What: Edmond Mesrobian, Nordstrom’s chief technology officer and chief information officer participated in VentureBeat’s Transform 2021 virtual conference.

Why is it important: As customer service is Nordstrom’s bedrock, Mesrobian shared how the department store revamped its data infrastructure in ways designed to enhance customer experience.

Nordstrom Analytical Platform (NAP) is a real-time, event streaming–centric analytical platform that provides insights on everything from customer services to credit. Reflecting on the start of this project, Mesrobian said that the most important thing is to remember that presenting the information is not about reporting data, but about collecting events that can be translated into actions.

Nordstrom starts by getting the business events created, organized, and streamed in real time. Then the multi-layered analytical models translate the events into predictions that lead to customer benefits and services. NAP employs open source technology and cloud computing, stitching existing components together to create an analytical platform that drives machine learning in a robust way.

“We want to transfer the responsibility from the data engineers in the past … to the application owners to make sure that their business events were pure, curated, and correct to begin with, and [they are] also aligned with their business goals,” Mesrobian explained. The shift in responsibility, he said, is key to the platform architecture process.

Nordstrom collects user preference information and employs it to provide better selection, better dynamic looks, better style boards, better choices, and so on. Through AI, the company presented a more robust way of driving discovery and personalization. Nordstrom also launched a fashion map effort to take a natural language-based approach with deep learning so that the model gets to know customers better through conversation, as opposed to keyword searches.

When building an analytical platform, Mesrobian pointed out that it is important to keep in mind that data is not the crucial aspect: so the platform actually has to make predictions rather than presenting raw information. An important point is also to make sure that the systems are wired from the store with privacy and security in mind, so that the analytics take into account both the business event and the privacy impact of customers.

Nordstrom CTO on AI-powered analytics and consumer insights