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AI Leadership · AI Metrics

AWS's Applied AI Chief Tells Companies to Drop 'Return on Tokens' for Business Metrics

Wells Vehicle Electronics cut inventory 7% in three months while tracking 100 times more SKUs.

· 2 min read

Rows of wooden desks with monitors and desk lamps run along the windows of a high-rise office at dusk, as a few people walk the aisle and others work at their desks.
Photograph: AI-generated

AWS’s Colleen Aubrey says the test for AI is whether it moves metrics a company already tracks, and points to Wells’s inventory cut with Amazon Connect Decisions as proof, according to a published report.

Companies are stuck on the return on AI, Aubrey said, and are looking at return on tokens, when the question is whether they can move their business metrics by working in a different way. The result she cites is stated in inventory and fill rate, not tokens, which sets the yardstick a program is held to when its funding comes up.

What did Wells move?

Wells Vehicle Electronics cut inventory 7% in three months while its fill rate rose, Ben Sobczak, its vice president of supply chain and digital transformation, says in a testimonial on AWS’s product page for Amazon Connect Decisions. Line fill penalties at one big-box auto retailer fell to zero.

The report said Wells also expanded the SKUs it actively monitors from 20 to 2,000, a 100-fold increase by The Denominator’s arithmetic. Connect Decisions, generally available since April 28, is AWS’s planning product for supply chains, with AI agents that work alongside planners.

How did Aubrey’s group speed up?

Aubrey said her own group doubled the velocity of its pushes to production this year. Amazon first made AI tools available across the company, she said, and teams then found their test coverage was poor. Once they fixed that, they found their pipelines were poor too, so they repaired pipeline health, removed manual steps and deployed faster.

The doubling followed those repairs, which makes test coverage and pipeline health part of what the speedup cost.

What did AWS not say?

AWS did not say what Wells pays for Connect Decisions, or what inventory level the 7% is measured from. Without those two figures, the cut shows direction at one customer over three months, not what the product returns against its cost.

Which line in the company’s AI business case is a number its finance team already reports?

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