How GenAI helps e-commerce firms handle high festive season demand

E-commerce companies lean on the technology to serve customers and sellers in festival season shopping rush

As millions of Indians shop online in the festival season, e-commerce companies have come to depend on artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI). The technology serves a range of work: Recommendations, order placements, customer feedback and last-mile delivery.
 

Amazon’s Great Indian Festival, Flipkart’s The Big Billion Days and Meesho’s Mega Blockbuster sale events this year heavily used GenAI and machine learning (ML) for consumer and seller-side operations. (GenAI is a type of AI that can create new content, such as images, text, videos and music by learning to take up tasks from past data. ML is a type of AI that performs data analysis tasks without explicit instructions.)
 

“Every year, especially during the festival season, we welcome a significant number of first-time internet users to our platform, and AI has been instrumental in bridging the gap between offline and online shopping,” said Debdoot Mukherjee, chief data scientist and head of AI, Meesho.
 

Softbank-backed Meesho has developed AI-powered solutions for customer and seller support interactions, voice search and addressing challenges in translation and geocoding, particularly in Tier-II cities.
 

For improving customer experience, Meesho uses AI to personalise “touchpoints” such as notifications, homepage content, product recommendation, and search results. The technology improves accuracy for customers’ search queries in Indian languages.
 

GenAI year
 

“This year, GenAI has also automated the majority of our customer support interactions through chat, allowing us to scale support seamlessly during peak sale periods. This includes handling queries in regional languages like Marathi, Punjabi and Kannada, leading to higher customer satisfaction,” said Mukherjee.
 

Amazon used AI and ML to develop Rufus, a conversational shopping assistant, and Live, an interactive streaming feed for brands to promote their products.
 

“Rufus is an expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalogue and information from across the web to answer customer questions on shopping needs, products and comparisons, make recommendations based on this context and facilitate product discovery in the same Amazon shopping experience customers use regularly,” said Kishore Thota, director, India and emerging markets, Amazon.
 

The company’s GenAI technology creates reviews that summarise thousands of product reviews and improve search results. It uses augmented reality for visual search and ML to make automated product videos. Amazon, which offers its services in eight Indian languages, is working with linguists to improve the technologies it uses for customer services.
 

Amazon has built an AI-powered engine to answer customers’ product-related questions. “For instance, for te question ‘how heavy is it?’ the system would provide the factoid answer ‘236 grams’. Or for the question ‘is this camera expensive?’ it would extract the following answer from a customer review: ‘For the price, this camera is good value for money for an amateur photographer’,” said Thota.
 

Flipkart, the homegrown e-commerce company, has introduced similar AI-enabled features to bolster its customer experience.

“This tech-driven approach goes beyond traditional e-commerce, enabling features like hyper-personalised recommendations, interactive virtual try-ons, and real-time engagement,” said a Flipkart spokesperson.
 

The company is doubling down on personalisation to improve customer engagement by using features such as GenAI-enabled 3D product explainer videos and ‘try-before-you-buy’ for items like watches. 
 

Flipkart’s ‘multimodal’ feature allows users to search for products using any combination of mediums: That is unlike traditional methods that are limited to a single medium like text or image. E-commerce firms are investing in AI technology for their seller bases as well. “Flipkart provides AI-powered seller insights across all business aspects such as product quality, customer feedback, inventory planning, ads, returns and cost optimisation,” said the company spokesperson.
 

Business insight
 

 Flipkart’s ‘SmartROI Ads’ capability enables sellers who are not well acquainted with e-commerce to set up campaigns with preset objectives. 
 

Amazon uses GenAI to make product listings informative by helping its seller-partners write engaging titles and product descriptions. 
 

“Sellers offer deals and promotions to entice customers to buy their products. However, key questions that plague sellers are: Which products should they offer deals on? What should be the amount of discount offered on the product? We are using machine learning to identify relevant products for specific events such as Valentine’s Day, Diwali, Holi, Christmas,” said Thota.

Large third-party logistics players are using GenAI to strengthen-last mile delivery. Ecom Express uses its own AI platform, Bull.ai, to reduce costs, forecast demand, optimise vehicle allocation and route planning.
 

“We actively use ML models to forecast shipment volumes, and it enables us to manage increased volumes efficiently ensuring a better ordering and delivery experience,” said Amit Choudhary, chief product and technology officer, Ecom Express.