For its inaugural re:Mars conference, Amazon invited attendees it calls "dreamers and builders" -- business leaders, scientists and others who are making contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. During the Wednesday keynote at the Las Vegas event, Amazon brandished its own AI credentials, making the case to its potential customers and partners that its teams -- across the business -- are pushing forward the stat of the art.
Across every step of its e-commerce operations, AI is at work: Amazon shared the way it uses AI to power e-commerce forecasting, and it showcased StyleSnap[1], an AI-powered feature that lets shoppers in the Amazon app take a picture of a piece of clothing and find similar items for sale.
Amazon also revealed newest fulfillment center robots[2], called Pegasus and Xanthus, as well as a new drone[3] that Amazon says will start commercial deliveries within months[4].
For in-store shopping, Amazon revealed new details about the technology that drives its Amazon Go stores. To stay connected to customers in their homes, Amazon revealed how it's driving forward conversational AI with Alexa[5].
"Amazon has been a technology company from the start," Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer division, said during the Wednesday keynote. That said, he added, "We're only in the beginning stages of truly understanding the potential" of AI.
Wilke walked through how, when he joined Amazon in 1999 as head of the global operations team, the company was "relying primarily on Skip" to manage package fulfillment. Skip isn't an algorithm, he said -- "Skip is a dude."
Now automation is a key part of Amazon operations. The company is on a path to