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Petra Schindler-Carter, AWS

In this interview from AWS re:Invent, Petra Schindler-Carter, director of retail and CPG at AWS, joins theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante to discuss the pivotal "revolution" currently reshaping the retail landscape. Schindler-Carter details how the industry has moved beyond the early hype of simple chatbots to implementing "invisible" generative AI that powers the engine under the hood. She explores critical shifts in consumer behavior and supply chain fragility, highlighting how retailers are using AI to solve complex problems like inventory allocation – citin... Read more

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Petra Schindler-Carter, AWS

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of re:Invent 2025. We're here in the Venetian tucked away in room 3708. Stop by and see us. My name is Dave Vellante taking over for John Furrier, who's out in San Jose today. Petra Schindler-Carter is here. She's the director of retail and CPG at retail giant Amazon. Good to see you. Thanks-

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Thanks for having us.

Dave Vellante

>> So much for coming in.

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Thanks for having me here, Dave.

Dave Vellante

>> So you are part of Amazon, part of AWS. Where do you fit in the organization and what's your role?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> So I have the honor of looking after the entirety of the retail and consumer goods and restaurants industry within AWS. So what that means for us is, as you know, we always have been super customer obsessed. So we work backwards from the customer, which in a big technology company means understanding the business needs by industry. So think of me as the voice of that industry within AWS.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, I'm going to love this conversation because I am a customer, and so we're going to work backwards from me. I don't know if I'm your typical customer, but we'll see. I'm sure you have a lot of different personas. But retail and CPG have gone through some massive disruptions, obviously. GenAI has created even more. What shifts are you seeing? What's the biggest shift, especially now as AI becomes pretty foundational to the industry?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Look, so I've been at Amazon for about 23 years now. A lot has changed. Despite all that, I would say this is a pretty pivotal moment. So we're almost saying this is another revolution for the retail industry. So I'd say three big areas of disruption and evolution. One is just customers expect ever more. They are assuming that the businesses can keep pace with them, have knowledge and context. So they want to traverse omnichannel from in store to online and have all that be seamless. So that's number one. Number two is, look, supply chain has always been difficult and a core challenge for these businesses. But you think of what happened in the last five plus years, the pandemic, global disruptions in the supply chain like the Suez Canal, there's a fragility and a brittleness in supply chain that I think keeps these retailers up at night. And then lastly, look, everybody is tightening their belts. There's challenges internationally. Tariffs are making it difficult, so these companies are looking for ways to save money.

Dave Vellante

>> So this is the whole working backwards from choiceful is the new buzzword, right, in your industry?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So I guess as a consumer, that means I'm being more selective. I'm just not taking any product. I'm doing more. What does that actually mean I'm doing more? More shopping, more research? I'm just going for the lowest price?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Yeah. Look, it depends. I think in some customer segments, certainly they are getting more and more educated. They're savvy about tools they're using. Their research appetite has increased. So they will go out of their way to find the right path to learn about specialty products, for example, and compare features and compare and contrast features. So retailers reflect on what that means for them. How much do they establish a destination on their own website, for example, to support that type of research. Other shoppers, and of course, there's a concentric circle, there will be an overlap, will be price conscious first and want to do that research. But I think the common factor is the bar has gone up. The bar has gone up significantly for brand owners, manufacturers, for restaurants, for any retailer to provide the service that keeps the customer coming back.

Dave Vellante

>> And we came out of COVID, it was a big shock, and we realized that we needed to do better, and so industries began to shore that up. And then we had this other shock of GenAI came in. So how are leading retailers using GenAI? How are they re-imagining the customer journey? Again, not just about personalization. You sort of touched on that earlier and that was in motion beforehand, but how I discover, how I get serviced. Loyalty programs seem to be... Talk about raising the bar, you have a lot of choices now as a consumer in terms of loyalty programs. So what are you seeing there?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> So first of all, Dave, I completely agree that if you go back 12, 18 months, the buzzword was GenAI equals a chatbot on your website, just an advanced version or not so advanced version of a thing that talks back to you. And we've left that way behind. So now when I meet with customers, when our teams engage and we talk GenAI, it's everywhere in the value chain. So 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 GenAI in a massively favorable way. So supply chain, again, that's super core to retail and in the most basic level, it's how much product should I make? Where should I ship it? Which distribution centers in the network do I need to place my product to be efficiently close to customers? How much of a given size do I put into a specific store so that I don't run out of the size eight jeans? There's a lot of art and science to it. And so 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 GenAI. And so that, almost every customer I meet with, when I ask them, "What keeps you up at night?" supply chain is in there. So think about topics like inventory allocation, how can GenAI and data science help do that calculation of where to put product? So we're seeing results north of 40% improvement in that inventory accuracy and placing it at the right place. Just order accuracy, you place an order, like you fully expect to get exactly what you ordered at the time that we promised you. That's really, really hard, but GenAI can help. So that's not the sexy feature on the website, but it's really what powers the engine under the hood. So that's a huge and a favorite one for me. Marketing, advertising, getting the targeting right, so using data and GenAI 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. 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. And so we're talking 20% plus improvements in click-through rates and performance of the advertising dollar. So that goes straight to their top and their bottom line.

Dave Vellante

>> What I'm inferring, Petra, from what you're saying is you had the tip of the iceberg before with chatbots, pre-gen AI was conditioned response, "Which of the following is you?" We still get that today, even in a return on Amazon. And it's unsatisfying, not so much for the return, but when you're chatting away. And then it became RAG-based chatbots which weren't very good. Now I'm hearing it's becoming invisible. Basically, the customer doesn't even know it's there.

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Exactly.

Dave Vellante

>> Just the overall experience is getting better. Is that a ?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> That is an excellent way of putting it. If you can't tell it's happening, that's probably the most elegant and impactful way of it. So it's like think of the best salesperson you've ever worked with who you have a conversation with and it's seamless. They know who you are. They anticipate your needs. They don't waste your time. I think that is the ideal shopping experience that we're trying to replicate. And 20 years ago, you still had the naysayers say, "Gosh, we'll never be able to sell clothing online." Now, you have companies like Adidas doing an amazing job with virtual try-ons on their site and just really stretching this technology in a place where it's useful and not a gimmick.

Dave Vellante

>> So you talked about supply chain earlier. That's obviously a huge challenge, maybe one of the most complex problems-

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> I would agree.

Dave Vellante

>> In industry. There's a combination of certainly data problems. You've got people, places, things and processes, so you've got this 4D map of the supply chain. How are you seeing agents, which have gone from assistance to now actually taking agency and data coming together, how are retailers solving that problem? Because data is everywhere, the supply chain, everybody has got different data formats. What patterns are you seeing? How are you helping there?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> I think the rollout of a true agentic workflow and system is the logical next step. So step one, get your data in order, map out the process that you're trying to fix. Like what waste are you trying to take out of a system? So think of waste also in the form of just archaic technologies like pieces of paper and handwriting. You'd be shocked or not how many retailers are still relying on human data entry in handwriting in a form to place an order. Because you might be ordering components or fabric if you're a fashion retailer from someone who's just not set up on their end to play with you through an API. But now we can adjust that handwriting and digitize it and use the information there. So that's step one. Step two then is, if I can see that pattern replay over and over, like a pattern such as I'm experiencing overage or an underage, I'm anticipating some external signal or driver, like a special event that's happening in a city that every time that event happens, my demand for certain product goes up. So rather than a human being, like a local sales manager or store manager saying, "Oh, I got to manually place another order," agents can now stitch that data together and say, "Oh, I see signal A, I'm going to a kickoff process B," and so on and so forth. And all that chain now put together is what makes the real difference. So it is important that retailers map out what that process looks like and also establish guardrails. So obviously we don't want agents to go haywire and wreak havoc. There is a tremendous amount of just focus on getting customer data privacy right. Prices cannot be subject to a fragility and a change that's without control. So we're really proud of our innovations that we've built and taken to customers that provide these security guardrails so that we can let the agents roam, but within the parameters that we're comfortable with.

Dave Vellante

>> I'm kind of surprised that tariffs haven't had a bigger impact. Seems like retailers have responded quite well in a business that's pretty thin margin as it is. And maybe there was some cushion in there from the pandemic, but so how much of the ability of retailers to withstand the potential disruption of tariffs is a function of technology, just preparation, pre-buying inventory, GenAI, how is it all shaping out do you think?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Look, some of it is just old brass tacks, being a merchant and being savvy about where you source from and how you put your product together. I have had some really interesting customer interactions and projects where companies have used GenAI and data in general to figure out alternate sources of product and just calculate how they can get to an outcome that... Essentially the outcome being a product that's priced such that my customers will still demand it, given the pressures that exist. But, Dave, absolutely, it's an extremely volatile environment right now. It's one of razor-thin margins as always. At AWS, we think of it as our responsibility to help our customers as a strategic partner figure out just how to run efficiently in these tough times.

Dave Vellante

>> How much of your time is spent on physical retail? Shrink is obviously a big thing. It seems like if I can reduce that, dropping right to the bottom line, you guys, Amazon itself has some experience in that regard. What are you guys doing there? What are you seeing?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> Look, it's anywhere from these very visible innovations that I'm sure you're familiar with like Just Walk Out you may experience at airports or in stadiums. But I think much more pervasively, you're absolutely right, just fraud detection is one, just doing a visual inspection of customer behavior in the store through cameras, lens solutions. But also going back to GenAI, we've done some really interesting work with some customers who are looking to equip their in-store personnel with more insights about their customers. So giving them a mobile app that quickly lets them tap into annual history of that customer to pick up feedback, voice of the customer and feed that back into the larger sentiment analysis. I think that's new. And I think it's another way of just freeing up some time where AI can help take out some of just the basic grind of retail tasks, like figuring out where a product is. We can do a better job providing inventory visibility and instead have that salesperson be ready to talk to you about like, "Hey, let's spend a little bit more time find the perfect product for you and give you some feedback." To me, that's a great vision and a great, a very... Again, going back to the core DNA of Amazon, we love that because it's all about delighting customers.

Dave Vellante

>> One of the keynotes yesterday, I can't remember who it was, you know how re:Invent is. Somebody said they think Amazon probably is, if not the largest deployer of robots is one of the, so that I think goes without saying. How are you seeing robotics play in both retail and CPG?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> We talked a lot about retail. I think manufacturing, consumer goods, food products, so much opportunity, whether it's robotics or IOT, connected, digitized factories where we can help these companies get ahead of downtime, anticipate any machine failures that would again disrupt the production process, which then has a massive downstream challenge in producing the final good and getting it to the customer. So we have fantastic examples, companies like Georgia Pacific where we've implemented early sensing of machine issues or downtimes and intercepting and improving the process. So huge area of opportunity. I think I spend time talking to my colleagues in other industries like automotive, for example, where I think that the bigger the product, the more expensive the product, I think the pressure has been much greater over the years to pull that innovation forward. But that's now definitely expanding and trickling down into other industries. So that's one of the fun parts of my job too, to say like, "What inspiration can I draw from automotive or from energy customers or financial services and bring that innovation into retail?" Because retail and consumer goods, they sometimes can be a little bit stuck in the past. Many of these brands have been around for a long time, and so there's still opportunity to modernize and just a lot of appetite and interest to move into the next century.

Dave Vellante

>> Petra, is sustainability still a thing? It seems like we don't talk about sustainability much anymore, but with all the DEI backlash and so forth, but the business case for sustainability is still there. What are you seeing particularly in CPG?

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> So actually, I will say the opposite. We talk about sustainability more than ever.

Dave Vellante

>> Good to hear.

Petra Schindler-Carter

>> And that's not just... Clearly Amazon itself has taken on a very ambitious and commendable set of goals around sustainability. But I work with customers like IKEA, who very much, if you look at IKEA's company principles, they share that. And it's actually really fun to be part of those conversations. And for sure, technology can help in avoiding waste, eliminating waste in the process and again, taking shrink out of every step of the way, which is, like you said, it's good for both the bottom line and it's good for the world as well.

Dave Vellante

>> I want to ask you about, you mentioned before, sometimes this industry is a little slow to respond because, "Hey, it's working. Why mess it up? It's risky. I'm already at low margins." But if I'm a retailer that wants to modernize my operations, what is the priority? Is it forecasting, supply chain, which is complicated? Is it computer-