Democratizing E-Commerce with AI @ Meesho

Speaker: Debdoot Mukherjee

Abstract

Meesho is on a journey to democratize internet commerce in India, where it is connecting the next generation of internet users from tier 3-4 towns and villages to the millions of sellers, who are also new to online commerce and sell the long tail of unbranded products. This talk provides an overview of how AI is used to power every pillar of the e-commerce marketplace and showcases interesting research challenges therein. At Meesho, there is a machine learning model working at every step in a user’s shopping journey - be it nudging you to open the app via personalized push notifications, a personalized home page feed that selects products just for you, decoding your current search intent even if you put it across ambiguously or showing product recommendations until you convert. On the supply side, AI helps radically simplify the product listing process. All that a seller needs is to capture a photo from their phone camera and AI does the rest - be it extracting product attributes, pricing, or managing budgets on Ads to ensure robust growth. Finally, on order fulfillment, machine learning helps our delivery partners resolve locations from addresses and also catch fraudulent orders to minimize overheads.

Bio

Debdoot Mukherjee is Chief Data Scientist at Meesho, where he leads the AI team that enables every pillar of the e-commerce marketplace to be smarter and more efficient. Additionally, he also leads Meesho's engineering organization focused on shopping experience and user growth. Debdoot has over 15 years of experience in building innovative AI products in social, mobile and e-commerce domains. Prior to Meesho, Debdoot was VP & Head of AI at ShareChat & Moj, where he led teams in the areas of recommender systems, multimodal learning and camera tech. Before that, he set up the AI team at Hike Messenger that developed novel methods for conversation modeling in Indic languages, massive scale social graph mining etc. Previously, he led ML efforts at Myntra for applications such as personalized search, product discovery, marketing and merchandising intelligence. Debdoot started his career in the domains of enterprise search and information extraction at IBM Research. Debdoot is a gold medallist from IIT Delhi from where he graduated with a Master’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering.