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Real-World AI Applications

AI is used in many industries for fraud detection (MasterCard), customer service automation (DoorDash), predictive maintenance and environmental monitoring (Laredo Petroleum), personalized travel planning (Booking.com), and visual search and product discovery (Pinterest), significantly improving efficiency, user experience, and accuracy.

  • Fraud Detection (MasterCard):
    MasterCard, the world’s second largest credit card network, uses AI to instantly assess the fraud risk of every transaction. By training its fraud detection models with SageMaker, MasterCard has tripled the detection of fraudulent transactions and reduced false positives tenfold. In 2024, MasterCard enhanced its system with generative AI, which analyzes customer transaction histories using a large language model, further improving fraud detection accuracy by 20% on average by evaluating whether a transaction fits the customer’s typical behavior.

  • Customer Service Automation (DoorDash):
    DoorDash replaced its old touch-tone IVR system, which frustrated customers and often led them to request live agents, with a new solution using Amazon Lex and natural language processing. This upgrade allows customers to speak naturally instead of using button prompts, resulting in a better customer experience, shorter hold times, and greater self-service adoption.

  • Predictive Maintenance & Environmental Monitoring (Laredo Petroleum):
    Laredo Petroleum, which operates over 1,300 wells in west Texas, uses AWS data streaming and Amazon SageMaker machine learning models to monitor real-time sensor data from its operations. This enables the company to proactively identify maintenance needs, prevent issues like gas flaring or venting, and reduce environmental impact. They also use ML models to detect leaks in storage tanks and pipelines, further improving operational efficiency and safety.

  • Personalized Travel Planning (Booking.com):
    Booking.com, a global travel marketplace with over 28 million listings and 150 petabytes of data, uses Amazon SageMaker to build machine learning models for booking recommendations. To enhance customer experience, they developed the AI Trip Planner, a generative AI application that interacts with customers in natural language, retrieves up-to-date information and reviews, and provides tailored recommendations. This approach, known as Retrieval Augmented Generation, helps the AI deliver more accurate and current responses.

  • Visual Search and Product Discovery (Pinterest):
    Pinterest, a visual discovery platform with over 450 million users, enables people to explore and save billions of images. Its Pinterest Lens feature allows users to take a photo of an object and instantly see similar items for sale, linking directly to online catalogs. To power this, Pinterest stores a vast labeled image collection in Amazon S3 and regularly re-trains its machine learning models to recognize new objects, using Amazon Mechanical Turk and SageMaker Ground Truth for image labeling.

Summary:
These examples illustrate how AI applications drive efficiency, improve customer experiences, and unlock new value in industries ranging from finance and e-commerce to energy and travel. AI is now an integral part of solving real business challenges at scale.