Artificial intelligence (AI) sparked a debate over its potential to cause job losses when Indian companies started adopting for multiple functions. However, with time, AI seems to have been absorbed into the tech ecosystem of India across several industries. Especially with Open AI’s ground-breaking product Chat GPT, generative AI has seemingly opened up an array of new opportunities for several industries.
While deep-tech and IT are the key industries to adopt AI, e-commerce companies have also started deploying it across multiple functions such as customer engagement, product description and listing, market analysis, etc.
In this backdrop, Business Today spoke with Meesho’s co-founder and chief technology officer Sanjeev Barnwal to understand how the start-up is adopting AI. According to him, Meesho operates on the basis of a lot of data gathered from the buying habits of the customers. As Meesho has a huge of base of non-branded products, it makes use of AI and data science to analyse the market demand and show products to the users accordingly.
He said, “We filter products for customers using AI and data. We use AI for product recommendation, product ranking, making listing easy for sellers, suggesting price points to sellers, etc. We try to enrich products by using AI.”
Enabling smoother operations in small towns
Barnwal said that Meesho has found Generative AI deployment efficient in supporting both sellers and buyers across the Tier-II and Tier-III cities. According to him, across such smaller cities and towns, high use of vernacular language has been detected on both buyer and seller sides. While, buyers search for products in vernaculars, some sellers find it tough to describe their products well in English. This is where AI helps, he said.
“We have found AI to be helpful in translation of product descriptions for both sellers and buyers. We have vernacular voice search feature which leverages AI to detect the right product,” Barnwal said.
Like its competitor Amazon, Meesho has also rolled out AI-enabled features to make product listing easier for sellers. The e-commerce unicorn offers a content-to-image feature for the sellers. The feature generates images of products based on descriptions powered by language models.
Translation of addresses
Interestingly, Gen AI has also been effective for Meesho in helping delivery executives with addresses, claimed Barnwal. In the small towns of the India many customers write addresses in vernacular languages. However, in such cases, finding the right address becomes a challenge for the delivery executives. Thus, Meesho has adopted AI for translation of addresses from maps to ensure smoother delivery.
Customer engagement
Meesho is no exception to the list of e-commerce companies that are leveraging AI for customer engagement. According to Barnwal, certain areas such as sending notification have become easier with the help of AI.
However, Meesho realises that technology has limitations. Not every time can it resolve the issues of the customers. Though the e-commerce unicorn has seen much success in addressing queries even in vernacular languages, humans are working hand-in-hand with AI-enabled bots wherever need for human intervention is felt.
Founded in 2015 by Barnwal and Vidit Aatrey, Meesho is an e-commerce platform backed by the likes of Meta, Peak XV, Prosus Ventures, B Capital, SoftBank among others. It competes with companies like Amazon and Flipkart.
Earlier this year, the company announced an employee stock option (Esop) buyback programme worth Rs 200 crore, its largest to date, benefitting nearly 1,700 former and current employees.