Swiggy forms dedicated team to work on AI

Rohit Kapoor, CEO of Swiggy's core business

Jumping on the bandwagon, Swiggy has formed a dedicated team of around five members who are tasked only with finding new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the company, chief executive officer of the company’s food marketplace Rohit Kapoor told Moneycontrol in an interview.

The food and grocery delivery startup has been using AI to generate pictures of food items and describing them as well in certain cases while it continues to experiment with technology. Even Gurugram-based Zomato, Swiggy’s biggest competitor, has been using AI to better customer experience and smoothen operations.

“AI is not a not an area of curiosity anymore, it is an area of active workstream. AI is also a space where we don't know what we don't know. So we are not taking a deterministic approach there at all saying it will be only implemented in a certain area, it’s across the business,” Kapoor said.

While bringing down the total operational costs by leveraging AI was one outcome for Swiggy, it wasn’t the only goal for the startup.

“Until and unless we are boundaryless in our thinking on this one right now we'll be making a mistake… cost is only one side of it,” Kapoor added.

More recently the company launched WhatToEat, a feature which improves food discovery by allowing users to explore curated options based on their mood and cravings.

Swiggy has also been using AI, mostly in the form of bots, to intervene with customer queries. “Every company has to automate customer complaints at some point and we do it where it makes sense…Can we do better refunds? Yes, we should do much better with refunds,” Kapoor said.

He however added that customer refunds are an “insignificant number” in the company’s profit and loss (P&L) statement and it will not amount to anything material beyond a point.

“...refunds are a careful thing to do. Because 99 percent of the refunds are genuine but that one percent will try to misuse the system at times and we must not lose money where nothing was due. We can of course optimise refunds and improve our profitability. But is this a big swing on our P&L? The answer is no,” Kapoor, who spends four hours every weekend – on websites like Midjourney and the like – learning about AI, concluded.