The Debenhams Group, a prominent force in online retail boasting brands like Debenhams, PrettyLittleThing, boohoo, boohooMAN, and Karen Millen, is intensifying its integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to stimulate business expansion and enhance the customer shopping experience. The company has secured a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) aimed at optimizing its operations and rapidly scaling new brands through AI-driven innovations.
Debenhams has already harnessed AWS cloud services on its platform, where AWS’s serverless technology underpins the retailer’s thriving marketplace model. This technology facilitates the quick onboarding of third-party sellers, broadens the range of available products, and ensures a seamless purchasing experience for customers.
Building on this strong foundation, Debenhams is set to implement sophisticated technologies, such as Generative AI (GenAI), to boost operational efficiencies and refine personalization efforts.
Transforming the Shopping Experience with AI
By utilizing AI-generated content through Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed service that simplifies the development and scaling of GenAI applications—Debenhams Group will be able to automate product descriptions and translations across tens of thousands of items. This will lead to improved consistency, localization, and quicker time to market.
Automating product descriptions has made the process up to 20 times faster. Furthermore, translations into six different languages will occur automatically, requiring no additional effort. This capability allows products to be made available in multiple countries significantly faster, ensuring customers can access them promptly.
Additionally, the company’s Interactive AI Room Styler, co-developed through the AWS Prototyping investment program, allows customers to upload images, select their preferred design styles, and receive tailored decor recommendations that link directly to purchasable listings.
AI-enhanced product attribution and taxonomy will further streamline search and navigation, enabling customers to discover relevant products with greater ease and speed.
After a successful initial launch across Debenhams and its associated brands, the Group plans to extend AWS technology to its other labels, with boohoo poised to adopt AWS’s AI solutions in the coming weeks.
