Recap of re:Invent 2021 for the CPG Industry

A couple of weeks ago at AWS re:Invent 2021, we announced more than 50 new products and services. If you have time, be sure to watch Adam Selipsky’s keynote address to hear major news, and also read the Top Announcement of AWS re:Invent 2021 blog post to learn even more details about some of our most noteworthy launches. In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the announcements that are the most relevant to the CPG industry to help your company overcome key challenges that you’re facing as our world continues to rapidly evolve.

Increase Consumer Engagement

Improve your response to consumer inquiries and issues using new machine learning (ML) capabilities from Amazon Connect, now with call summation. By embedding Amazon Machine Learning technologies into a cloud contact center solution, companies of any size can deliver superior service at a lower cost. To improve the customer experience as well as agent and supervisor productivity, the solution can automatically summarize the important aspects of a customer call and add it to the contact detail page.

With Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer (Preview), your developers can automatically design chatbots from conversation transcripts in hours rather than weeks. Amazon Lex helps you build, test, and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants on contact center services (such as Amazon Connect), websites, and messaging channels (such as Facebook Messenger). To learn more, visit the Amazon Lex documentation page.

Amazon Personalize now offers intelligent user segmentation based on preferences and interactions with different products, categories, brands, and more. This can help you drive higher engagement, increase retention through targeted messaging, and improve return on investment. Learn more in the What’s New post.

Modernize Your IT Stack

AWS Mainframe Modernization (Preview) allows you to migrate and modernize your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns—replatforming and automated refactoring—allowing you to select the best-fit migration path and associated toolchains based on your migration assessment results. Learn more in the What’s New post.

Improve Organizational Agility with Better Analytics and ML

Amazon Redshift Serverless (Preview) allows CPG companies to run high performance analytics at any scale in the cloud without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure. There’s no need to set up and manage clusters. Just load your data and start querying.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas allows business analysts to build ML models and generate accurate business predictions without data science expertise or coding. The solution leverages powerful AutoML technologies to automatically train and build models based on your dataset.

Amazon SageMaker Studio Inferencer Recommender automates load testing and optimizes model performance across ML instances. This reduces the time it takes to get ML models from development to production and optimizes operational costs.

Connect All Aspects of Your Manufacturing and Supply Chain

AWS Private 5G is a new managed service that helps CPG companies set up, provision, and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months. You can connect disparate manufacturing sites and all aspects of the supply chain to create a digital twin from raw materials supplier to distribution centers while only paying for the network capacity and throughput you need. Sign up for preview access.

With AWS Outposts servers, part of the AWS Outposts family, you can connect remote parts of your manufacturing and supply networks to provide local compute and networking services for sites with space and capacity constraints.

AWS IoT TwinMaker (Preview) service makes it easier for CPG companies to build digital twins of their factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state, and behavior of the systems they represent. The solution imports data from a number of AWS services and other data sources (like CAD data) to form a digital twin graph that combines and understands the relationships between the virtual representations of your physical systems and connected data sources to accurately model your real-world environment. End users, such as plant operators and maintenance engineers, can use Amazon Managed Grafana to observe and interact with the digital twin to optimize factory operations, increase production output, and improve equipment performance. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

If you’d like to discuss how these new solutions can help your CPG company build brands consumers love, increase organizational agility to react to market opportunities, and drive efficiencies across your operations, AWS is here to help. Contact your AWS account team today.