Amazon Web Services looks to bring grocery into the cloud
Q&A: AWS retail chief Tom Litchford looks to bring grocery into the cloud
Tom Litchford serves as head of worldwide retail at Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary and the global market-share leader in cloud computing services and solutions. Before joining AWS in his current role in November 2017, he was vice president of retail technologies at the National Retail Federation (NRF). That followed more than 13 years at Microsoft and 18 years at NCR.
AWS has thousands of retailers as customers around the globe and serves every retail segment, including food and grocery. Its AWS Retail arm describes itself as “the only cloud born from retail and built for retailers.” Said Litchford, “We provide the broadest and deepest cloud platform out there. We have over 175 services today, across just about any meaningful workload that you can think of.”
With many retailers rethinking their businesses to adapt to a “new normal” — more so today amid the COVID-19 crisis — AWS aims to drive cloud adoption in data and IT migration and modernization, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and digital transformation. In an interview with Supermarket News Senior Editor Russell Redman, Litchford said a cloud-native approach can help grocery and other retailers optimize channels (brick-and-mortar and digital), reinvent supply chains and better anticipate and respond to changing customer behaviors, as well as improve efficiency and rein in costs for overall operations. Here are edited excerpts of the discussion.
