Key Points
- The most popular attraction at Amazon’s major tech conference was an AI-powered perfume-making booth.
- Attendees waited in long lines for a custom fragrance designed by Amazon’s generative AI.
- The booth was a marketing gimmick to showcase Amazon’s AI technology’s creative capabilities.
- The AI-generated perfumes received mixed reviews from those who tried them.
At Amazon’s massive cloud computing conference in Las Vegas this week, the biggest lines aren’t for the expert panels on data lakes or server migrations. Instead, thousands of tech professionals are waiting hours for a free, custom perfume designed entirely by artificial intelligence.
While Amazon officially touted new updates to its SageMaker AI service, its “Fragrance Lab” stole the show. The interactive booth uses the company’s Nova generative AI to create a unique scent for each person.
Attendees answer a series of voice prompts about their favorite activities and moods. The AI then analyzes their answers and generates a scent profile from a palette of 30 notes, which human perfumers flown in from France mix on the spot.
The gimmick is meant to demonstrate the creative potential of Amazon’s AI, showing it can do more than just crunch numbers. For some, the wait was well worth it. Peter Nikoloff waited nearly two hours to create a fragrance for his wife and was thrilled with the result, a mix of mint, sandalwood, and sage. “Oh it was totally worth it,” he said. “There’s quite a lot of perfume here, for free.”
But the AI perfumer isn’t a master just yet. Anthony Walker, an engineer, also waited for hours, describing himself to the AI as “nature-loving and creative.” He was deeply disappointed with the bamboo-and-mint aroma it designed for him, calling it “very feminine” and saying it “really stinks.” He plans to give the failed experiment to his girlfriend.
