AWS for Industries
AWS re:Invent in review: Highlights for customers in retail and CPG
Jam packed with new and inspiring content shared by the industry’s best and brightest, AWS re:Invent 2022 returned to Las Vegas this year for the 11th time.
While re:Invent 2022 has come to a close, that doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying everything the event has to offer. We’ve compiled keynote highlights, key retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) sessions, and details around new announcements to keep you learning and engaging with AWS.
Let’s look back at some highlights that made this year’s re:Invent one for the books.
Executive keynotes
Adam Selipsky: Chief Executive Officer at Amazon Web Services
“More than 90% of the startups on the Cloud 100 run their businesses on AWS … These leaders could choose any cloud provider, and they choose AWS.” Watch Selipsky’s keynote to see how how forward-thinking builders like Engie, Siemens, and Lyell Immunopharma are transforming industries, and even our future, with AWS. Selipsky also highlighted innovations in retail with Just Walk Out Technology by Amazon and Amazon One, which enables in-store customers to skip the physical checkout line and experience frictionless shopping. Learn more about data and infrastructure capabilities that are helping customers achieve their goals faster, take advantage of untapped potential, and create a better future with AWS.
Monday Night Live Keynote with Peter DeSantis: Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing
Get an “under-the-hood” look at the ways AWS continues to push the boundaries of performance in the cloud with services like AWS Nitro, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and AWS Lambda SnapStart. In his keynote, DeSantis explores how teams at AWS dive deep to engineer novel solutions across silicon, networking, storage, and compute without compromising on traditional tradeoffs around performance, sustainability, or cost. “At AWS, we never compromise on security, and we’re laser-focused on cost. So, how do we improve performance while improving security and lowering cost?” Find out the answer to this question and learn more about cutting-edge AWS services and solutions in the presentation.
Keynote with Swami Sivasubramanian: Vice President, Data and Machine Learning, AWS
Learn from Sivasubramanian about how the latest AWS innovations can help you transform your company’s data into meaningful insights and actions for your business. Featuring speakers from Expedia Group and AstraZeneca, this keynote discusses the critical components of a future-proof data strategy and how to empower your organization to drive the next wave of modern invention with data. Hear from leading AWS customers who are using data to bring new experiences to life for their customers.
AWS Partner Keynote with Ruba Borno: Vice President of AWS Worldwide Channels and Alliances
Led by Borno, this keynote gives special attention to our AWS Partners and the ways that cloud-powered innovation is uniquely positioning partners to accelerate customer business transformations. Hear directly from partners and customers like IBM, Inter, and Heineken about how, working together with AWS, the possibilities are unlimited. Learn how AWS is tailoring the digital partner experience to guide partners to higher-value opportunities.
Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels: Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com
Discover innovations and emerging technologies like AWS Step Functions Distributed Map, AWS Application Composer, and Amazon EventBridge Pipes that enable builders to create systems that would have been previously unimaginable. Hear from Vogels and other featured speakers from Trustpilot and Epic Games about how customers and AWS are using novel architecture patterns to build scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant applications.
Industry sessions and events
Core elements of digital transformation – RET301 breakout session
Learn how a $6 billion fashion retailer leveraged AWS and its partners to digitally transform their organization. Hear about Tapestry’s digital transformation journey, why digital transformation is so difficult in fashion retail, and the ways AWS reduced deployment time, mean time to remediate (MTTR), cost, and more.
Heineken brews a new connected manufacturing business – MFG203 breakout session
Heineken and AWS leaders talk about how they’ve been working together to retrofit breweries with digital capabilities. Learn more about their journey to becoming the “most connected brewery” with AWS.
Kellogg’s modernization journey: A worldwide business transformation – CPG203 breakout session
Learn how AWS helps CPG brands go further and faster on the cloud. Kellogg’s 10-year journey with AWS has spanned 75+ workloads and four Regions all while building a digital culture with people and processes to drive success. Read more about this journey in this blog and webinar.
How women leaders are transforming customer experience – BIZ102 breakout session
A panel of experts, including Saks Fifth Avenue, talk about how they are addressing the opportunities and challenges in customer experience (CX) transformation. Hear practical advice and tips on how to create more value for customers and innovate continuously in a digital age.
CPG Executive Advisory Forum (EAF) Meeting
The AWS CPG EAF is a select group of customers who lend their insights to AWS as we develop new capabilities and innovations that will advance the CPG industry into the future (locally and globally). Comprised of global industry business and technology executives, the AWS CPG EAF represents a range of brands and businesses including digital natives and startups, small- and medium-sized businesses, and brands large and small that meet regularly to obtain industry insights, trends, and market insights from broader Amazon lines of business. The CPG EAF influences and informs the AWS worldwide CPG solution roadmap and go-to-market strategy. Want to get involved? Contact Justin Honaman (jhhonama@amazon.com) for more details.
Big news! Expanded services for retail and CPG
Among the new services announced at AWS re:Invent 2022, the most exciting AWS Solution for retail and CPG is AWS Supply Chain, a machine learning (ML)-powered supply chain application that can mitigate risks and lower costs. This new cloud application improves supply chain visibility and delivers actionable insights so you can quickly gain visibility across your supply chain, make more informed supply chain decisions, reduce errors, and mitigate overstock. Also be sure to check out Tech Predictions for 2023 and beyond, an article by Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, on five ways we can expect to see the world change in 2023 and beyond, which includes a prediction about the upcoming supply chain transformation.
Other new launches include:
AWS Clean Rooms (Preview): AWS Clean Rooms helps customers and their partners to more easily and securely match, analyze, and collaborate on their combined datasets–without sharing or revealing underlying data.
Amazon QuickSight: New capabilities in Amazon QuickSight Q enable customers to forecast and to ask “why” questions; Automated data prep makes it faster for customers to start asking questions of their data using QuickSight Q.
Amazon SageMaker: Amazon SageMaker Role Manager makes it easier for admins to control access and define permissions for improved ML governance; Amazon SageMaker Model Cards make it easier to document and review model information; Amazon SageMaker Model Dashboard provides a central interface for all of the models in your account.
Amazon Security Lake (Preview): Amazon Security Lake is a new purpose-built security data lake helps organizations aggregate, manage, and analyze log and event data to enable faster threat detection, investigation, and incident response.
Amazon Connect: With retailers experiencing extreme traffic during the holiday season, they must ramp up their contact center staff in order to meet high demands. Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, a feature of Amazon Connect, can help simplify this.
AWS SimSpace Weaver: Retailers are heavily investing to create an immersive experience by leveraging virtual 3D worlds for their customers, including metaverse. AWS SimSpace Weaver simplifies the setup. Retailers experience heavy foot traffic during Black Friday and other heavily marketed events. The service will also let retailers simulate real-world crowds with their products and other entities.
AWS Verified Access (Preview): AWS Verified Access lets retail stores connect to corporate applications without a VPN, simplifying their network architecture.
AWS IoT Core Device Location feature: AWS IoT Core Device Location is a new managed feature of AWS IoT Core that enables customers to choose the appropriate location technology that works within their business and engineering constraints, without relying on Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware. This will help with asset tracking.
Water positive: AWS commits to returning more water to communities than it uses by 2030. Discover more on this initiative on About Amazon.
Looking ahead
Before we get too excited for re:Invent 2023, we’d like to extend a very special thank you to everyone who attended re:Invent this year, in person or virtually. We had so much fun hosting you and we hope you continue learning from re:Invent by watching the on-demand sessions you didn’t get a chance to see in Las Vegas. See you in 2023!