TRANSCRIPT:

Brian: Welcome everyone to Friday 15 with Master B2B. We’re going to do a report from the field and Andy, you and I this week were in Seattle, Washington at the Amazon Business Reshape Conference where we had really a great opportunity to meet with all sorts of folks both at Amazon and from the community at Amazon and Amazon Business. So we’ll talk more about that. We have a special guest. So, hang on for just a minute here and we’ll get them into the program. But first, you know, many folks don’t necessarily know what Amazon Business is. So, we thought we’d take a minute to kind of explain that Amazon business is the same website as Amazon. It’s not a different website. You log in with business credentials and you’re able to access features, all kinds of features specifically for business buyers. There are teams of people now Amazon has in the field working on different aspects of recruiting buy side buyers who are making purchases through Amazon business as well as sellers. That’s new for Amazon relatively speaking. I mean historically Amazon has been much more about just the ecom experience. They’re they allow pricing tools there’s business Prime a whole set of features. So, it’s really a Amazon’s effort to pursue the whole B2B side of purchasing. And this year, Andy, Bank of America says they will do 83 billion. For context, Granger does about 17 billion. Right. It’s this is not just office supplies. It’s across a lot of different categories. In fact, Andy Jassy says, “We believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible to date.” So really, you know, amazing. potential I mean they didn’t talk about Amazon in their filings for Amazon business excuse me in their filings for years now all the way up to the CEO they’re talking about it it’s clearly a major initiative and we were at the Reshape conference Andy what was that about well first of all I’m betraying my age I was there when they changed the name from Amazon supply to Amazon business Wilson who used to run the group called me and said hey want to chat and then he described what they were doing and I’m like well that seems like a different kind of approach I think a better approach and it’s hard to believe that was 10 years ago. Amazing. So it was almost poetic that you and I were there together at the Reshape conference which is really a conference targeted at procurement professionals right the people who buy things on mass for for companies they’re largely compensated based on how much money they can save and I think Amazon’s angle with this among many is that they can aggregate tail spend help control spending which is what procurement professionals do. So, in many ways, it’s ideally suited for that. But the whole show was really about that. There were but it wasn’t all just, you know, serious stuff. 

So, we havea very special guest, Natalia Montouri. And we’ll bring you onto the stage here.  Natalia, can you hear us? Okay, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Perfect. Excellent. Yes.  Natalia is a director at Amazon Business and one of the one of the superstars at Amazon. We’re really excited to have you. We had the chance to sit down and talk one-on-one with you, but why don’t you tell our audience what your role is, what do you do at Amazon business. 

Natalia: Thanks so much for having me and thanks so much for coming to Reshape. I agree it was a great few days together with customers and analysts and all sorts of different people in the procurement world. I’ve been at Amazon for almost 13 years. And the last year I’ve been , in Amazon business. So, I was at Reshape last year and this is sort of my one-year anniversary with Amazon Business. I work on a couple of different things for Amazon Business. One of them is the thirdparty sellers. So, sellers that sell to B2B customers and helping sellers to sell to B2B customers. I also work on services which we should talk more about because that was one of the highlights of Reshape and that includes both restock as well as IT services. I also lead a group focused on socially responsible purchasing. So customers who want to buy from small diverse local sustainable suppliers, we have tools and ways to help them do that. and finally, we’re starting to tinker a bit in the grocery space because we keep hearing from customers that they want to have access to that type of selection. Think bananas in the breakroom, milk, those types of things. You know, a party you want to put together. and that’s a big space that we’re looking at as well. 

Brian: I will say from a business perspective, one of the highlights was that restock program and services, you know, I’m looking at vending machines, you know, you guys are doing I mean this is like this is awesome stuff you guys are doing. Tell us more about that. 

Natalia: So we launched the program actually part of the program last year at Reshape and it was really fantastic because we did a panel this year about this program and I’ll share some of the new things we launched as well but the customers on the panel came to reshape last year and they saw our display and for folks who weren’t at Reshape I would say across the floor and Brian and Andy can keep me honest the booth that had the biggest crowd was the services booth and there in that booth we had the vending machine we also have a locker solution that we launched as well and then we have some IT services that are new that we are launching as well and essentially what we’re hearing from customers is that they it’s not just about the product sales but what we layer on top of it and you ask like why did we do this well everything we do at Amazon starts with the customer we’re not interested whipping things up that aren’t valuable to our customers and so in the business space, as you noted, we are still fairly young, you know, 10 years, and we’re still building things that customers really, really value.

And so, we heard from customers that they were looking for these additional services, and we built that, started off last year with this vendor manage, inventory, and vending. And then we layered on lockers this past year and then this IT offering as well. 

Brian: So tell us about Rufus. We know you launched Rufus for B2C recently and it really was kind of interesting. $10 billion in sales. This one caught my eye. 60% more likely to convert. I think it kind of answers itself, but tell us a bit about why you decided to migrate Rufus over B2B. 

Natalia: We launched the Amazon business assistant. That’s our AI solution at the moment. and it’s we all use ChatGPT right we all like this conversational approach to doing business and that is what this is in the B2B procurement context so opportunities to save spend anomalies bulk purchasing opportunities selection elevation opportunities so that’s where the com that’s the point is that you can do all of these things now through the conversational format. In the last session of Reshape, we had Ari Shapiro there. He’s a award-winning journalist. And one of the phrases that he had was, and I thought it was so interesting, “AI is never going to be as bad as it is today.” Like, I like that. It was like I would say, you know, for folks who are testing out all all of the tools, I’m not just saying Amazon business assistant, actually, it’s pretty good. But all of our tools are only going to get better. 

And we’re going to get better, too, right? We’re going to figure out how to use them in smarter ways. Like they can do things that we’re not tapping into, right? So, we should all be looking towards the future, right? And how we integrate, but this is our we we talked a lot about AI, not throughout the entire Reshape conference. That was clearly a topic on the minds of our customers in open conversations as well as closed door conversations. And so we’re excited to hear from customers what they think about Amazon business assistant and we are I would say just getting started. 

Brian: That’s what I love about Amazon. You guys stay true to that customer focus even at the scale you’re at. It’s incredible. The other thing that I saw was interesting. Shel talked about the trucks right on you guys now have trucks. I mean you it’s amazing tell you like I was at Accelerate – that was a big theme at Accelerate the Accelerate conference was you guys are a fulfillment company we did a episode on this a couple months ago so tell us about that now you’re rolling trucks around too.

Natalia: The customer need is they want direct deliver. They want palletized delivery. They want to have that familiarity that brand is actually really important. Think about even from a security standpoint like that truck comes in It’s not a non-descript truck. It is an Amazon business truck. That’s for sure. In many cases, same drivers, you know, same routes. Yeah. So, there is a bit of that consistency which is particularly valuable in a business context. So, we’re super we’re really excited about these trucks and they’ve, you know, they started rolling out to some metro areas that we’re going to continue to in like everything, right? We start here, we continue to increase our coverage. we’re, you know, I have yet to see one in the wild. but I’m excited to be able to see that for but this is this was a big undertaking for our team and we have we get questions too from businesses often about targeting business buyers right so you guys are offering now business advertising which is something rolled out recently.

It just makes sense. Advertising is all about a message targeted to an audience and we have a specific audience the business buyer right so no this This this very simple and so we’ve been working on our ad products so that our sellers and vendors can target those business buyers and that not only means targeting the that audience but also being able to have the right messages for that audience business discounts bulk buying even if you’re selling the same product that being able to show it in a a large pack that’s more relevant for that business audience and I will say so as I mentioned at the beginning I work with are thirdparty sellers and they have adopted this product quite well and what they’re saying is they’re seeing great rorowaz from it because business buyers again they have a different profile they buy more units per purchase they return less they convert higher they’re professional buyers right right and so we have to get that the right messages in front of them and that’s that’s something that we’ve been working on and we’re really excited with the early results of this ads product awesome