Walgreens Boots Alliance goes personal with AI

If the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an accelerator of digital transformations, Walgreens Boots Alliance was at the forefront of this trend.

The Deerfield, Ill.-based company, which has more than 9,100 Walgreens retail pharmacies in the US and about 2,000 Boots retailers in the UK, had no option to close or slow down when the pandemic hit the world in March 2019.

Instead, global CIO and senior vice president Francesco Tinto, who joined WBA six months prior, pushed the company’s business transformation to the cloud to ensure the pharmacy chain could better serve its customers. customers digitally, as the need for COVID-19 planning, testing and testing, and vaccinations prompted the company to build digital solutions faster than expected.

“COVID really pushed us to make sure we could really have customer service during lockdown,” says Tinto.

To date, WBA has administered 56 million COVID-19 vaccines and 22.9 million tests in the United States, thanks in part to a digital transformation largely based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and a dizzying array of technologies. cutting-edge, including MongoDB databases, Snowflake data warehousing, and Databricks’ Spark-based AI platform.

Today, Walgreens Boots’ IT manager is harnessing this powerful cocktail of advanced cloud, data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to deliver mass personalization services and improve WBA’s online relationship with consumers.

Data is an essential ingredient

WBA’s modernization of its IT stack resulted in the migration of back-end processes that drive its online retail business, such as accounts payable, general ledger and inventory management, to Microsoft’s cloud. As part of this, WBA rebuilt its business application stack by moving to SAP S/4HANA and migrating to ServiceNow’s cloud-based automated operational services.

The company has also begun consolidating its many data assets into a Microsoft Azure data lake, a shift that has proven key to making the analytics and magic of AI a reality, says Tinto. As part of this transformation, WBS migrated from legacy databases to advanced cloud databases and analytics, deploying Azure Synapse for relational data, Azure Cosmos for unstructured and semi-structured data, and MongoDB for document-oriented models.

The retail chain is also migrating on-premises data stored in Teradata, Netezza and Hadoop appliances to the cloud, leveraging Snowflake for data warehousing and Databricks for AI, Tinto says.

This database has proven critical to establishing WBA’s next-generation services, enabling developers and data scientists from WBA’s 2,000-member IT team, as well as the thousands of programmers from its partners, to create about 100 in-house AI products to date, Tinto said. .

In addition to the Databricks platform, WBA uses Python tools, Spark Clusters, Jupyter Notebooks, and open source NLP (natural language processing) capabilities to write machine learning models for inventory optimization and optimization. prices, and to create customer profiles – the heart of WBA’s next-generation personalization services, says Tinto.

“For us, AI is really the technology that we push a lot,” he says. “A big push is to build an operating model where we can really leverage data and data scientists increase their knowledge and use of AI. We want to make sure that AI and machine learning are embedded in everything we do.”

Next frontier: mass customization

In the third year of its transformation, WBA’s primary focus is now on building customer profiles and offering mass personalization to its customers, advancing its online distribution system and giving consumers better management of online prescriptions, according to Tinto.

“It’s really the consolidation and curation of all of our data that allows us to start building the customer profiles and personalization capabilities,” says Tinto, adding that the company is implementing cloud services in a way that allows it “to harmonize between global capacity and local adaptation.

Tinto and CEO Rosalind Brewer both believe that WBA’s cloud infrastructure is essential to the company’s strategy to provide more personalized and personalized services to the bulk of its consumers in the US and UK, as well as a growing number of WBA pharmacies in Mexico, Thailand and Ireland.

“We laid the foundations. We are no longer moving to the cloud. We’re in the cloud,” says Tinto, noting that the company is finalizing its online delivery system and moving more aggressively to data analytics that are “much more prescriptive and predictive.”

While the company still operates some applications in its data center, the next-generation AI and data analytics platform will allow WBA to get closer to its consumers, one customer at a time.

The intent is for customers to manage their prescriptions online from their Walgreens or Boots accounts and receive personal recommendations for products and solutions that address each consumer’s unique health concerns.

“AI is very important to understand the customer profile. Now we can deliver the best promotion, the best content, personalized offers,” says Tinto, adding that the plan also includes making personalized services interactive at the help of chatbots.

WBA, for example, signed a partnership with Microsoft and Adobe 18 months ago to offer one-to-one consumer communications and deliver personalized prescribing experiences online. Adobe’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions, another aspect of the partnership, will offer online analytics, content management, personalization and campaign orchestration services.

“For example, we are launching a new experience for a patient who has been diagnosed with a chronic illness so that we can support the customer through the journey and offer advice and suggestions that help the person minimize the impact of the disease,” says Tinto.

The World IOC is pleased with the progress made to date and excited about the prospects for the future.

“I’m on a journey that doesn’t end with moving to the cloud,” he says of his efforts to create a data-driven organization that can deliver mass customization. “With all the complications of the pandemic, I am in the process of rebuilding an organization from a highly operational organization to a transformational one.”