Episode 5
From Takeout to the Big Leagues: Innovation at Scale
With Dave Sellers
What do Panda Express and the St. Louis Cardinals have in common?
In this episode of REWIRED, host Akanksha Bilani sits down with Dave Sellers, General Manager of MultiCloud at World Wide Technology (WWT), to dive into the world of cloud and AI and how it is transforming the way we order food, cheer for our teams, and live our everyday lives.
From supercharging software development with generative AI to reimagining how global enterprises harness multicloud architecture, Dave pulls back the curtain on the customer wins, engineering wizardry, and game-changing partnerships that make it all happen.
A candid, insightful, and behind-the-scenes look at how Intel, AWS, and WWT are teaming up to build what’s next and deliver outcomes that truly matter.
REWIRED Ep 5 Podcast Transcript
Akanksha Bilani (Host):
Welcome to Rewired, a podcast that shares the coolest stories of innovation and behind-the-scenes breakthroughs from Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani. I run the go-to-market team for team Amazon at Intel, helping bridge the path with AWS partners and customers.
Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Dave Sellers, the GM of Multi-Cloud of WWT.
Dave, thanks so much for being here.
Dave Sellers:
My pleasure. Looking forward to it. Thank you.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely. So, Dave, tell us a little bit about your role and what are you seeing in terms of cool things that are happening in the cloud and Gen.AI that get you excited?
Dave Sellers:
My role is really focused on delivering outcomes to our customers. At World Wide, we focus on the Fortune 500, government entities, et cetera. And there's a lot of really cool projects that we've been involved with, with you guys and AWS and one of which comes to mind, as you ask the question, is we worked in coordination with the folks at Panda Express.
Yes, I'm talking about food. It's about dinner time. So one of the things that they were looking to do was improve their overall user experience as well as their mobile app, and they wanted to create a loyalty program for the first time. So in conjunction with them, we sat down and put some of our UI people together and our design studio people and our folks that know the industry really well, and we came up with an app for them.
I'm happy to say it's powered by Intel running on AWS, and I've got some interesting stats for you. I think you'll be interested in hearing. So via some EC2, RDSS3 and CloudWatch, we built this thing and now have over 16 million reward members added to the program since its launch.
Those 16 million loyalty program members alone have delivered more than a billion dollars in sales from Panda Rewards, and the app won the award for the highest overall score for a mobile order pickup experience out of 26 brands that were ranked by mystery shoppers. So it's been a really, really fun thing for our teams to work on and deliver with the Panda Express folks.
Akanksha Bilani:
And that's getting me even more hungry and I want to add to those numbers, but that's sensational. Congratulations, Dave, to you and your team.
Dave Sellers:
Well, thanks. It's been a team effort. Obviously, we all know that and working with you guys in AWS as well. So it's always good to work with you.
Akanksha Bilani:
Well, speaking of success, just keeping on that same path, Dave, tell us maybe one more of your favorite customer stories that you've been tracking in your career.
Dave Sellers:
Favorite's going to be pretty easy because, Akanksha, I grew up in St. Louis. I'm still here, and my grandfather took me to my first Cardinals game when I was four years old.
And when I then got older and had a family and had children, we became season ticket holders and we were season ticket holders for over 20 years. Kids grew up, off to college. I'm giving away way too many tickets. So we ran into a project where World Wide Technology partnered with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and I had the privilege and honor of leading that team for a year and a half to revamp their analytics program and all of the tools and dashboards they were using and came up with some really good stuff. So if it's my favorite, it'd have to be that one.
Akanksha Bilani:
That's amazing. No, it's incredible what Gen.AI as well as just thinking outside the box of making people get close to technology to just analyze if their life as well as their jobs are lucrative as well as valuable is just incredible.
At Rewired, we're focused on sharing innovations people might know or not know about. So can you give me an example that shows what you're working on that's disruptive in the market today for our audiences? You know, World Wide is a very large as well as a massive brand, possibly associating you guys to multiple services. So what do you feel that you're working on today that's disruptive for technologies like cloud and Gen. AI?
Dave Sellers:
My background before I got here, Akanksha, was I ran three niche software companies. And so application development has been a part of my life for many, many years.
And I will date myself once on this podcast, which is I remember the days of sitting in what were called joint design sessions, and they would last for months on end and it would take years to get applications developed. And by the time you did, the world had changed and the users changed requirements.
So then you get to, you know, 2000s and 2010 and Agile comes in and so those were big changes. But what I'm seeing now, when I look at generative AI for software development, is that these AI coding assistants, such as AWS Kiro, help write code faster. And, you know, you could go out and find like a hundred instances of a file system that needs to be replaced and you can ask the generative AI Kiro system to go do it for you and then you can check the work, right? So you just think of the productivity enhancements and the labor savings there.
And, you know, when these things are done right, I know that there's a statistic that Amazon has out right now that the recommendations were accepted 79% the time. So that tells you how smart these things are and are becoming, and so to me, if we kind of went through the 80s, 90s phase of app dev and the early 2000s, Java came in, you know, and it changed things a little bit and then agile development and instant failure and all those things. I really think this is going to change it more than anything else has ever changed. And I don't think it's going to take long for our customers and users to adopt this technology.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely, and I think software has been the way of the world, the way that optimizing it is also as equally important to make sure that when companies are leveraging their technologies as well as their infrastructure and are leveraging the software that they take advantage of, they're able to also see that best-in-class journey coming through with users of, I would say, industry and technology vendors like Intel, AWS, and WWT.
Dave Sellers:
Yeah, I mean, just one more example from that theme. You know, inside a tool like this, developers can actually describe their requirements in natural language. And then the tool is going to go out, create the user stories, create the acceptance criteria, design the document with diagrams and schemas, and then create a list of coding tasks to implement, and you can go pick how you do that. So I mean, that literally blows me away to think that's where we're at now.
Akanksha Bilani:
Yeah, so you know, when your early journeys as a software developer where you turn your C++ cursor on and start to write your code from that to going in there just to literally like put in the requirements and then, you know, the models spitting out recommendations. That's literally sensational. It's fantastic. I totally agree with you.
Since we've talked about just the diverse ways in which you've seen success stories come through across different industries, Dave, a little personal question: How do you leverage cloud and AI for your own personal journeys today?
Dave Sellers:
So the older I get, the slower I get, right? We all suffer that consequence.
Akanksha Bilani:
You and me both.
Dave Sellers:
So I'm not going to give you a very sexy answer, but I'll give you the real answer, which is these things that are note takers and then organizers of the meeting transcripts and summary, not only are they magic, they're time savers like crazy. So, you know, you get double booked all the time or you want to be in a meeting, but you can't.
And so to be able to go and read it is great. But to say, hey, summarize the key points, who spoke those words, like tell me the story, is mind boggling. It's so powerful and so fast. I mean, it almost instantaneously happens as you're having the call. And so to be able to then, you know, lunch break, having a sandwich and click on the transcript and get that read up, that's game changing to me too. So I love using it that way.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely. Same here. I think whatever it helps with productivity and makes us have to do the cumbersome tasks less and keep it more about thought as well as strategy and vision planning.
I love that aspect of Gen AI today and I leverage it like crazy as well, like almost foolishly.
So I love that we all do that.
Dave Sellers:
What's your go-to?
Akanksha Bilani:
I manage AWS, so we've got Anthropic and Claude that I leverage quite a lot. It also just depends on the asset. So I think if it's PowerPoint or spreadsheet analytics, I think Cloud and Anthropic have been sensational in those.
But like to your point, meeting minutes, because they're tied to a certain app that we typically use for conferencing as well as meeting other people, they seem to be a little bit more efficient or faster when we have to send out minutes of the meeting immediately, since the world is live time lately, isn't it?
Dave Sellers:
Yeah, yeah, good points.
Akanksha Bilani:
Yep, yep, absolutely. Well, that wraps up our show today. You've been listening to Rewired, the podcast celebrating innovations on the bleeding edge brought to you by Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners. Check out our show notes on the Rewired page at www.rewired-podcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts for links to learn more about what we discussed today.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani. Again, I would love to extend a very warm thank you to Dave Sellers for being here and sharing these awesome stories with us. Dave, thanks so much for coming on.
Dave Sellers:
My pleasure. See you next time.
Akanksha Bilani:
See you next time.
