hy Accelerates Ecommerce Growth with Generative AI on AWS

SEOUL-October 21, 2024- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that hy (formerly known as Korea Yakult), a leading South Korean traditional food company specializing in probiotics, announced the successful implementation of an advanced search and product recommendation engine powered by generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) on AWS for its rapidly growing Fredit online mall.

After migrating to AWS in 2023, hy built a data platform on the world's leading cloud to help its 2 million subscribers and 40,000 paying members easily find more information about products in an engaging, natural language interface. Since migrating to AWS, With AWS generative AI, Fredit's search accuracy went up to 94.1% from 53%, while the product click rate, a key performance metric in digital marketing that measures the effectiveness of online advertisements, emails, or product links, went up to 75.2% from 49%.

hy has more than 5,000 products including health foods, cosmetics, and household items available on Fredit, but the company didn't have recommendation or effective product search functions. The ecommerce provider's existing search system only provided simple keyword search functionality. In addition, autocomplete and typo-corrected search required constant updates over time, which needed a lot of operational resources. With rapid growth as it pivots from probiotics only to general nutrition, home products, and beauty, the company required the scalability and agility of cloud computing to match surging demand for diversifying products and for a natural language AI search function that helps shoppers easily find them.

With AWS generative AI, hy offers advanced search capabilities like improved product matching, item comparison by attributes, auto-generated queries based on user intent, typo correction, English-Korean translation, and autocomplete. By analyzing the intent of shoppers' questions, for example if a user asks "what are the best gifts for Mother's Day?" hy can generate descriptive phrases to help users better understand search results and recommend relevant products to help them with their buying experience, driving sales and user satisfaction. Hy also plans to build an AI chatbot on AWS to help store managers better manage inventory.

"AWS generative AI has transformed our Fredit online mall," said Taemo Koo, leader of platform development team at hy. "Search accuracy and product click-through rates have soared, vastly improving the customer experience. As our local ecommerce market evolves, we're excited to keep innovating with AWS to deliver even better service."

"Generative AI has ushered in a new era of intelligent and personalized experiences for consumers across the ecommerce industry," said Kee Ho Ham, managing director of AWS Korea. "By leveraging advanced AI capabilities, hy has enhanced the shopping experience, enabling more precise product matching and intuitive search functionalities that drive both customer satisfaction and sales growth."

To implement its advanced generative AI search on AWS, hy partnered with Megazone Cloud, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner specializing in generative AI deployments. Megazone Cloud provided support with the design, build, and operation of hy's new AI-powered search engine, helping the company develop a user-friendly, engaging, and accessible ecommerce platform.

· hy's search engine functionality is built using Amazon OpenSearchfor features like English-to-Korean search (when the customer mistakenly uses an English key instead of a Korean key), typo and spacing corrected search, suggested search terms, and search query autocomplete.

· For natural language search, hy used Amazon Titanmodels created by AWS and pretrained on large datasets, and Claude3 Sonnetfor improved search accuracy to provide accurate answers when customers enter unique words like HY2782, which is hy's patented lactic acid bacteria. Instead of just matching keywords, hy's semantic search on AWS can understand the actual meaning and context behind queries using large databases of words and phrases to provide more relevant and insightful search results for users.

· For the search function using AI, hy used Amazon Bedrock, the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications, to provide high quality real-time search term ranking, search query suggestions, and the ability to infer customer questions and filter out inappropriate words like slang through Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock.

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