David Jones Accelerates Insights and Builds Its AI Foundation on Snowflake

Customer experience is incredibly important at David Jones. It's the foundation on which we built our organization. David Jones made a definitive decision to start to invest in our data for us to start to treat our data as a strategic enterprise asset, and much more about how could we turn it into something meaningful for our teams, for our customers, for our brands?

For years, our teams had been asking for better integrated customer data, and we'd never really been able to bring that to the fore. Within just 4 to 6 months with Snowflake, the data was available. They could access it, it was trusted, it was accurate, and that they could visualize it and link it to other data sets in a way that brought real value to the business, in a way that really drove insights and better decision making.

Before we deployed Snowflake platform, it was hard for them to navigate through customer to product, to inventory, through to sale. So Snowflake is now becoming that thread that connects all these components, and we're starting to see those benefits with some of those business units.

Having access to real-time, in-season trade data has meant that our teams are much better equipped to be able to make daily and weekly decisions about how they need to respond. Previously, our teams would have had to scroll through pages and pages of Excel spreadsheet. This is really bringing it to them in that moment, making that decision which is affecting the business in a positive way.

What it's also done, though, is provide that foundation for our AI strategy. And again, it's not that I know exactly what we're going to be doing with AI in 18 months' time, but I know that having that data in the Snowflake ecosystem and that it's trusted and it's set up in a way that we can quickly respond to new opportunities as they arise with AI.

We are leveraging all the Snowflake capabilities, such as Snowpipe and trying dynamic tables as an example. So there's a lot to tap into, and we will be leveraging some of these foundational patterns. We are often asked about how our data strategy is contributing ROI. So we have reduced time to value with some of those business cases because of the reusability of the data. We're also finding new use cases and generating new data at pace.

Where is there a cost avoidance? Where do we not need to buy a big solution because we can build something in Snowflake? How do we get that sort of uplift in really matching our customers to our curated products in the right channel? And data is behind all of that.

Our experience with Snowflake has been super simple. You don't need to worry about overengineering it. Everything is in there, ready to use. It's as if they're thinking of things before we've got to them. And so every day they're showing us something new, and we're like, 'I want one of those. How do I get one of those?' It really is going to underpin the next, you know, nearly 200 years of the David Jones journey.