From warehouse floors to boardrooms, AI is reshaping how retail operations are designed, scaled, and led. In this episode of re:Tales with AWS, host Brooke Moody sits down with Hanna Moisander, COO/CTO at Sweden’s leading online pharmacy Apotea and board member at fashion retailer Lager157, to explore what modern retail operations look like when technology, people, and bold leadership converge.
Hanna shares how she led Apotea’s transformation from legacy on-premise infrastructure to an AI-ready ecommerce and logistics stack built on AWS, scaling order processing from 12,000 to 40,000 daily and launching three AI use cases within three months of platform launch. One of those, a recommendation engine powered by Amazon Bedrock, lifted conversion by more than 600 percent.
But this isn’t just a technology story. Hanna unpacks the cultural trade-offs of re-engineering for intelligence at scale, the courage to "kill your darlings" (whether that’s legacy code or comfortable ways of working), and how to keep transformation moving when board cycles are slow and the market won’t wait. In a category as sensitive as pharmacy, she explains how Apotea balances personalisation with responsibility, compliance with speed, and automation with trust.
You’ll also hear Hanna’s perspective on preparing teams for the emotional shift that comes with automation, why boards need to move beyond compliance checklists, and what bold moves she expects will define retail in 2026.
If you’re a retail executive, operations leader, or technologist navigating transformation, this episode offers a practical and human look at what AI-first retail operations actually require, and what no algorithm can replace.
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