How Amazon Is Using AI To Better Understand Customer

Search Queries
SEJUTI DAS
17/03/2020

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-better-understand-customer-search-queries/

Being an early adopter of artificial intelligence and automation, Amazon

always had an edge in using AI to improve its business efficiencies. Not only
has it been using AI to enhance its customer experience but has been heavily
focused internally.

From using AI to predict the number of customers willing to buy a new product
to running a cashier-less grocery store, Amazon’s AI capabilities are designed
to provide customised recommendations to its customers. According to
a report, Amazon’s recommendation engine is driving 35% of its total sales.

One of the main areas where Amazon is applying continuous AI is to better

understand their customer search queries and what is the reason they are
looking for a particular product. For an e-commerce company to make relevant
recommendations to its customers, it is not only crucial for them to know what
their customers searched for, but it is also critical to understand why a
customer is searching for a product. Understanding the context can help the
retailer to recommend complementary items to its customers, and Amazon is
intent to work out this puzzle by applying AI to the problem.

In a recently posted blog, Amazon discussed using AI and machine learning

to predict the context from their customers’ search queries. This system has
been aimed to augment the quality of search results on Amazon.com platform,
which indeed intended towards enhancing the overall Amazon’s shopping
experience.

Explaining further, in a paper accepted to the ACM SIGIR Conference on

Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, Amazon researchers described
how most retailers use product discovery algorithms to look for correlations
between queries and products; however, Amazon used their AI to identify the
best matches depending on the context of use. Therefore the system predicts
activities like “running” from customer queries like “Adidas men’s pants” or if
an Amazon customer enters the query “waterproof shoes”, is she looking to
go for a weeklong hike?

According to Amazon, predicting the intent of the query is a significant

component of information retrieval which in turn, improves the relevance of
the results through an understanding of latent user intents in addition to
explicit query keywords. The researchers believe this might improve people’s
shopping experience by matching only high-quality products to search
queries.
Training The System

The first step of the process was to train the system for which the team had
to build a data set. In order to build the data set, the team assembled a list of
173 context-of-use categories divided into 112 activities — such as reading,
cleaning, and running — and 61 audiences — like a child, daughter, man, and
professional — based on common product queries. They used standard
reference texts to create aliases for the terms they used to denote the
categories. Such as for the category ‘father’ they included ‘dad’, ‘daddy’,
‘pops’ etc. or for ‘mother’ they included ‘mum’, ‘mommy’, ‘mom’ etc. and
then they used their in-house dataset to co-relate million of their products to
particular query strings. They also scoured online reviews of their products to
label them with their category terms and their aliases — also known as simple
binary classification.

The in-house dataset that Amazon used, correlates their query strings with
products according to an affinity score — from 1 to 15, where a low score
indicates a weak correlation. But, to train their context-of-use predictor
system, Amazon researchers created another data set, where each entry was
labelled with three data items — a query; a product ID, which has been added
by context-of-use categories; and the affinity score derived from the in-house
dataset. This data set was then divided into two smaller sets — one annotated
according to activity and one according to the audience, and from each of
those smaller datasets they constructed two more — one with high-affinity
score of 15 and one which was low as 8. This resulting data set was then used
to train six different machine learning models.
How Amazon Has Reorganized Around Artificial Intelligence
And Machine Learning
Blake Morgan

https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/07/16/how-amazon-has-re-organized-around-
artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/?sh=3f45e39a7361

In honor of Amazon Prime Day, let’s take a look at the inner workings of this company
that is pushing the bounds of innovation, not only with Amazon Prime, but the many
other cutting-edge management strategies.

The company that sets the tone for so many aspects of customer experience is breaking
down internal barriers and showing how other companies can do the same. Amazon,
a leader in customer experience innovation, has taken things to the next level by
reorganizing the company around its AI and machine learning efforts.

Amazon Uses An AI Management Strategy Called The Flywheel

Amazon’s approach to AI is called a flywheel. In engineering terms, a flywheel is a

deceptively simple tool designed to efficiently store rotational energy. It works by
storing energy when a machine isn’t working at a constant level. Instead of wasting
energy turning on and off, the flywheel keeps the energy constant and spreads it to
other areas of the machine.

At Amazon, the flywheel approach keeps AI innovation humming along and

encourages energy and knowledge to spread to other areas of the company. Amazon’s
flywheel approach means that innovation around machine learning in one area of the
company fuels the efforts of other teams. Those teams use the technology to drive their
products, which impacts innovation throughout the entire organization. Essentially,
what is created in one part of Amazon acts as a catalyst for AI and machine learning
growth in other areas. Amazon is no stranger to AI. The company was one of the first
to use the technology to drive its product recommendations. But as AI and machine
learning grow, the flywheel approach has become a keystone to Amazon’s expanding
business – a central stone at the summit of the company, connecting the organization
together. This is particularly unique at a time when many companies silo their AI
efforts and don’t integrate them into the overall company.

AI Is Not Located In One Particular Office At Amazon – It’s Everywhere

AI isn’t located in a single office at Amazon, and information is spread throughout

departments. Machine learning technology is used by the product recommendation
team to improve its product forecasts, and those insights are shared throughout the
company. AI and machine learning powers three popular Amazon products: Alexa, the
Amazon Go Store, and the Amazon recommendation engine.

The Amazon Echo, which features AI bot Alexa, has been one of the company’s most
popular forays into machine learning. Amazon faced an uphill battle at the beginning,
especially as it was one of the first companies to try its hand at creating a voice-
powered virtual assistant that could fit on a countertop. Once the technology started
to come together, divisions across the company realized that Alexa could be beneficial
for their products. Some of the first skills for Alexa were integrations with Amazon
Music, Prime Video, and personalized product recommendations from an Amazon
account. Many companies now have Alexa skills that add value to the customer’s life
such as Liberty Mutual and Capital one. Liberty Mutual provides auto insurance
information and Capital One allows customers to make a payment through their
Amazon device.

The cashier-less Amazon Go store also took advantage of the wealth of data to track
customer shopping trends. Data from customers’ smartphone cameras tracks
shopping activities and not only helps Amazon Go, but can also be shared with the
machine learning team for continued development.

AI also plays a huge role in Amazon’s recommendation engine, which generates 35% of
the company’s revenue. Using data from individual customer preferences and
purchases, browsing history and items that are related and regularly bought together,
Amazon can create a personalized list of products that customers actually want to buy.

Creating A Cohesive Customer Experience With Artificial Intelligence

Data from these three main pillars of the company work together to create a cohesive
customer experience. A customer can visit the Amazon Go store to get a few items for
dinner, ask Alexa to look up a recipe and the product recommendation engine can
determine that the customer likely needs to purchase a certain type of sauce pan.
Instead of fighting against each other, different divisions share their innovative
knowledge to provide a customized and cohesive customer experience.

Amazon has come a long way since its early beginnings in AI and machine learning.
The company now sells its machine-learning approach through Amazon Web Services
to clients including NASA and the NFL. By taking advantage of AI advancements and
applications in other areas of the company, it offers personalized AI solutions to large
and small businesses.

In a world where so many companies are hung up with bureaucracy and silos, it is
refreshing to see Amazon break down the walls to encourage innovation and growth
throughout its entire organization. If other companies want to succeed and stay on the
cutting edge of new technology, they might also want to consider a new organizational
approach like the flywheel.

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author of

"More Is More."