Walmart-owned Flipkart is leveraging generative artificial intelligence to improve customer and seller experience by rolling out various features. Flipkart chief product and technology officer (CPTO) Jeyandran Venugopal said the company is also developing in-house GenAI tools to improve productivity and efficiency.
Venugopal was speaking during a fireside chat at the Converge Walmart event in Bengaluru. “We fully support GenAI, which we believe is a major transformative technology and provides an opportunity to democratize e-commerce. Especially in India, I think a lot of users in tier-2 and tier-3 cities can benefit from the assisted purchasing experience provided by GenAI ,”He said.
GenAI’s approach
Flipkart has taken a three-pronged approach to GenAI. It plans to create a chat-led experience for its customers and sellers, significantly upgrade search capabilities based on the LLM, and build internal tools to improve productivity and efficiency.
Venugopal noted that the platform’s homepage will be changed ahead of the festive sales. “We’re creating a multi-home experience where people can swipe right to a very clean chat-dominated home page. We’ve been working on this for six months,” he said.
Semantic search
The company also hopes to improve its search capabilities by changing existing information-driven technology to a more semantic-based search experience powered by large language models (LLMs). Venugopal aims to make product discovery seamless and intuitive. He said that the promotion rate of this feature has reached 60% and has received positive response.
Walmart’s flagship event focuses on retail technology innovation within the ecosystem, with numerous industry players showcasing their approach to evolving technologies.
“We are at the beginning of another major transformation in retail. Many of the new technologies that are having a major impact on our industry have been accelerating over the past few years. As technology is adopted, it is redefining standards and disrupting industries . Whether consumers are talking, texting, looking at a screen, viewing or interacting with a product through an AR/VR device, they want to continue the conversation,” said Suresh Kumar, executive vice president, global chief technology officer and chief operating officer.Walmart Corporate Development Officer
