Walmart-owned Flipkart is leveraging Generative AI to improve experiences for its customers and sellers by launching various features. It is also developing internal GenAI tools to improve productivity and efficiency, said, Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Flipkart. 

Venugopal was speaking on a fireside chat at the Converge Walmart event in Bengaluru. “We are all in on GenAI, we think it’s a significant transformative technology and gives opportunities to democratise e-commerce. Especially in India, I think a lot of tier two and three city users can benefit from assisted buying experiences, which GenAI empowers,” he said. 

Approach to GenAI

Flipkart has a three-pronged approach to GenAI. It plans to create chat-led experiences for its customers and sellers, upgrade the search function significantly based on LLMs, and build internal tools for productivity and efficiency. 

Venugopal noted that the homepage of the platform will be changed ahead of festive season sales. “We are creating a multi-home page experience where one can swipe right to a very clean chat-led homepage. We have been working on it for six months,” he said. 

Semantic search

The company is also looking to improve its search functions by changing it from the existing information-driven technique to a more semantic-based search experience, powered by large-language models (LLMs). With this Venugopal aims to make the discovery of products seamless and intuitive. The feature has been rolled out up to 60 per cent already and has received positive reactions, he said. 

Walmart’s flagship event focussed on retail-tech innovations in the ecosystem with various industry players presenting their approach to evolving technology. 

“We are at the beginning of another big disruption in retail. Many new technologies that have had a substantial impact on our industry have been accelerating in the last few years. As technology gets adopted, it redefines the standards, and disrupts industries.  Whether a consumer speaks, texts, goes to a screen, or looks at the product from an AR/VR device, or interacts with it, they want a continuation of a conversation,” said Suresh Kumar, EVP, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer, Walmart Inc. 

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