Amazon Says Its AI Already Knows What to Stock for You Nearby
In its bid to continue dominating online commerce, Amazon is enlisting artificial intelligence to help. The company is reportedly using artificial intelligence to map where products are in-demand to increase delivery speed.
Amazon vice president of customer fulfillment and global ops services Stefano Perego described the approach to CNBC. Artificial intelligence will help Amazon plan delivery routes and map stops while accounting for rogue variables like weather and online shopping will be enhanced to help customers better find what they’re looking for. Amazon’s big push, according to Perego, is what the company calls “regionalization,” or, using AI to figure out where to place in demand inventory to cut down on delivery times.
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“So now, I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with the vast selection we offer to our customers,” Perego told CNBC. “Imagine how complex is the problem of deciding where to place that unit of inventory. And to place it in a way that we reduce distance to fulfill to customers, and we increase speed of delivery.”
In order to compress delivery times with the regionalization strategy, Amazon needs to quickly analyze datapoints and patterns for hundreds of thousands if not millions of products in order to determine where—and potentially why—certain items are in demand in certain geographic areas. Those items will then be fulfilled to warehouses that are in a hotspot. Perego told the outlet that the plan is working, and that 74% of products shipped to customers are from warehouses in their region.
Amazon is not alone in adding artificial intelligence to its workforce. CNET infamously used AI to publish news articles for months, only for those articles to be rife with errors. Meanwhile a tech CEO has been spending $2,000 per month on ChatGPT Plus subscriptions for his employees, and he’s claiming that its been useful. Even fast food franchise Wendy’s is looking to use AI to soup up its drive-thrus.
Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides to The Best Free AI Art Generators, The Best ChatGPT Alternatives, and Everything We Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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