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Amazon said that its push into Machine Learning (ML) has already started yielding results and reconfirmed its plans to increase its kirana footprint in India.
Addressing a gathering of Amazon executives as a part of its Women In Technology conference, Amit Agarwal, Senior Vice-President - India Consumer Business, Amazon, said the company is using ML to identify defects in its products. “We use it to check for defects in pages that list these products,” he said.
Earlier, this was done manually as humans would scour through pages of information to search for defects. Now, thousands of data scientists in Amazon are using ML, said Doug Herrington, Senior Vice-President, North America Consumer, Amazon. This development comes in the backdrop of the American tech giant launching a microchip aimed at ML, thereby getting into the segment dominated by Intel, Nvidia and AMD.
Agarwal along with Herrington reiterated the company’s commitment to put customer expectations at the heart of every transaction, something which founder, Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos is very particular about.
Grocery segment
This is evident from Amazon’s recent foray into the grocery segment in India, something that it has not tried in its home turf (US) or other geographies. “We will increase our engagement with kirana stores from where a shopper can get food and other essentials delivered from nearby stores within 2-4 hours of placing an order,” Agarwal said. However, the Amazon executives did not get into specifics. Agarwal pointed to the company’s delivery network which enabled it to deliver products to 99.3 per cent of pincodes during the recent festival sale.
This service is available currently in Bengaluru. Through its new delivery service, the owners of kirana shops can upload their inventories onto the Amazon website for local shoppers to see what’s available in nearby stores. This will be delivered either through the company’s delivery service or through third-party logistics companies.
“The customer push is evident, and in achieving scale, technology will play a pivotal role. “Innovate at scale using technology is our mantra,” said Agarwal.
Despite making losses in India, Amazon, along with private equity company Samara Capital, has co-invested in supermarket chain More. Amazon holds 49 per cent and the remaining is held by Samara Capital. It also has a small stake in Shopper’s Stop.
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