Be Prepared for Retail Today - Live from #NRF2025| CDW
(bright music) - I'd like to welcome you all to our session, "Tomorrow's retail: Innovating today to ensure your business is ready for the future." We appreciate you being with us today. We know that there are a lot of great sessions that you could be attending this morning and we're honored that you took the time to join us here. My name is Andy Szanger from CDW. If you're not familiar with CDW, we are a multinational systems integrator that's been helping retailers do amazing things for more than 40 years. We help our clients with everything from strategy, ideation and planning, to procurement, system development, design, as well as deployment and ongoing managed services to make sure you have the technology to achieve amazing things and use technology as a competitive advantage for your brand.
I'm honored today to have a great panel for you. With me is Gina Cox, our senior industry advisor for retail. We have Ran Hu, director of Strategic Business Development of NVIDIA. And lastly, I want to call out the fact that some of you may have joined us today expecting to see Gareth Hughes from Estee Lauder with us.
Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, Gareth was not able to join us today. However, I think you'll be delighted to have Nathan Cartwright from CDW with us today in his place. Nathan is our chief architect of artificial intelligence and he's working with some of our retail clients across the country, and the globe for that matter, to achieve amazing things through the use of artificial intelligence. I've personally been with CDW for approximately 30 years now.
A little more than that now. And prior to that, I was an assistant store manager in charge of operations for a big box retailer. And that really gave me an understanding of how we can use technology to help our customers improve their customer experience, improve operational efficiencies, and reduce risk from their business.
And so Gina, I'd love for you to tell the audience a little bit about your background 'cause you've worked for some amazing customer-centric brands in the past. So if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at CDW. - Thanks, Andy, and thanks, everyone, for attending. It is great to see you all here and I'm hope you are having an awesome NRF. So I come from the retail background, 25 plus years.
It goes so fast, it's so crazy. Working in IT for Nordstrom, I was an IT director, I was an IT director at REI and then I was VP of IT at Blue Nile, a jewelry company. Incredible fun career. I've seen almost everything you can see, seen all the rise of all the technologies, all the fun stuff. And currently, I am a senior retail advisor for CDW.
It is a dream job for me. I get to go around and talk to many retailers of all sizes to really talk about art of the possible, what's the strategy, what's working, what's not. And then I also work with a lot of vendors, the CDW partners to also see what they're seeing and we just get a talk about where we should go, the trends, what's real, what's not.
And it's just been really fun. - [Andy] Great. Thanks, Gina. And we're thrilled to have our amazing partner, NVIDIA with us on stage. Ran, great to see you.
If you don't mind, maybe give a little background on yourself as well. - Sure. Sure, first of all.
- [Gina] Oh here. - First of all, very exciting to be here and I spent about 15 plus years in retail. So when I first graduated, I spent a few years in Procter & Gamble in the consumer packaged goods industry leading different initiatives from project engineer to brand manager. And then I spent the next seven years at Amazon, leading the category of home innovation at Amazon.
And I joined NVIDIA in 2023. It's been a exciting ride since then, being able to see how some of the technology we're gonna talk about including AI and generative AI is revolutionizing retail and see all the innovation and new use case bring to customers as well as how that is improving the overall like revenue and reduce the cost for retail. So very exciting to be here. - [Andy] Thank you so much, Ran. And Nathan, obviously, you work quite a bit with NVIDIA and our clients on implementing AI solutions and understanding how it can help them do amazing things.
If you don't mind share with the audience a little bit about your background. - Yeah, sure thing. So I've been around CDW for about 14 years. I've done everything from Cisco networking, collaboration, and then I actually started our customer experience team using AI for those customer interactions and customer engagement. Now I'm the chief architect for AI.
So my role is to provide thought leadership around artificial intelligence and how do we use that technology to meet our customers business challenges. - Excellent, thank you. All right, well, so Gina and I were here last year and we've been speaking at the NRF big show for the last few years in a row. And you know, last year when we were here at this time, we sat in a room similar to this and we're speaking about what we expected to be happening throughout the year. And I think as we sat here and for those of you that were likely at the show last year, AI was everywhere, right? As you walked around the floor, if a company had the letters, A and I in their name, they called themselves an AI company.
And ultimately though, throughout the year, it really came down to what was real, what was attainable, and ultimately understanding what use cases can be leveraged that can actually drive revenue and reduce cost and improve operational efficiencies in the stores. Because too many people were really starting with AI. You know, I've been in the industry now, again, about 30 years as I mentioned. And you know, when we go back probably 15 or so years ago, cloud was all the buzz. And we saw the same thing happen then that we see now happen with AI.
Someone hears the term "AI" and all of the great promises that it can help you achieve and they try to just throw AI use cases at things, right? Try to solve for things. And we really talked a lot about, you have to make sure that you're starting with the strategy and not the technology or the solution if you really wanna achieve true success and the ultimate ROI from your projects. If you're starting with a technology that you're trying to force a use case on, you're far less likely to achieve the full potential of that ROI. And lastly, we talked about where we were in last year at this time was really retailers trying to figure out how do I harness the power of AI? What can we truly do with it? And ultimately, what we said was we need to really take a step back, understand your data, because at the core of what AI is, it is taking your information and making something out of it. That can mean a lot of different things, whether we're talking about generative AI, providing insights into your business, but at the core of what AI is doing, it is taking information and inputs and making something out of it. And if you don't have a true grip on what your data is, you're never going to be able to achieve the ultimate success there.
But Gina, as the year went on, you meet with clients on a daily basis. What did you hear from our clients throughout the year as 2024 unfolded? - Yeah, it was very interesting. And we also do at CDW, a retailer survey annual out there. So we also ask these questions too. And Andy, you were talking about how last year everyone's like AI, AI, AI, and it was great, but we all know this was a tough year. It wasn't as bad as COVID.
So everyone's thankful it's not as COVID, we didn't have the supply chain issues. But it really came down to what is the best way to spend my money to get into ROI? Everyone knows retailers have a operational budget you have to spend. And this year ,there wasn't a lot of discretionary left. But retailers did take advantage of that. You saw advances in self-checkout, how many kiosks have popped up? A lot of the AI was just around your customer and marketing analytics. I know it was an exciting year, we saw advances, but still, it had to have a business case.
You had to have that immediate return. - Excellent. Ran, obviously, NVIDIA is, you know, at the core of everything that is AI and involved in so many conversations. What about from your standpoint, what did you see happening throughout the year? What were you hearing from retail clients? - Yeah, so on my side, just to building on the marketing and advertising, so I used to be a brand manager and P&G. Just in the past like two years, I've seen how some of the new talk technology such as generative AI, being able to, you know, like include the overall efficiency of producing ads. Have, you know, advertising copy, etc.
So instead of me talking about the different use case, I like to play a video from NVIDIA retail, sharing the use case. (calm music) - [Narrator] I am a helper. Bringing endless possibilities to life. (uplifting music) Guiding us to better answers faster. (uplifting music continues) I am delivering on every promise. Predicting what comes next, simulating physical environments to meet real world challenges.
(bright music) I am anticipating every need, making everyday tasks a little easier. (bright music) Delivering a better future for us all. I am AI, brought to life by NVIDIA and inspired minds everywhere. (uplifting music) - Well, some amazing things that you can see obviously what retailers and how they were actually executing by leveraging AI.
I know that you also, in addition to CDW, doing a lot of our own research, NVIDIA also conducts quite a bit of research. And so where are we seeing, you know, retailers using AI? Where are retailers in their journey as far as adopting it? Can you talk a little bit about that? - Yeah, sure. Where we see from, you know, 2023 to 2024 is there's a lot of, you know, POC and pilot. And as we're closing to 2024, we've seen more production. So some of the use case in the AI space is like shopping assistant.
So for example, instead of the traditional search, you go into, you know, input a key search word. With gen AI technology, you're able to have a very natural conversation with the shopping assistant. For example, I was in Hawaii for Christmas holiday and when I, you know, was looking for like things I need to bring to a trip, instead of searching for sunscreen, I can just talk to the shopping assistant and asking, you know, "I'm going to Hawaii, like, what do I need to bring?" It will provide me the list of the like merchandise, you know, recommended to me. So I think that, you know, from like gen AI technology fundamentally change, you know, how we interact with the e-commerce. And I think that's one of the key use case.
We're very excited. And right before NRF, we also announced our own blueprint for retail shopping assistant. I encourage, you know, every one of you to check it out NVIDIA retail website. Essentially, we're providing a framework for you to leverage, you know, different NVIDIA technologies, to create your own shopping assistant.
Whether that's for, you know, putting the furniture together or for like virtual try on. And I know like CDW has also adopted some of our blueprints. And another area we've seen getting attraction is as we're continuing see, especially on the edge side, you know, happens in the store as some of the language model are, you know, specific getting smaller, being able to use for the edge computing, we're able to see some of the use case such as, you know, leveraging the vision language model to do the summarization of the videos, you know, in the stores. So as a security person, instead of spending, you know, hours of time, you know, reviewing the videos, the generative AI is able to behave, let's say, as a security guard to alert you when there is abnormal behavior happens in the store. So those are some of the new emerging use case we're seeing in the space.
- [Andy] Excellent, thank you. And Nathan, obviously, you're speaking to a lot of customers about how to leverage the power of AI. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that we're hearing from our clients? - Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we've been getting a lot of questions about is how do we use generative AI for marketing and sales content generation? And actually in our booth we have a demo and we'll show a video clip here in a moment that we use generative AI and agentic frameworks to create the script for the video, create the images video, and also the voiceover for that as well.
And by doing this, you increase your time and speed to market. You don't have to wait weeks or months for an agency to create those videos 'cause usually, they're pretty short videos. But you can also do a lot of personalization. So like another use case for this is a customer buys something from your store. And you wanna send them kind of a thank you video or maybe there's another product they might be interested in.
You can do that automagically here. And you know, again, kind of increase that time to get that message to your customer. The other one is for global reach in multiple languages, it's easy to create those videos in multiple languages at the same time in batch. So that way, you don't have to pay translators and voiceover actors as well. And also allows you to free up your creative team for those more challenging tasks and that you know, some instead of something simple like a short 30-second video.
And then we can create larger volumes of videos as well. Like for example, CDW, we're gonna use it for our website. We have over 200,000 some products that are listed on cdw.com and with this, we can actually create videos personalized for either the customer or the product in general relatively easily. And we have an example here of a video we created that we'll show now.
- [Narrator] Welcome to the future of personalized video creation. Imagine turning data into stunning videos in just minutes. Pull from your media library and stop content, even generate unique visuals with Sora or Adobe Firefly. Agents dynamically craft scripts based on your branding, ensuring every detail is tailored and accurate.
With support from multiple languages, easily reach global audiences, create content that speaks directly to your customers no matter where they are. The possibilities are endless, streamline, personalized, multilingual. Discover how you can revolutionize video creation today. (techno music) AI powered by CDW Technology solutions.
- And all that was created with a short prompt and a large language model agent. And the agent went out and created all that content on its own. The other technology we're showing off in our booth that's really becoming big with customers. And CDW as well, we're actually using, the video created generation, but also these virtual humans that we're showing off in the booth. So virtual human has a lot of different use cases and reasons to adopt it. One of the things that's pretty common is, you know, at least for me, I wouldn't be like a support anytime.
I don't really get a whole lot of time between meetings for personal phone calls. So it's always nice to be able to have somebody to talk to. These virtual avatars can be on your website, your mobile app, or even as a kiosk in your stores.
The other big point here I wanna shout out is the accessibility feature. Our avatars can do multiple languages. So for instance, if somebody comes up and speaks to it in Spanish, it's gonna respond in Spanish. Like we have a customer working with now where they have some locations where they may not have a Spanish speaker that always gonna be on shift, but they're in a heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhood. So again, meeting your customer, you know, where they are.
And we do this by a couple different ways. AI natural language, of course. So speech recognition, text-to-speech, but also using large language models to do that translation and also have a more conversational aspect to it instead of those kind of pre-canned answers. So we'll play a short video of what we've built and come by our booth and you can try it out for yourself.
Good morning, Ash. How are you doing today? - Hey there, I'm doing well. Thanks for asking. Just brewing up some virtual coffee vibes here. How can I make your day a little more caffeinated? What can I get started for you today? - [Nathan] Let's do a macchiato, please.
That sounds really good. - A macchiato, it is. Do you have any preference for flavored syrup, milk option or dipping stick with that? And can I get your first name for the order? - [Nathan] No dipping stick, and let's do caramel syrup.
- Great choice with the caramel syrup. How about the milk option for your macchiato? We've got whole milk, oat milk, 2%, or skim. And I'll still need your first name for the order. - [Nathan] Oh, sure thing. Sorry, my name is Nathan and can I do whole milk please? - No worries at all, Nathan.
A macchiato with caramel syrup and whole milk coming right up. Let me get that order placed for you. Your macchiato with caramel syrup and whole milk is all set, Nathan. The order number is 46.
Anything else I can brew up for you today? - [Nathan] No, that's all. Thank you. - All right, Nathan. enjoy your macchiato. If you need anything else, just give me a shout. Have a fantastic day. - [Nathan] Actually there is one more thing.
We're actually presenting at the National Retail Federation Conference and talking about you. So can you just say hi to the audience? - Hello to everyone at the National Retail Federation Conference. I'm Ash, your virtual barista for CDW.
It's a pleasure to be brewed into your presentation today. If you ever need a virtual caffeine fix or insights into CDW, I'm here to help. Enjoy the conference. - Yeah, and the cool thing about this, it's all generative AI.
There's no pre-canned script and very conversational. - Excellent. Thank you, Nathan. You know, it's been great to see the interaction with Ash over in our booth and just the many use cases that can be used and obviously, that could be used in a kiosk in store, it could be used in a mobile app, it could be used on a website. It's not just in that kiosk situation.
And I think we've all seen that over the last few years, more and more retailers are trying to integrate kiosks into their business, you know, based on staffing issues, based off of cost. And this is really just that next step in making that a little bit more of a human touch and really having that amazing experience that retailers are trying to execute on. So thank you for sharing that.
And so obviously, another piece of executing on that amazing experience and elevating the customer experience is unified commerce. Over the last few years, you know, if you go back maybe three, four or five years ago, all the buzz was omnichannel, right? And over the last few years, we've seen that shift to unified commerce, which isn't extremely different, but there is some nuance that makes that a little bit different and more relevant. And it seems that that is really something that retailers are striving to execute on today and we think that's gonna continue on into the future as a growing trend.
And so Gina, can you talk a little bit about what we're seeing, you know, as far as the trends for unified commerce are concerned? - Yeah, absolutely. And this is a very exciting area. And as Andy mentioned, we used to call it a slight version of it was omnichannel, but if you think of omnichannel, it was hooking up all your inventory, all your systems so you could understand where things were so you can talk or have it ready for the customer for the channel they wanted to be. Unified commerce. I look at the change of name as really being about that customer perspective.
That you go in and the technology is getting there, that we can just correlate everything the shopper does and meet them where they're at. I grew up, I say, at Nordstrom. And Nordstrom was always known for that personal shopper experience. So you would go in and your personal shopper would know, "Hey, you were going to Hawaii. You need to close, how was that trip?" All those good things. And now when a shopper comes in, when you do this correctly, you could maybe know you were looking at that blue sweater online there, I recognize you through your mobile phone, you come in, did you know it's in my store? Did you know it's over here? And hey, we can coordinate things with that, what you are looking at.
And shoppers are looking at this. Everyone is shopping online on that e-commerce, it's taking off. They do researchers. But I love stores and shoppers do too.
They love that experience, they love that. So how good is it that you can go hyper-personalized in the store by unifying your data behind the scenes, recognizing that shopper, telling them what they need to see, getting them where they want and just making amazing things happen and it's becoming a reality right now. - Yeah, I think it's also about making sure you truly understand the total value of your client. It's about understanding their full journey. Obviously, when a client shops online or in a mobile app, we're able to see every step of that journey where it stops, where it starts and ultimately, do they transact.
I think we all know though that when the customer comes into the store, although that is in most cases a more profitable journey for a retailer, for many reasons, we lose a lot of visibility into what they're doing in that store and tying that information together. So really having your data tied together in a unified way that allows you to understand and monetize the total journey of the customer is hugely important. And I think that's a big part of what's happening. And I know, Ran, you know, AI obviously plays a big role in this as well and I know NVIDIA's been doing some really great things to help retailers and different organizations work with, you know, unified commerce strategies. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? - Yeah, so to build on Gina's point is sometimes, you know, it's to unify that online and the offline experience.
So we've been working with Caper by Instacart where for shoppers, not only you can, you know, put your shopping list online and when you check in, the retail store where there is a caper card, you can link your app and then being able to recognize your shopping list as well as it's already mapped the store. So it's make it very easy for you to find certain items in the store. It will guide you. 'Cause some of us will not have that challenges like we don't know where certain stuff is, at which aisle. Also caper can guide you there. And also, you know, the NVIDIA technology power, the Caper cart is using our smallest embedded chip called Jetson and it's leveraging the computer vision algorithm being able to recognize the merchandise on the shelf.
And you can just directly, you know, put in the Caper card or be able to recognize the specific item without you scan the code. So overall making the shopping experience super easy. And also, based on your diet it can recommend the, you know, relevant item for you and overall, making the experience.
So what that means for retailer is it helps the retailers to build a basket size and overall giving a much, you know, similar shopping experience as well as, you know, easy checkout. So by this collaboration, we think we're, you know, creating this, you know, holistic online offline shopping experience for customers. - Now we did a look back at 2024, we talked a little bit about what's happening recently and what we're talking to clients with day-to-day right now. What about fast forwarding a little bit and taking a look into the future a little bit, Gina, if we think about what's happening now and what we expect to occur over the course of the next year and beyond, what are you hearing from our clients? And what do you expect to see trend-wise in the industry that everyone in the room should be thinking about? - Yeah, thanks, Andy. There is so much fun stuff coming, but let's talk about kind of the climate of what retailers are feeling because I think that's important on what we're gonna see. Retailers are optimistic that it's gonna be a better year in 2025, but they are not going out and spending like crazy.
They are still looking for those return on investments, strong business case. And there's been a lot of focus when I'm talking to them about what is the customer experience and what do you want it to be? And you can't talk customer experience without talking sales person experience. Because the happier your sales associate, right? The happier they appear to that customer, make things happen. So I think we're gonna see a real trend on using some of the AI coming out, but really it has to have a proven business case. I think the self checkout is going to stay. I know last June, it seems like forever ago, people were talking about it was gonna be ripped out.
I don't think so. I think with the vances and the visual intelligence adding the cameras there, RFID, we're gonna see more of that. The other thing I think we're going to see pop up more are kiosks. You're seeing it right now in quick service restaurants. And it goes in, you can make the order.
Retailers are seeing an uplift in sales. It gives a customer less pressure. When they're doing it at the kiosk, they can explore a little more and maybe honestly, they're like, "Okay, no one's looking at me.
I can order large fry." So there's a lot of fun light with that. The other thing that I haven't heard so much here, but during holiday, I was hearing about social selling. And this is a new trend that we're watching and I know TikTok is, we'll see what happens with TikTok but TikTok had a lot of sales coming through their channel, through holiday, new numbers. It was amazing.
And then Victoria's Secret, also streamed live on Amazon Prime, their big show and you could buy right there without leaving. So I think there's gonna be a lot of fun there. And finally, I think the advances in AI, we're gonna see, I'm excited to see the visual intelligent. We're already seeing people taking advantage of iPad cameras and I'm gonna do the motion 'cause it makes me excited. Taking the iPads and just scanning across their shelves to do inventory.
So a lot of advances in that, a lot of fun. And I don't know, I think it's gonna be a great year, but again, ROI, ROI, ROI. - Thanks, Gina. You know, when it comes to AI, Nathan, I think it's clear to everyone that it's gonna be a big focus in 2025, right? I don't think I'd be shocker if I if I said that. So can you talk a little bit about what you expect to be seeing in that space? - Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, AI is nothing new.
It's been around for, you know, decades. So we have like the perceptive kind of AI with vision. There's like the predictive AI that we've had for years.
And then we have this new thing called generative AI. And what generative AI did is allow for the language models to do things like text completion or text classification, which kind of goes to the next iteration of AI, which is agentic frameworks and agentic AI. And so this year, agentic AI is gonna be relatively huge, you know, across many markets. And actually, both of the solutions that we showed earlier, the virtual human and the video content generator is all ran by agentic AI. And what that basically means is you can give an agent some tools to use. And a large language model can select not only which tools to use, but when to use them and what the inputs for those tools should be.
A lot of different use cases here. And, you know, we'd obviously be happy to talk to you about them, but yeah, the age of agentic AI is going to gonna be starting this year. - Excellent. And Ran obviously, NVIDIA is at the forefront and the front of the market of everything that is happening with AI and obviously a market leader. And so where do you see everything headed this year? - Yeah, definitely, for 2025, we're also bullish about agentic AI.
And moving forward in the next few years, as a company, we're very excited about physical AI. And in order to make physical AI happen, so think about today, you are interacting with ChatGPT, it's token based, it generate text, but in the future, it's gonna be generating actions. And the robotics is a huge industry that we are, you know, being after and super excited. And in order to make that happen at NVIDIA, we created three computing system.
So you'll see on the left top is DGX and a lot of you are familiar with that. That's where we use to train the gen AI model. So in 2016, our CEO Jensen Huang, while he delivered the first DGX system to a startup called OpenAI.
And then on the bottom left is our second computing is Omniverse. So this is where we can use the, it's a simulation of the physical world and it's based on physics. And we can simulate, you know, robotics as well as, you know, car driving in the Omniverse environment. And then down the right, the bottom on the top right is robotics, and where we have there is our Jetson GPU, that's the smallest GPU we offer. And it can be embedded in robots, being embedded in the vehicles.
And by creating the three computing system and as well as with, you know, generative AI technology, we finally believe it's time for the robotics industry. So what that means for retail and consumer packaged goods is with robotics, you know, you can leverage robotics to do work in the environment. Which is not, you know, suitable for human being as well as, you know, like working, you know, longer hours, etc. So robotics is really good at that.
And also, the world has efficiency of the labor. So I think with robotics, it can hugely improve the productivity. So that's where, you know, we're betting big on robotics. - Yeah, I think it's really exciting to see how quickly things are changing and the potential of what AI can mean to the retail industry and just our lives in general, right? And I know that some people are worried that AI might replace them, that it might take their job, right? And you know, I don't think it's, you know, that's the case necessarily personally. And I know, you know, even, you know, I think I've heard even your CEO making statements about the fact that, you know, we don't see AI replacing people. We always need that human touch, right? - Yeah, I think our CEO said it very well, you know.
At NVIDIA, we don't believe AI will take people's job. However, what we think is people who use AI more will take over the job for people who don't use AI. - Yeah, I agree.
And you know, we referenced cloud earlier and when we saw that technology, you know, starting to become popular, we heard the same thing, right? People who ran data centers and server environments were all worried that their jobs were gonna go away. What we really found was that people were needed to still run environments, but ultimately, what it does, what AI really holds the promise of doing is allowing people to do things that they're more passionate about and actually focus on more innovation and different tasks that will drive more revenue, increase efficiencies and remove costs from the business. So it's not removing the people, but it's allowing those people to do things that might be more productive and enjoyable actually. So really excited for where things are heading.
But as everyone sits here today, where should retailers go from here, Gina? You know, how should people be thinking about what they're doing today to get them to where they wanna be in the future? - Thanks, Andy. And we've mentioned it before, sometimes, it can be very tempting, just a new technology comes out, "Hey, I have to use it." You always have to go with the strategy.
What are you trying to solve? What do you wanna say about your business? What do you want the customer experience to be? What do you want your sales associate experience to be? Really, really look at what you're trying to solve before you start looking at technology. - [Andy] Thank you. And Ran, obviously we talked about the fact that data is really the key. We were talking about that last year at this time, that if you don't have good data, it's really hard to get good outputs from anything that you're gonna do. And so can you talk a little bit about that? - [Ran] Yeah, so on that part is what we see is, you know, the data for retailer is your mode, is how you can differentiate.
So we always, you know, as a first step, before you move to, you know, your gen AI technology, whether it's you know, on-prem or in the cloud, we encourage retailers to look at like where your data sit and what is your data strategy to start. And with that, you know, NVIDIA offer different libraries to helps you and to, you know, being able to like, whether it's curate your data or retrieve your data. So those are the things we can help you, whether you know you wanna do it on-prem or in the cloud or which cloud you wanna do it, we have our libraries and NVIDIA AI enterprise there.
- [Andy] Thank you, Ran. And one of the things we also saw earlier, I think it was on your slide actually, was that one of the barriers to people moving forward with AI was actually lack of resources, lack of skillset, and knowledge in the category. And Nathan, can you talk maybe a little bit about how your team is helping with that? - [Nathan] Yeah, absolutely. So there was a stat I believe last year that said about 80% of generative AI projects failed.
Now there's all kinds of reasons that we're given for that. Poor use cases and lack of funding, lack of ROI, but I really think it goes much deeper than that. You gotta think that large language models and generative AI have only been around for, you know, a year, a year and a half or so, at least at scale. But having a partner who really understands not only the use cases in the business, but how those large language models are actually built, how they respond, how they work. And that can really help find those use cases that are gonna be successful and make sure you go from POC to production and get that ROI that you're looking for. - Excellent, and Ran, you know, obviously, NVIDIA is an amazing partner to CDW.
We do a lot of close work together. We greatly appreciate you being in care with us on stage today, but do you wanna take a minute and talk about how we work together as well as CDW and NVIDIA to work together to help our clients do amazing things? - Yeah, sure. So a lot of you might know, you know, we provide GPU, we provide chip, but really the most important is on top of that, we have, you know, 350 libraries.
And we go to market by more than 15 interesting industries. And retail CPG is one of the industries. However, we are not a end-to-end solution company.
We provide different technology component for our partners to leverage and really take it to the end retailers. So that's why having ecosystem partners like CDW is critical for us. And we also offer NVIDIA enterprise and Omniverse, those are the two software offer.
And be working with CDW to integrate the software in their solutions. So I hand it to Nathan to about our technical integration. - Yeah, absolutely.
We were lucky enough to be such a close partner with NVIDIA to get access to all the latest things. Like we got access to NVIDIA NIM and NVIDIA agent blueprints much earlier than everybody else. We can kinda get our hands around them.
And like NVIDIA NIM for example, if you're using OpenAI or whatever it is, it's usually per token cost, but if you have a high throughput. You wouldn't pay for just that compute. And that's kinda where NVIDIA AI enterprise comes into play, NVIDIA NIM.
So you're just paying for the queue, you don't have to worry about token consumption. So it's been a great partnership and we're looking forward to see what we can do together in the future. - Appreciate that. - Well, so I'd like to thank all of our panelists with us today.
Gina Cox, senior industry advisor from CDW, Ran Hu, director of business development for NVIDIA, and of course, Nathan Cartwright, chief architect for artificial intelligence at CDW. (bright music)
2025-02-28 06:25
