How Flipkart is using automation to deliver your

products on time?
• Flipkart recently introduced robots, or what it calls automatic guided vehicles (AGVs), at its shipment sorting
centre in Bengaluru. These rectangular objects move on their own and place packages in designated slots
with minimal human intervention.
• At present, Flipkart has around 110 AGVs or "cobots", which can sort 4,500 packages every hour, compared
to the earlier 500 parcels per hour done manually.
• The supply chain network is a complex phenomenon, which includes multiple nodes like fulfilment centres,
sorting locations, delivery hubs, and the last-mile transit of delivering goods. All these elements have to work
in sync to ensure the right product is delivered to the correct address.
• According to EKART, the two key benchmarks it always keeps in mind are customer experience and the speed
of delivery.
• Flipkart- 150 million registered users.
• Today, Flipkart sells its products across 80-plus categories, servicing over 20,000 pin codes across the country.
• EKART’s Key Priority- It is looking to increase the use of automation, optimise intelligent decision-making
technology systems, and lastly, do all of this successfully to meet requirements of scale.
 The State of AI in the Enterprise
Key Findings from the Survey Conducted in 2018
• 20% to 30% of enterprises are early adopters, having implemented at least one AI prototype or production
application.
• Relatively simple low-hanging fruit projects prevail over more ambitious and complex moon shots.
• Only 24% of respondents to the 2018 survey cited “reducing headcount through automation” as one of their
top AI priorities
• 82% saying that their AI investments are paying off.

Two types of AI Projects-

• Moon shots tend to be highly ambitious, CEO-driven, large-budget projects with very high media visibility. In
contrast, low-hanging fruit projects are modest, invisible, and generally CIO-driven, designed to improve
operations, customer satisfaction and financial returns.
• companies should look at AI through the lens of business opportunities, not technologies.

Basic Challenges for early AI Adopters

• implementation difficulties
• integrating AI into the company’s roles and functions
• data privacy
Mr. Davenport concluded his presentation with a set of recommendations to help leverage AI
for competitive advantage:
• Think big: Figure out how AI can transform your business processes, business models and
overall strategy
• Start small: Begin with pilot projects and less ambitious goals
• Scale up: Develop a pipeline toward production and move along it
• Skill out: Offer AI training to augment the skills of the workforce and help them transition
to new jobs
• Put an ethical framework in place
• Appoint a company-wide AI leader
 Volkswagen: The scandal explained
• In September, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that many VW cars being sold in America
had a "defeat device" - or software - in diesel engines that could detect when they were being tested,
changing the performance accordingly to improve results.
• The EPA's findings cover 482,000 cars in the US only, including the VW-manufactured Audi A3, and the VW
models Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat. But VW has admitted that about 11 million cars worldwide, including
eight million in Europe, are fitted with the so-called "defeat device".
• Defeat Devices could sense test scenarios by monitoring speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the
position of the steering wheel.
• Result-The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the US.

What has been VW's response?

• VW has also launched an internal inquiry.
• My most urgent task is to win back trust for the Volkswagen Group - by leaving no stone unturned," Mr
Mueller said.
• With VW recalling millions of cars worldwide from early next year, it has set aside €6.7bn (£4.8bn) to cover
costs.
How widespread are VW's problems?
VW will recall 8.5 million cars in Europe, including 2.4 million in Germany and 1.2 million in the UK, and 500,000
in the US as a result of the emissions scandal.
No wonder the carmaker's shares have fallen by about a third since the scandal broke.
 EU testing rules need tightening(upgradation), too.
• Diesel cars in Europe operate with worse technology on average than the US.
• 90% of diesel vehicles didn't meet emission limits when they drive on the road. We are talking millions of vehicles

It's all another blow for the diesel market

• Diesel sales were already slowing, so the VW scandal came at a bad time.
• In the US, the diesel car market currently represents around 1% of all new car sales and this is unlikely to increase in the
short to medium term.
• In Europe the impact could be much more significant
 Is Amazon Unstoppable?
• Points for discussion:
1) As Amazon continues to expand globally (including India) should it stick to the aggressive “move fast and
break things” approach to growth? Or should it adopt a softer, less confrontational and more traditional
approach to growth?

2) How can it continue to grow without stirring up more legitimacy issues as evidenced by strong reactions of
politicians, labor unions, SMEs and frustrated regulators? What more needs to be done?

3) Is Amazon a tech company or retail company?

Amazon has two main businesses.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Cloud Servie Provider and a pioneer in cloud technology (Iaas and Paas). AWS
is surely a technology company. They make money by selling technology ‘products’ as a service. AWS represents
is a small percentage of Amazon’s revenue but the majority of the company’s profits.
Amazon.com is not a technology company, it is a retail company, as it makes money primarily by selling goods in
physical and electronic formats (i.e. kindle, audible).
As with most retailers, technology is an important component for Amazon’s retail business and a key enabler of
competitive advantage. That is different to being in a tech company.
At one point, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, suggested personalizaiton tecchnology ot be it’s main
source of competitive advantage. Today, one could argue their brand and logistics are more important for the
business
• Amazon 14 leadership Principles- “never say ‘that’s not my job,’ ” to “examine their strongest convictions with
humility,” to “not compromise for the sake of social cohesion,” and to commit to excellence even if “people may think
these standards are unreasonably high. “ ‘Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!’ ” Speed
matters
• Amazon is now America’s second-largest private employer. (Walmart is the largest.) It traffics more than a third of all
retail products bought or sold online in the U.S.; it owns Whole Foods and helps arrange the shipment of items
purchased across the Web, including on eBay and Etsy.
• Company’s fast-delivery policies have resulted in drivers speeding down streets and through intersections, killing people.
• In 2015, Amazon had roughly two hundred thousand employees. Since then, its workforce had nearly tripled. Bezos,
now fifty-five, had transformed as well, from a pudgy bookseller with an elephant-seal laugh to a sleek, muscled mogul
whose empire included a television-and-movie studio.
• Freed asked-“leaders are right a lot” really mean? Bezos explained, “If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be
flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details.
• PowerPoint was discouraged. Product proposals had to be written out as six-page narratives—Bezos believed that
storytelling forced critical thinking—accompanied by a mock press release. Meetings started with a period of silent
reading, and each proposal concluded with a list of F.A.Q.s,

• Freed loved Amazon’s focus on spinning its flywheels faster, and finding new markets where they could whirl.
• Everything Jeff does is to stop a big-company mentality from taking hold, so that Amazon can continue behaving like a
group of startups.
• When the Kindle was launched, in 2007, it sold out in less than six hours, and soon became one of the most popular
gadgets of the past quarter century.
• But when the Amazon Fire Phone was released, in 2014, it was a flop.
• Alexa—a name that was sufficiently familiar yet unusual enough to avoid too many accidental commands. Just four
months after releasing the disastrous Fire Phone, Freed revealed the Echo, a voice-activated speaker” The initial price
was a hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Today, you can buy one for half that, and fifty million homes have them.
• If Amazon sold a streaming device, it could collect more data on popular shows; if Amazon had that data, it could begin
profitably producing its own premium movies and television series; if Amazon made that content free for Prime
members—customers who already paid ninety-nine dollars per year for two-day delivery—then more people would
sign up for Prime; if more people signed up for Prime, the company would have greater leverage in negotiating with
UPS and FedEx; lower shipping costs would mean bigger profits every time Amazon sold anything on its site. The
Amazon Fire TV, as the device was named, soon became one of the most popular streaming devices on the planet.
Amazon Studios began producing premium shows, and before long it had won two Oscars for “Manchester by the Sea”
and eight Emmys for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” In 2017, the number of Amazon Prime subscribers surpassed a
hundred million.
• Amazon’s obsession with expansion made it the corporate equivalent of a colonizer, ruthlessly invading new
industries and subjugating many smaller companies along the way. In 2006, the company had launched Fulfillment by
Amazon, an initiative in which outside sellers—everyone from mom-and-pop venders to major Chinese
manufacturers—housed inventory inside Amazon’s giant warehouses and paid a fee for Amazon to handle logistics,
such as packing and shipping products and fielding customer-service calls. Companies enrolled in Fulfillment by
Amazon often appeared in the Buy Box, the top search listing on Amazon.com. To participate, many venders had to pay
about two dollars per item.
• BuyBoxer- sells its product on Amazon.
• Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said, “Amazon is a microeconomist’s wet dream. If you’re a consumer, it’s perfect
for maximizing the efficiency of finding what you want and getting it as cheap and fast as possible. But, the thing is, most
of us aren’t just consumers. We’re also producers, or manufacturers, or employees, or we live in cities where retailers
have gone out of business because they can’t compete with Amazon, and so Amazon kind of pits us against ourselves.”
• William Stolz, who has worked for two years at an Amazon warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, told me that he’s
expected to grab an item every eight seconds, and has seen co-workers injure their wrists, knees, shoulders, and backs by
repeatedly.
• Amazon doesn’t want humans, they want robots.
• AMAZON can be a hard place for women. A former senior female executive told me she counselled younger colleagues
that “it’s not the company’s job to create a work-life balance—it’s your job,” adding, “The idea of a company as a
caretaker is not our culture.” There is only one woman on Amazon’s S-Team, the group of eighteen executives who
largely run the firm,
• Amazon argues that criticisms of working conditions in its warehouses are unfair. Amazon pays all U.S.-based employees
at least fifteen dollars an hour—more than the minimum wage in many places—and full-time warehouse workers have
access to the same health and retirement plans as executives.
• Amazon has always been unabashed about being a cutthroat competitor. When the company started, in 1995, with fewer
than a dozen employees, Bezos considered naming it Relentless. (The company still owns the URL for relentless.com—it
redirects you to Amazon.com.) Amazonians know that outsiders want them to change, but listening to outsiders is not
one of the Leadership Principles.
• GM sold plenty of cars, but, unlike Ford, it wasn’t a product company—it was a process company.
• Silicon Valley is filled with product companies. Google invented two products—a spectacular search engine and a set of
algorithms for matching people’s online behavior to ads—that today deliver eighty-five per cent of its revenue.
Facebook invented (and acquired) addictive social-media products and then basically imitated Google’s ad-matching
algorithms, and gets ninety-eight per cent of its revenue from those products.
• Amazon is a process company. Last year, it collected a hundred and twenty-two billion dollars from online retail sales,
and another forty-two billion by helping other firms sell and ship their own goods. The company collected twenty-six
billion dollars from its Web-services division, which has little to do with selling things to consumers, and fourteen billion
more from people who sign up for such subscription services as Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited. Amazon is estimated
to have taken in hundreds of millions of dollars from selling the Echo. Seventeen billion came from sales at such brick-and-
mortar stores as Whole Foods. And then there’s ten billion from ad sales and other activities too numerous to list in
financial filings. No other tech company does as many unrelated things, on such a scale, as Amazon.
• Amazon is special not because of any asset or technology but because of its culture—its Leadership Principles and internal
habits.
• Amazon is special not because of any asset or technology but because of its culture—its Leadership Principles and internal
habits. Bezos refers to the company’s management style as Day One Thinking:
• In the early two-thousands, a San Francisco firm named Rain Design began selling an aluminum laptop stand that had a
graceful curve, and it became an unexpected best-seller on Amazon. Amazon then released its own stand, with a nearly
identical design, under the brand AmazonBasics, at half the price.
• Critics say that Amazon uses the torrent of data it collects each day—how long a customer’s cursor hovers over various
products, how much of a price drop triggers a purchase—to divine which products are poised to become blockbusters,
and then copies them
• Amazon is “hosting thousands and thousands of smaller businesses, but at the same time it is a competitor to them
• Amazon said that it is not its role to decide who is, and is not, authorized to sell various items. Amazon isn’t a mall, a
current executive told me. He described it as a Web site that offers unlimited shelf space for an almost unlimited number
of products and sellers. Some might call this a platform.
• Bezos Affair-Bezos’s involvement with Lauren Sanchez, a helicopter pilot who had founded a company, Black Ops Aviation,
that filmed promotional videos for Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin.
• Among America’s top five billionaires, he is the only one who has not signed the Giving Pledge—a program, created by Bill
Gates and Warren Buffett, that encourages the world’s wealthiest citizens to give away at least half their wealth.
• Financial filings show that Amazon likely paid no U.S. federal income tax in 2018. The company reported a negative federal-
tax charge on $11.2 billion in profits, in part because it received tax benefits by paying employees in stock rather than in
wages.
• America’s stores and malls and paying zero in taxes while doing it.”
• Bezos, who is reportedly worth a hundred and fourteen billion dollars, has so far donated less than three per cent of his
wealth to charity. Three months after the homelessness-tax incident, he pulled a Sloan-like move: he announced the
launch of a two-billion-dollar foundation named the Bezos Day One Fund. Since then, it has given grants to advocates for
the homeless, and it is creating a network of Montessori-inspired preschools in low-income communities.
• Amazon currently has more than a hundred and fifty warehouses, and many of them are in economically depressed areas,
where employment is scarce and politicians and workers are less likely to complain.
• Within six weeks, the owners of the Enquirer had announced its sale. Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos finalized their divorce in
July, and she received a thirty-eight-billion-dollar settlement. Shortly afterward, she announced that she was signing the
Giving Pledge.
• Inpax delivery partner, after accident partnership broken.
• Amazon announced that it would soon start guaranteeing to many customers delivery in one day, rather than two,
putting even more stress on couriers and workers.
• Four “C”s.
1) Concentration.-A high-ranking F.T.C. official told me, “The bigger a tech company becomes, the more they can bully, so
we need to put hard caps on how big companies like that can grow, on what they can acquire.”
2) Conflict of interest that comes from “both controlling the pipe and selling the oil.” If you do both, you will structure
your marketplace in a way that ultimately is self-dealing, and you will use the data from those who sell on your
marketplace to benefit yourself.” There’s a long history of the government forcing industries to separate distribution
and sales; for years, movie studios have generally been prohibited from owning movie theatres.
3) Concern is contracts. Big tech companies often make highly restrictive deals with smaller venders. Amazon retains a
contractual right to hold sellers’ revenues for long periods after a sale, and imposes limits on what data sellers can
share with other companies.
4) Complexity of current antitrust law. “You really have to be an expert, or hire an expert attorney, if you feel like one of
these companies is acting inappropriately
• Bezos adamantly refuses to consider slowing the company’s growth, fearing that its culture will break down if the pace
slacken
• And so in 2017 Freed quit Amazon, and not long afterward he founded Bamboo Learning, a company that builds voice-
activated education software.
• A product is a tangible deliverable that can be sold to external customers or used to fulfill internal company needs.
A process is a systematic way of doing something - for example, a process could be used to create a product.