Gen AI retail transformation: Boosting inventory, marketing and ROI – News

Generative AI is shifting retail from reactive execution to real-time decision-making, changing how merchants forecast demand, position inventory and engage customers at scale. As retailers face tighter margins and faster consumer cycles, gen AI is emerging as an operational lever rather than a marketing add-on.

Amazon Web Services Inc. is pushing that shift into production, applying generative AI across inventory allocation, demand planning and customer engagement, according to Petra Schindler-Carter (pictured), director of retail/CPG at AWS. Drawing on Amazon’s operational playbook, AWS is helping retailers turn long-standing logistics and personalization challenges into data-driven, automated decisions with measurable business impact.

“Where should I ship it? Which distribution centers in the network do I need to place my product to be efficiently close to customers?” Schindler-Carter said. “If I reflect on my career at Amazon.com, those are the problems that we’ve just finessed and battle tested over the years with our own machine learning and now gen AI. Think about topics like inventory allocation, how can gen AI and data science help do that calculation of where to put a product? So, we’re seeing results north of 40% improvement in that inventory accuracy and placing it at the right place.”

Schindler-Carter spoke with Dave Vellante at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed  why gen AI retail transformation is essential, spotlighting AWS as a leading force.

Gen AI retail transformation: Driving hyper-personalized marketing and maximum ROI

Gen AI retail transformation revolutionizes marketing and advertising by enabling hyper-personalized, data-driven outreach. It delivers the right message to the right customer at the optimal time with optimized creative content, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs and boosting ROI, according to Schindler-Carter.

“Marketing, advertising, getting the targeting right, so using data and gen AI to tap into the cumulative history we have with a given customer segment, with the locale, a price point, using that information to make the targeting sharper,” she said. “For a retailer, I would give you an example. Mercado Libre is one of our big customers. They’ve done an excellent job using technology to get their ad targeting better. We’re talking 20%-plus improvements in click-through rates and performance of the advertising dollar. That goes straight to their top and their bottom line.”

In today’s hyper-connected, data-driven marketplace, gen AI retail transformation directly reflects modern consumer behavior, real-time data creation and competitive dynamics. This positions generative AI as a strategic necessity, not a future trend, Schindler-Carter added.

“I completely agree that if you go back 12, 18 months, the buzzword was gen AI equals a chatbot on your website,” she said. “We’ve left that way behind. When I meet with customers, when our teams engage and we talk gen AI, it’s everywhere in the value chain. Think of it more as any part of the production of product, the movement of product, the marketing, the delivery, end delivery to the customer can and is impacted by gen AI in a massively favorable way.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

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