Justin Honaman of AWS on the Data Challenge Behind AI Scale | CGF 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I am Chris Walton, and we are coming to you live from the Consumer Goods Forums Global Summit in Vienna, Austria.

Right, Justin?

Amazing.

So great to be here.

Justin is so excited.

He's so excited.

But before we get to our interview with Justin, I just want to tell you that we are recording this podcast from the CGF Leadership Studio, which is sponsored by Vuzion.

All right, Justin, so we've had you on the show before.

We have.

It's great to be back.

We're excited to have you back.

So for those that are new to Justin, Justin is the AWS Global head of worldwide retail restaurants and consumer goods Business development.

And by Justin, I mean Justin Hahnemann.

Justin, welcome back.

Great to be here.

Great to be back.

Great to be here at Consumer Goods Forum.

I mean, amazing energy and just an incredible environment.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It's really fun.

All right.

Last time we spoke, I've been pumped.

I mean, you and I've been talking about getting you back on the show for a while over LinkedIn.

So when we last spoke, you laid out three themes for me, and I wrote them down, so I want to make sure I get them.

So one was, of course, AI.

The second one was Amazon's ads and its new ad service, and the third one was Unified Commerce.

So my question for you is, we're almost a year since we had that conversation.

I went back and looked at the date.

We're almost a year out.

So looking back at those three, which played out more or less like you expected, and which one has surprised you the most?

Interesting.

Okay, so AI certainly has continued to grow and expand over the last year since we last were talking.

I mean, it's.

But what's interesting is the conversation has shifted from.

From when we first met early last year.

We're talking generative AI still, and kind of the advancements there in use cases right now, we've really moved into this whole space of agentic commerce and agentic AI.

I think that was my presentation today was kind of on the progression of AI in that space.

I mean, customers are moving quickly to take advantage of not only generative AI, but the agentic commerce idea and using agents in their daily business.

That's the space that has certainly just moved incredibly fast since the last time we talked about.

So that's by the cut, by surprise.

Maybe not by surprise, but just moving so fast, more so than you anticipated.

And we knew it was moving quickly, but like within just the last 18 months.

And we launched our own agent Platform called Agent Core.

We launched new models which are key for building applications.

We've internally, we've launched capabilities for shoppers on Amazon.com, like buy from Me, Alexa for Shopping, which used to be called Rufus.

And then we've taken even the tech behind that and monetized it, created a solution for our customers called the Shopping Assistant from aws.

I mean, it's just, this is all just in the last couple of months.

It's just an incredible.

See how fast it's moved.

Yeah, you guys give me plenty of fodder for my weekly podcast.

Like, it's amazing.

It is, it is great.

It's a great.

It's great.

And it's great to talk about it.

I love talking about it.

But let me talk about the other two real quick.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Oh, we're not gonna orphan the other two.

All right.

Okay, let's do this.

So retail ad service is still, it's important and it's actually a way that we've taken the engine for Amazon advertising and, and brought that to our customers so that they can, you know, produce ads on their own site.

It's a win for them, it's a win for us, a win for our platform and their customers that shop it.

So that's still there and growing.

So that continues.

I would just say, you know, from a perspective of like scale of change though, I mean, the AI space has just been incredible.

The nice thing though is like on the retail ad service and other capabilities behind Amazon advertising, the AI is, it's impacting that too.

Right.

Foundation.

Right, right, right.

Okay.

Anything on unified commerce or do we just want to just totally disavow that one?

No.

So that's actually interesting.

So that we find that primarily in retail where retailers were on very, I'll say, difficult to manage systems where like if you wanted to make a change to a back office marketplace platform, you have to change the entire or upgrade the entire platform if you made a change to it.

Now most retailers have moved to a more composable API driven.

Headless is some of the other words or phrases you might have heard around this composable platform where you can choose best of breed capabilities and when you make a change to one area, you do not have to upgrade the entire platform.

So there's certainly been a big focus on that in the retail space and.

That's more just a gradual move towards that versus like an asymptotic shift like we talked about with AI.

But you have many consumer goods brands here.

They're all now thinking about their ERP systems and how they make those more flexible.

Some of them are building their own ERP with agentic capabilities and coding.

I mean, it's incredible the shift that's happening in the consumer goods industry.

Yeah.

I've had some people tell me they're rethinking their ERP investments given everything that's going on right now.

So there's just new capability that's more accessible than ever.

Yeah.

Right.

All right, so to that point, what brings you to CGF in Vienna?

You know, what do you hope to accomplish?

Like, why is AWS here?

Justin?

Yeah, so AWS and Amazon that are here.

So if you've not, if you're not familiar with Consumer Goods Forum and this Executive summit is the best consumer goods environment to connect with other leaders in the industry by far.

I'd say the primary reason to be here is that our customers are here.

Like, you know, I'm looking out here and I can see brands that we work with every day and not just, you know, individuals from the brand, but their CEOs are here and their, their leadership is here.

And so it gives us a chance to engage with in a one to one format in a fashion that's unique.

Second would be the content.

I mean, you know, Consumer Goods Forum does a nice job of keeping it fresh, bringing kind of what's new, latest and greatest to this event each year.

And third would be, you know, for us with Amazon and with our broader Amazon partnerships, it's like bringing knowledge of what we do in the industry and why it matters to be a partner with AWS and the broader Amazon.

All right, so I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit.

Joseph.

No, don't do that.

I'm gonna put you on the spot.

Okay, you already, you already kind of gave a good list of all the new AI capabilities that you have and all the capabilities you have under Amazon and aws.

But I'm curious, I want to know what is your honest assessment of what is actually transferable from Amazon's AI playbook to other retailers and to the brands?

Well, I'm always honest.

So, so it's, I would say this.

There's, there's capabilities we provide to customers that are foundational.

For example, bedrock.

It's our AI platform that, where you can access, model, gives you model choice so you can access all kinds of different large language models there.

That's not just transferable like it's customers are using it every day.

Right.

Our agent core platform.

It's our agent Platform for driving agentic commerce.

Like, customers are using that every day.

This is, it's not questioning.

We're.

We're investing in chips.

Customers are benefiting from our investment in chips.

That's right.

I forgot about that.

I forgot about that angle.

Yeah.

So I mean, it's not a matter of like, I mean each of these things is foundational and we start with the customer in mind and end with like, how are we going to help the customer create an incredible customer experience for their customer?

Right.

So all these capabilities we talk about on the tech side of AWS are really foundational for enabling a better customer experience and engagement with our brands and the customers we work with here.

So one of the core themes of this conference at CGF in Vienna is helping those in attendance figure out how to move from pilot stage into like actual scalable applications of AI.

So from your vantage point,.

What is.

The most pressing reason why AI pilots don't reach scale?

So we saw a lot of this with generative AI.

The challenge is often the data.

So in consumer data, consumer goods space, okay, the consumer goods space, many of these companies that are here grew through acquisition.

Many of them have the place I used to work for.

Before I came here, Georgia Pacific had 14 different ERPs.

Not all of them were in the cloud.

Just to get a good view of operations is challenging.

Right.

Then you start overlaying that with point of sale data from what, 15, 20, 30 retailers and then integrating like syndicated data from Nielsen IQ or Circana.

Most brands are still doing that in spreadsheets and not in the cloud.

So you have a really big trend right now, an acceleration of movement to cloud so you have better access to data, but also a big investment in data to.

To clean that data, make it available for AI models to even access it.

So that's what's holding people back, I would say, versus these point, you know, use cases and try some things out here and they're like, at the end of the day, there's a foundational data challenge for many of the companies here.

And then also just kind of the alignment around governance and security and like that AI is a priority.

We're going to make it something we really focus on as a brand.

I'm really glad you brought that up because I've been wanting to ask somebody this and because I've been hearing from a lot of folks that the great thing about AI is it doesn't require great data.

But yet you kind of just said something different.

And my question is like, that may be the case, but you still have to train the agent on something.

Right?

And so, so like, so those people that are telling me that what would you tell them?

I don't know the context of like what, where they're coming from.

But if you're using bad data, you're going to get bad results.

I mean that's, it's like putting a reporting tool on top of data that's not cleanse, it's not available in a good format or data that's not aligned.

I mean we haven't really seen yet.

I think there's an opportunity for this but like where AI could align data and kind of fix some of the machinations that we all go through in the consumer goods industry around bringing those different types of data together.

I think that's an opportunity for AI, but that's a real struggle still for many in this space.

And so, you know, I was talking to a retailer this week, just as an example, a major brand, that their logo is behind the camera here.

The head of data analytics said we can't even do AI.

This is a major.

Because I have five back office systems that don't talk to one another and for the same box of cereal I have 5 different item numbers that are going into a data lake and then I'm just reporting on top of that.

Okay, that's not easy to fix.

You got to fix back office systems.

You got to find some sort of platform to get data to a place you can use it if you want to do AI.

None of that by the way is in the cloud yet.

This is a major retailer that's here at cgf.

So these are the challenges that are holding back some companies.

So you essentially my big takeaway there is you still have to have a very cohesive data strategy.

AI might make it easier to get around some issues with data, but you still have to have a cohesive strategy.

Absolutely.

And there's, there's a lot of enablers for that.

I mean now like I said in the agentix space, there's an opportunity now to put agents on top of different platforms, different systems to bring that data together, start to do the analysis for you, get you at least initial results.

I mean there's a really real opportunity in the agentic commerce space for agents to collaborate and work together and make our jobs easier as consumer marketers, as shopper, marketing teams, at category planners, people developing planograms.

I mean like those jobs should get easier and more efficient and even make better decisions.

Right.

With AI, that's the key, right.

You gotta still Be thoughtful about the approach.

That's a big takeaway for me.

All right, we haven't talked about the human side of AI yet, so how are you helping at aws, your customers think through the human side of AI deployment?

Yeah, it's very easy to get enamored with the technology, the models, the platform and whatnot at the end of the day.

And if you talk to some of the consultants here, they'll tell you that there's as much work to be done with process and changing how you do business and the people that then do the work within the business.

And that can be the most challenging part to doing any sort of work in the AI space.

So it's not just the tech.

You then have to be thinking about what's going to change in our business process.

Not just replacing something new with old or old with new, but also the people that go with it.

I'll tell you also, many of these companies are struggling to hire the right people that can come in that have the mindset of kind of industry, but also the interest and curiosity to dive into tools and use them.

Right.

That's not easy to find.

And so there's a real opportunity for those of you out there that are thinking about career path decisions and whatnot.

You know, come in with that natural curiosity to dive into tech, but also be able to dive into the industry kind of that.

That hybrid space is really a one to think about right now.

Are there any do's or don'ts that you've seen?

You know, and particularly in the past year as people are grappling with the human side of this equation?

The one thing I might coaching to anyone that I, when I'm talking to groups on the business side is, yeah, be the first to raise your hand and like step in.

Like be the one to say, you know, I want to try that out.

I'd love to pilot that.

I'd like to test out that tool.

You'll learn so much.

You don't have to be an IT or a programmer to do this.

I mean, like, the tool sets are so much easier now and it's only going to help your career long term.

So my coaching to anyone in the line of business, like that's kind of like, I don't know about this AI thing.

It's like, yeah, put your hand up and try it out and be one of the first ones to be out there testing out new capability.

All right, all right.

So whenever I have you on, I love having you on because you always like pique my Interest about something I hadn't thought about before.

So I'm going to put you again before I let you go.

I'm going to put you to the test one more time, one last time.

Is there one burgeoning use case in retail that you think will generally genuinely make a consumer's life better that we haven't quite talked about as an industry yet?

One that's old, but it that's new is personalization.

Like, okay, personalization has been around for more than 20 years.

It has, it's only gotten better with, with generative AI and now with agentic commerce and the kind of the, the enablement of the personalized experience both online, even in store and through the apps and whatnot.

That's an area, like I talked about it in my presentation earlier today, it's an area that it's kind of, I don't want to call it low hanging fruit, but there's opportunity there to take advantage of that quickly.

And then there's other capabilities like understanding these large language models and how search is happening off site and on site.

That's top of mind right now for many of the companies that are here.

And then experientially, if you're a retailer and you have an e commerce platform, but things like virtual try on have gotten so much easier.

Image search where you take a picture of like your iPad that's sitting right here, you guys can't see it.

And doing a quick search and finding that and being able to buy, like creating an easier shopping experience, taking out the friction in the shopping experience, like these are the types of things that AI is really enabling gets me very excited because like you can just see the benefit to the end customer and like making their job easier, getting to a purchase faster and then you win as well as the retailer.

Got it.

Okay, so because we're out of time, I'm gonna let you go on that one.

But so burgeoning, if I use the term burgeoning, you're saying there's burgeoning use cases inside of the idea of personalization?

That's one.

Yeah, that's one area that makes sense.

Yeah, it makes sense.

All right, man.

Well, thank you.

Good to see you.

It was a pleasure.

Pleasure as always.

You're welcome back anytime, my friend.

All right, Justin Hahnemann of aws, thank you to cgf.

That's who is here, cgf, the Consumer Goods Forum and their Global Summit and Vuzion for making all of our coverage from this conference possible.

And as always, Justin, be careful out there.

See you again soon.