Australia’s largest private e-commerce technology company, New Aim has selected Google Cloud to consolidate its digital infrastructure and make generative AI more accessible to Australian e-commerce businesses.
New Aim has already reduced overall IT costs, strengthened cybersecurity, and boosted infrastructure performance since beginning the migration from its previous multi-cloud and on-premise environment to Google Cloud in March 2024.
Moving to Google Cloud also gave New Aim one-stop access to artificial intelligence (AI) and big data capabilities that now sit at the core of its insights platform, AirOxy.AI, which has garnered strong industry demand since its pilot launch at Online Retailer in July 2024.
New Aim chief operating officer and chief information officer, Dr. Alex Ji said the previous multi-cloud infrastructure came with growing complexity and costs that were proving challenging and risky to manage for the IT team.
“In less than a year, Google Cloud helped us leap from an increasingly shaky multi-cloud approach to a single cohesive cloud environment that’s been significantly easier to manage while also delivering immediate efficiency dividends. As a result, we’ve been able to take advantage of AI far faster, and with much greater sophistication, than we’d thought possible for an e-commerce company of our size,” he said.
New Aim developed an internal core platform, AimCore, to enable digital supply chain management by using BigQuery to structure and analyse data from its product sourcing, end-to-end logistics, and warehousing services. These services power many retailers’ e-commerce operations and reach more than one in two households Australia-wide.
AirOxy.AI was developed out of AimCore’s technology to enable e-commerce SMEs to run generative AI models tested and selected from the Model Garden on Vertex AI to create pricing insights, identify market trends, and optimise images for online product listings. All AirOxy.AI capabilities and data were built and reside on Google Cloud, with the platform’s native integrations eliminating the compatibility and complexity issues that New Aim had previously faced when combining various open-source and proprietary systems.
SME retailers, using Dropshipzone, New Aim’s subsidiary B2B2C marketplace, stand to be the biggest winners of AirOxy.AI’s capabilities with access to pricing insights and market trends to make better decisions and win over customers.
New Aim founder and CEO, Fung Lam (main image) said, “Smaller e-commerce players often don’t have the critical mass of skills or funds to tap into AI at the scale and sophistication of larger global marketplaces. We wanted AirOxy.AI to fill that gap, but for that to happen, we ourselves needed a way to access world-class AI without overwhelming our engineers or overcomplicating our systems.
“Google Cloud gives us that straightforward access to a whole world of top-tier gen AI capabilities in a single environment: they’ve democratised gen AI for us so we can do the same for our customers.”
Partnering with Google Cloud also helped New Aim reduce the cost and complexity of its cloud transformation. Google Cloud provided extensive engineering support and education resources to New Aim that helped the firm upskill its engineers at greatly reduced cost, while also tackling the local requirements of multiple international offices.
Google Cloud Australia and New Zealand director and chief technology officer, Matt Zwolenski added, “Google Cloud is working with retailers around the world to make AI an essential ingredient throughout their businesses, by first consolidating, structuring, and streamlining their enterprise data as efficiently as possible.
“New Aim is proof that e-commerce firms of any size can tap into digital infrastructure that allows them to punch above their weight. New Aim’s vision resonates strongly with our own commitment to lowering the entry-level barriers to future-ready digital infrastructure, market-leading generative AI capabilities, and the growth potential they offer.”