Having collected enough unique 'Indian' data, Flipkart gears up with ‘AI for India’
, ET Bureau|
Updated: Dec 21, 2017, 08.50 AM IST
BENGALURU: There might come a day in the near future, when you can maybe order shirts from Flipkart using a voice assistant in your mother tongue or maybe have an AI-based visual similarity search. These could well be the results of the homegrown ecommerce company’s newly-coined umbrella theme ‘AI for India’.
The company is all geared up to double down its work with artificial intelligence technologies, across operations ranging from conversational search, visual similarity, better last-mile delivery, fraud detection, personalisation to warehousing.
The trigger for this broad-based intent is the fact that Flipkart, in its decade-long existence, has collected enough unique 'Indian' data to build various algorithms. It believes that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach will not work in India. In fact, it is already running specific projects across the board using AI.
"Right now, the use of AI is moderate. There are some interesting projects in the marketplace, customer support, search and personalisation. You will see much more innovation coming out of Flipkart in the next year...this is going to be a big game changer for us," said Sachin Bansal, executive chairman of Flipkart.
According to Sreedhar Prasad, Partner and Head – Consumer Markets & Internet Business, KPMG India – it is a given that companies need to push for the use of AI across its various functions. "AI, per se, (can be used for ) on the customer side and two, internally, to in turn enhance the customer experience. It can be used in warehousing. For example, can I do predictive analysis on my warehousing?" he said. "Right from trigger to exploration to discovery, purchase to post purchase you have something from AI coming in. The definition of an interface with a customer is itself changing."
Flipkart’s main rival Amazon has been working on similar problems in the marketplace and has already made significant advances, given its global scale. It is aggressively pushing to build an ecosystem around Alexa, its voice based personal assistant, part of the work for which is done in India.
To achieve this vision, the ecommerce player is looking to ramp up its talent pool. It is looking to hire aggressively from premier campuses and is also looking to attract talent from abroad. It is also upskilling its present talent pool.
The company is all geared up to double down its work with artificial intelligence technologies, across operations ranging from conversational search, visual similarity, better last-mile delivery, fraud detection, personalisation to warehousing.
The trigger for this broad-based intent is the fact that Flipkart, in its decade-long existence, has collected enough unique 'Indian' data to build various algorithms. It believes that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach will not work in India. In fact, it is already running specific projects across the board using AI.
"Right now, the use of AI is moderate. There are some interesting projects in the marketplace, customer support, search and personalisation. You will see much more innovation coming out of Flipkart in the next year...this is going to be a big game changer for us," said Sachin Bansal, executive chairman of Flipkart.
According to Sreedhar Prasad, Partner and Head – Consumer Markets & Internet Business, KPMG India – it is a given that companies need to push for the use of AI across its various functions. "AI, per se, (can be used for ) on the customer side and two, internally, to in turn enhance the customer experience. It can be used in warehousing. For example, can I do predictive analysis on my warehousing?" he said. "Right from trigger to exploration to discovery, purchase to post purchase you have something from AI coming in. The definition of an interface with a customer is itself changing."
Flipkart’s main rival Amazon has been working on similar problems in the marketplace and has already made significant advances, given its global scale. It is aggressively pushing to build an ecosystem around Alexa, its voice based personal assistant, part of the work for which is done in India.
To achieve this vision, the ecommerce player is looking to ramp up its talent pool. It is looking to hire aggressively from premier campuses and is also looking to attract talent from abroad. It is also upskilling its present talent pool.
