapidly develop and deploy new solutions that increase consumer engagement, reinforce brand, and grow revenue. This session will provide an inside look at how the Coca-Cola team is leveraging cloud-based services to offer a touch-free experience for their retail partners that allows consumers to select and pour drinks quickly, safely, and in a fun new way. You’ll come away with a better understanding of Coca-Cola’s innovation process and how AWS can help you reinvent the consumer goods industry.

MKT205: Navigating COVID-19 and Optimizing Wine Delivery with Data
Available on demand
There are no limits to how organizations use data to make decisions and shape the world. With AWS Data Exchange, getting access to the data you need is easier and faster than ever. In this session, you’ll learn how the University of Texas Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering uses free research data to conduct contact tracing to keep students and faculty safe. You’ll also hear how Wine Access spreads joy by using zip code data from Weather Trends to ensure wine arrives to their customers in the best possible condition.

Other sessions of interest to look out for:
IOT205: How Carrier is transforming the cold supply chain to eliminate food waste available here
TRV203: How Just Eat Takeaway (online food delivery) is Building Resilience for the Long Run available here
GPS211: AWS Partners driving innovation amidst COVID-19 available here

Extras you won’t want to miss out on!

Andy Jassy keynote
On demand here
Andy Jassy took the stage to share his insights and the latest news about AWS customers, products, and services.

Machine Learning Keynote
On demand here
Join Swami Sivasubramanian for the first-ever re:Invent Machine Learning Keynote. Hear how AWS is freeing builders to innovate on machine learning with the latest developments in AWS machine learning, demos of new technology, and insights from customers.