Flipkart is banking on AI technology to build sales strategy

India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart is betting on an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will use its vast data of online consumer market collected over 10 years to make smarter decisions to predict sales of products.

"We are trying to predict how many units of what we will sell. This is a very complex thing that is dependent on a variety of inputs such as price, discount or if an event, such as Diwali or Christmas is coming up," Krishnendu Chaudhury, principal scientist and head of image sciences at Flipkart, was quoted by Business Standard as saying.

Although global player Amazon has been in the e-commerce space 10 years before Flipkart, it set foot in India only in 2013. As a result, Flipkart enjoys an advantage over its rival from the enormous data it has collected over the years. This will help the Indian company to train its AI engines as they provide accurate solutions when more data is available.

Another factor that may help Flipkart’s AI solution success is its 100 million user base.

Out of the 100 million users, majority of them make use of smartphones. This helps the company in understanding consumer behavior, purchasing power and socio-economic background of an individual depending on the smartphone they use.

The e-commerce player can also gauge the signals a user’s phone captures and leverage it by targeting the right products to the consumers.

Not more can be known about the AI sales predicting engine of Flipkart as it is patent pending.