E-commerce platforms enabled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are changing the business model of many brands. However, Sudhir Kadam, Venture Partner of FYDA Growth Partners believes there’s still a lot to achieve. While moderating the keynote panel ‘AI in Retail/E-commerce’ at the 7th Annual Big Data Conference, he stated though it is easy to adopt AI if you start from scratch; it is difficult to dismantle a legacy system for big companies.

Leveraging data to enhance consumer experience

Matthew Tovbin, Software Architect at Salesforce, believes adopting AI is like transforming a company’s operations inside out. His company embraced AI a few years ago and has fully integrated the system into its operations. Similarly, GAP has been building quantitative models for over 30 years and experiments a lot on its platform to understand the behavior and interaction of its users. The brand aims to speed up its delivery process and identify the weak links in the process that are resulting in the loss of the time by understanding the relevancy of AI both from its scale perspective and its ability to add productivity to the value chain of e-commerce retail.

Use of AI is also helping companies like Levi Strauss to transform their business. Levi’s is leveraging data and algorithms on these platforms to enhance its consumer experience. It has been building applications to help its consumers shop online and has recently launched a ‘recommendation system’ which helps its customers to find relevant products.

Challenges of insufficient knowledge

However, there are many challenges brands are facing as they are working in a new domain with new technologies. Another challenge is the use of Natural Language Processing. Brands find it difficult to cope with both the language and image processing used in the NLP model. They believe the language used by the model is as stable as deep learning and the image processing quality is also weak. To counter this, they are reading high-level reviews on the technology and its applications. Through this, it they are able to isolate the problem areas for its customers.

Arijit Sengupta, CEO of Aible, believes one needs to be an expert data scientist to create AI and most people do not have data scientists. He expects AI to be most impactful technology in future. However, companies do not have the required knowledge about it.

Summing, Sridhar Muppalla, NIT Warangal brand ambassador said AI is the buzz word currently with companies investing money in it. However, his company also aims to promote startups as only if they are successful, they will hire more people.