New Aim and Google Cloud give retailers easy access to gen AI

New Aim Taps Google Cloud to Democratise Access to Generative AI and Big Data for Australian Retailers

 
Australia's largest private e-commerce company consolidates multiple cloud workloads with Google Cloud to streamline infrastructure and enable faster, simpler adoption of AI for its customers

New Aim, Australia's largest private e-commerce technology company, has selected Google Cloud to consolidate its digital infrastructure and make generative AI (gen AI) more accessible to Australian e-commerce businesses of all sizes.

New Aim has already reduced overall IT costs, strengthened cybersecurity, and boosted infrastructure performance – including increasing service uptime from 97% to 99% – since beginning the migration from its previous multicloud and on-premise environment to Google Cloud in March 2024. 

Moving to Google Cloud also gave New Aim one-stop access to artificial intelligence (AI) and big data capabilities that now sit at the core of AirOxy.AI, its insights platform designed to make generative AI more accessible to e-commerce retailers. The platform has garnered strong industry demand since its pilot launch at Online Retailer in July 2024. New Aim’s customers range from small “challenger” e-tailers to some of Australia’s most well-loved local brands, including Bunnings, Woolworths, Big W, and Baby Bunting.

“Our previous multicloud infrastructure came with growing complexity and costs that were proving challenging and risky to manage for our relatively lean IT team,” said Dr. Alex Ji, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Information Officer at New Aim. “In less than a year, Google Cloud helped us leap from an increasingly shaky multicloud approach to a single cohesive cloud environment that’s been significantly easier to manage while also delivering immediate efficiency dividends. As a result, we’ve been able to take advantage of AI far faster, and with much greater sophistication, than we’d thought possible for an e-commerce company of our size.”

Levelling the retail playing field

New Aim developed AimCore, its internal core platform to enable digital supply chain management, by using BigQuery to structure and analyse data from its product sourcing, end-to-end logistics, and warehousing services. These services power many retailers’ e-commerce operations and reach more than one in two households Australia-wide. 

AirOxy.AI was developed out of AimCore’s technology to enable e-commerce SMEs to run generative AI models tested and selected from the Model Garden on Vertex AI to create pricing insights, identify market trends, and even optimise the images that e-commerce retailers use for their online product listings. All of AirOxy.AI’s capabilities and data were built and reside on Google Cloud, with the platform’s native integrations eliminating the compatibility and complexity issues that New Aim had previously faced when combining various open-source and proprietary systems.

SME retailers, using Dropshipzone, New Aim’s subsidiary B2B2C marketplace, stand to be the biggest winners of AirOxy.AI’s capabilities. SME retailers will be placed in a stronger position to compete with their larger competitors with access to vital pricing insights and market trends to enable them to make better decisions and win over customers. Dropshipzone has more than 2,500 active retailers using the marketplace to start and scale their e-commerce businesses.

“Smaller e-commerce players often don’t have the critical mass of skills or funds to tap into AI at the scale and sophistication of larger global marketplaces. We wanted AirOxy.AI to fill that gap, but for that to happen, we ourselves needed a way to access world-class AI without overwhelming our engineers or overcomplicating our systems,” said Fung Lam, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at New Aim. “Google Cloud gives us that straightforward access to a whole world of top-tier gen AI capabilities in a single environment: they’ve democratised gen AI for us so we can do the same for our customers.”

Skills and simplicity in data infrastructure

Partnering with Google Cloud also helped New Aim reduce the cost and complexity of its cloud transformation. Google Cloud provided extensive engineering support and education resources to New Aim that helped the firm upskill its engineers at greatly reduced cost, while also tackling the local requirements of New Aim’s multiple international offices that had driven its original multicloud approach. New Aim now employs a range of Google Cloud solutions to automatically optimise its data for AI adoption while also securing it from threat actors and outage risks.

“Google Cloud is working with retailers around the world to make AI an essential ingredient throughout their businesses, by first consolidating, structuring, and streamlining their enterprise data as efficiently as possible,” said Matt Zwolenski, Director & CTO, Google Cloud Australia & New Zealand. “New Aim is proof that e-commerce firms of any size can tap into digital infrastructure that allows them to punch above their weight. New Aim’s vision resonates strongly with our own commitment to lowering the entry-level barriers to future-ready digital infrastructure, market-leading generative AI capabilities, and the growth potential they offer.”