The Most Interesting Thing About Amazon Go is its Audacity

Earlier this year, Amazon opened a new convenience grocery location to the public in Seattle called Amazon Go. What makes this store unique is that there are no checkouts or lines. You scan an app on your smartphone as you enter the store, you collect whatever groceries you like, and you leave. The technology built into the store knows what you took, and it’s charged to your Amazon account.

To make all of this work, they created an intelligent store leveraging dozens of cameras, piles of various sensors, computer vision, geofencing, and multiple forms of artificial intelligence with machine learning. The outcome is a store experience we’ve never seen before, but built on technology that organizations have been using for years, just not really in this combination or configuration.

It’s a pretty impressive feat, to say the least. Reports are that it works well, and there’s at least some speculation that with more hardware (cameras/sensors) and computing power, it might scale (and of course, conversely, there are doubts that with increased complexity that it could scale). But to me, it’s not building it that’s interesting; it’s that they had the audacity to do it.

While the technical accomplishment can’t be ignored, there’s a certain culture required for someone to dream up an idea like this, and then actually invest to execute it. Many organizations (especially those in more traditional industries like oil and gas) are struggling with implementing even one of the technologies that it took to build the Go store.

In addition, there’s an argument that it doesn’t even have a defensible business case (do convenience stores really see roadblocks from long line ups, and if they aren’t resolved, will the sector as a whole suffer?) Can you imagine a traditional organization investing time and money in developing this, without an iron-clad business case?

(Of course, there’s another argument that the implications to this are potentially dramatic. If it could scale, could you expand the platform to cover use cases where long lineups are a problem – maybe somewhere like a grocery store…hmm if only they had a place to test that…wait a second…)

No matter your view, I imagine if you’re a conventional retailer, you’re paying attention and maybe thinking differently about some of the projects you’ve identified as potentially building sustainable competitive advantage, but also difficult due to complexity or size.

Here’s an interesting exercise to try:

• Make a list of the audacious projects and resulting capabilities your organization has considered, but are either struggling with or have shelved entirely because of their complexity
• If your three largest competitors announced that they were finalizing and launching one of those capabilities the next week, how might your competitive positioning be impacted?
• What would happen to your competitive position if they launched all the capabilities on your list, at once, and you still had none of them?

An important (and often overlooked) element of digital transformation and building an intelligent enterprise is culture. Many older organizations will have to decide if the status quo will deliver the value creation they seek, or if they’ll need to embrace a new way of working that encourages this sort of audacity.

For many newer organizations, they’ve already built a culture around being audacious, and don’t know any other way to operate.