After years of pandemic-related business disruption, it’s invigorating to consider 2023 “The Year of Profitability.”
But when it comes to driving profitability, there’s a new player on the board — one all Amazon sellers need to be paying attention to.
Artificial intelligence (AI).
The first few months of 2023 have brought a deluge of AI advancements: Microsoft rushed to incorporate ChatGPT into their Bing search engine; Google pulled the covers back on Bard, their proprietary AI; even Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the AI wagon.
It’s suddenly dangerous not to embrace this exciting new tech.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Amazon has thrown its hat in the ring.
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On April 13, 2023, Amazon announced its entry into the AI fray, stating that “Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools that can help Amazon Web Service [AWS] customers — businesses who run their operations on Amazon's data servers — build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and make and classify images based on prompts.”
Imagine a company that sets up their own custom AI tools using Bedrock, for instance. Their marketing department then uses those tools to create a targeted campaign for their new product.
By simply issuing a few instructions, Bedrock:
The company saves time, energy, and people power by offloading much of their everyday thinking onto the AI.
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While it’s still in its early rollout phase, Bedrock is Amazon’s answer to other AI technologies, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, which are both part of the OpenAI family.
Amazon makes most of its money through AWS, which provides computing and networking options to a large part of the world. Bedrock will run native to that environment, providing development tools that allow AWS users to create their own AI solutions.
In that sense, Bedrock isn’t fundamentally different from other AI offerings.
Instead of providing massive in-house AI models, Amazon’s Bedrock toolkit will give customers access to top AI providers, whose tools they can then customize with their own data and deploy in their apps.
Bedrock users will be able to perform specific tasks by selecting from a range of machine-learning “foundation models,” or models trained on troves of raw data. These include access to services such as:
With the amount of data available at Amazon’s fingertips — through both AWS and its retail marketplace — scalability and customizability will no doubt be a hallmark of the platform going forward.
But what does it mean to play in the Amazon AI sandbox now?
The biggest benefit?
Stability.
The support and backing of a juggernaut like Amazon lends many positive checkmarks to a new offering like Bedrock. The significance of Amazon’s investment in AI and the future of AI technology cannot be understated.
With Amazon backing this project, sellers can expect quick updates, improvements, and repairs going forward, making Bedrock a potentially central and stable part of the selling experience.
As always, there are potential drawbacks, such as:
Data privacy is also a top general concern around AI. To address privacy concerns, Amazon has stated that it won’t rely on user input for training its language models. This means businesses, ideally, can maintain their data privacy while using Bedrock.
For most technological advancements, early adopters often benefit most.
Usage increases as technologies emerge, which often means that competitive advantages reset back to the usual things that score the win: hard work and sound business practices.
Figuring out how to make the best use of a new technology often means leaping out ahead of the competition. Early adopters of Bedrock will benefit most from the increased profitability this toolkit will offer.
An AI-powered world isn’t just the future. In many ways, it reflects the here and now.
Early adopters are already using existing AI tools, and Amazon’s Bedrock will give AWS users a whole new toolkit to complete business-enhancing creative tasks. It’s a safe prediction that most entrepreneurs will be using AI or AI-driven features in the not-too-distant future.
But AI doesn’t change the basics of business itself. Nor does it change the need for other sorts of tools that help sellers optimize their operations and drive profits.
Protect your profitability for the future with Carbon6’s ecosystem for ecommerce, including smarter inventory management with SoStocked, reimbursement services with Seller Investigators, and results-driven PPC management with PPC Entourage.
With the right combination of tools, you can not only weather the AI tidal wave but use it to glide into better business.
