Case Study: Ocado achieves 4x faster urgent response and 80x faster analytics with Google Cloud Platform

Ocado Delivering big results by learning from big data

Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer and creator of the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), faced rapidly growing online demand and massive, complex data needs—approaching two petabytes—while relying on specialist on‑premises infrastructure and PhD-level data scientists to run machine learning and analytics. The company needed scalable, cost‑efficient analytics and AI to improve customer service, speed decisioning, and support OSP’s expansion as a hosted solution for other retailers.

Ocado migrated to Google Cloud Platform—using BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud Machine Learning Engine/TensorFlow, Dataflow and Dataproc—democratizing ML and streamlining analytics. The solution prioritized customer emails with a TensorFlow model (urgent responses 4x faster, 7% of emails require no reply), boosted contact‑center efficiency by 7%, delivered analytics 80x faster at 33% lower cost than the old warehouse, and reduced IT overhead while enabling scalable OSP deployments (used by Morrisons and other partners).

Ocado

Paul Clarke

Director of Technology