Online shopping giant The Very Group is aiming to beef up its interactive and personalised digital shopping experiences to millions of customers with a new Gen AI Innovation Lab, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The retailer, which has worked with Amazon for nearly four years, will use the Lab to trial new generative AI-powered retail solutions to overhaul how customers shop on the ecommerce platform, combining advanced cloud and generative AI capabilities with Very’s retailing experience and insights.
It will also aim to create new products and immersive ecommerce offerings that will power more relevant, timely and personalised experiences for Very’s customers, and enable better decisions at scale for its colleagues.
Very engineers and data teams will work closely with teams from the newly launched $100m AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre to leverage AWS generative AI capabilities through Amazon Bedrock.
It is claimed that AI experts will help Very securely use generative AI at scale, navigate technical challenges, and roll out new experiences for customers faster and with less heavy lifting.
Very Group chief information officer Matt Grest said: “We want to be recognised as one of the UK’s leading AI-powered retailers. To keep our customers satisfied and transform our business operations, we’ve chosen to build on our existing strategic relationship with AWS and incubate new generative AI-powered products with a trusted collaborator and innovator who understands how we work with data at scale.”
AWS general manager UKI Jeff Johnson added: “Using Amazon SageMaker, Very is already leveraging machine learning to transform its business operations. Incorporating new generative AI capabilities like Amazon Bedrock will further enable the company to deliver the personalised experience that customers want to meet their shopping goals.”
The Very Group has already successfully implemented AI to enhance its business operations, including forecasting product demand and plan inventory. Meanwhile, its machine-learning chatbot, dubbed Very Assistant and originally launched in 2017, is now its most used customer service channel. It now reportedly answers more than 268,000 customer queries a month.
The company’s heritage dates to the launch of the UK mail order giants, including Littlewoods, the Liverpool pools and retail group founded by John Moores, as well as Great Universal Stores and Kays Catalogues.
It now describes itself as “the UK’s largest pureplay digital retailer” and financial services provider, with annual revenues of £2bn and over 4 million customers.
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