Conversational AI in E-Commerce
Dr. Ganapathy Krishnan is currently Vice President, Engineering of the US R&D Centre for Flipkart, India’s eCommerce market leader.
Prior to Flipkart, Dr. Krishnan spent several years working on Bing Search at Microsoft. He led teams to improve Bing Local Search quality and also launched the Bing Business Bot for Microsoft.
He then joined Amazon where he led a team of data and research scientists to help Amazon gain insights on its worldwide operations workforce. His team worked on novel approaches to reduce hourly worker attrition and improve the quality of life in Amazon’s warehouses.
He also built a data team at Sweetgreen, one of the hottest startups in the fast casual food industry.
Earlier in his career, he founded two companies with successful exits. He was also CTO at multiple startup companies. Prior to his career in industry, he was a tenured Computer Science faculty member.
In his career, he has published multiple papers on neural networks, Computer Vision and has two patents in eCommerce.
His current interests are in Conversational Commerce and Deep Learning for Natural language understanding and Computer Vision.
The pandemic has accelerated the Indian eCommerce market and Flipkart is innovating once again with Conversational AI. This is especially important for Tier2 to Tier4 cities where customers want to shop in a conversational fashion using regional languages. This talk will discuss our journey in Conversational AI and how we are innovating to address the eCommerce needs of Indian customers.
Q&A transcript
Mike Barton Thanks for joining today. And thanks to Ganapathy! Stay tuned after the talk for Q&A.
Al Rey Thank you
Paolo Di Pietro What about digital human interfaces?
Troy Conquer Will the presentation be shared afterwords?
Robert Mitchell Yes, it will.
Troy Conquer Cool. Thanks!
Robert Mitchell Look for it before eob today!
Ganapathy Krishnan If you mean artificially generated avatars for digital human interfaces, I think it is a great idea for engagement, but we aren’t doing this yet
Ganapathy Krishnan Also, happy to connect with anyone and answer more questions on LinkedIn
Paolo Di Pietro Yes, I mean exactly that. I’m really impressed and intrested in such a technology.
Ganapathy Krishnan Look at soulmachines
Paolo Di Pietro Another one is digitalhumans
Ganapathy Krishnan I will look at them as well
Paolo Di Pietro Or maybe they are the same as both are in Auckland, NZ ;-)
Robert Mitchell Thank you, Ganapathy! Are there any more questions?
Ganapathy Krishnan I’m here to answer any questions you may have
Ganapathy Krishnan I would love to hear from any of you who are in this space of Conversational Commerce
Robert Mitchell Going once....
Milind Kamble Can conversational AI impact cart abandonment rate?
Robert Mitchell Again, thank you Ganapathy for your time today!
Ganapathy Krishnan Thanks everyone!
Paolo Di Pietro Well, we are on the way to develop a virtual assistant to support people to match the desired recipe/food with the best available wine type.
Ganapathy Krishnan Do connect with me and we can share notes
Robert Mitchell Did you see Milind’s question above?
Paolo Di Pietro The matching part has already been developed, but we are now facing the Virtual assistant part, and for that I’d like to use digital humans ....
Ganapathy Krishnan Yes, I think Conversational AI can impact cart abandonment rate
Robert Mitchell Join Ganapathy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganapathykrishnan/
Ganapathy Krishnan One of the reasons people abandon carts are they are not entirely sure, so getting a definitive answer really helps keep the customer shopping
Paolo Di Pietro The dark side of the cart abandonment rate is the low quality level of the current chatbots
Ganapathy Krishnan Yes, totally agree. We are working hard to improve our answerability to a very high level
Milind Kamble Yeah, timely nudges over a voicebot could be a great addition.
Mike Barton Agreed there, for sure, @JP
Ganapathy Krishnan As I said, one of the metrics we measure is answerability and I think we need to hit about 80% answerability for customers to be really happy
Robert Mitchell How are you going to get there?
Paolo Di Pietro As can we cooperate together to implement a voice supported voice driven virtual assistant?
Ganapathy Krishnan There is no silver bullet to get there. It takes a number of initiatives. Here are some of the things we are doing.
Paolo Di Pietro Are you open to work on an Open Source based collaboration?
Ganapathy Krishnan
- Improve coverage of product descriptions and specifications 2. Improve out intent recognition to incorporate context 3. Find as many external sources of information as possible and then use analytics to debug exactly where we are not answering questions
Ganapathy Krishnan Let’s talk offline about open source collaboration. It will require a higher level of discussion.
Ganapathy Krishnan Finally, we have a customer service agent who can help answer questions that the bot cannot.
Paolo Di Pietro Allright, let me know how to!
Robert Mitchell Click on Ganapathy’s name above. You can then message him here or go to his LinkedIn and message him there.
Ganapathy Krishnan Another is answering negative answers, e.g. “Does the phone have 2 sims example ?” I gave
Ganapathy Krishnan Answering it with a helpful answer is crucial in helping customers.
Ganapathy Krishnan Another area that we are working on is improving our ability to understand Hinglish
Ganapathy Krishnan For example, we get queries such as “Ye phone ka resolution kya hai?”
Ganapathy Krishnan This means “What is the resolution of the phone?”
Ganapathy Krishnan Tuning our models for these kind of queries helps us answer more questions.
Ganapathy Krishnan Thanks for the great questions!
Robert Mitchell And thank you for your time today!
Ganapathy Krishnan Signing off
Mike Barton Many thanks to Ganapathy Krishnan from Flipkart today. The replay/on-demand version of this talk will be up later today and we'll have a highlights article that will follow. Join us next week for Keegan Hines from Arthur https://exchange.scale.com/home/events/translating-data-science-to-business-value-2022-03-03