The Great Indian 'AI' Festival: How AI is Helping Amazon Reach Record Sales In almost ten years of 'GIF' and having witnessed a record of 110 crore customer visits in the 2023 edition, Amazon India is leveraging emerging technologies, particularly AI and GenAI, to ramp up customer and seller experience ahead of the GIF 2024

When e-commerce giant Amazon entered the Indian market in 2013, it partnered with 100 booksellers. With just one category under its belt, it clocked in a solid INR 112 crore in revenue.

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman, Amazon in 2014 said that India has something special, and invested USD two million in the country's operations. "This country has something special. This is going to be the Indian century," he had said.

This was the beginning of Amazon India's expansion to offer products in over 30 categories to over 100 million customers.

In 2015, it launched the first edition of its annual sale event 'Great Indian Festival', contributing to a revenue of INR 1,022 crore. Saurabh Srivastava, vice president, Category Leadership, Amazon India calls GIF a place where 'innovation meets tradition.'

In almost ten years of 'GIF' and having witnessed a record of 110 crore customer visits in the 2023 edition, Amazon India is leveraging the emerging technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), to ramp up customer and seller experience ahead of the GIF 2024.

AI-powered Playground

In June 2024, Amazon touched a market valuation of USD two trillion for the first time in the backdrop of AI strategies. It is leveraging AI and Machine Learning in innovative ways, from using computer vision to grade products to generating AI-powered seller videos, all aimed at enhancing the customer experience.

AI-powered features such as Amazon Live, Visual Search, and Regional Language Search have made the e-commerce player more accessible across India. Case in point, Amazon Live reported more than 1,000 hours of live streaming powered by over 300 influencers to help customers make informed purchase decisions in 2023.

"The app that we use today is the result of thousands of small incremental improvements that we make every day to enhance your shopping experience on Amazon," shared Zaid Khan, director, Reach and Consumer Marketing, Amazon India during the launch.

Exactly a month prior to GIF 2024, it launched Rufus, a Gen AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, in beta mode. For Srivastava, Rufus is all about making the shopping experience smoother and more intuitive than ever. According to the e-commerce giant, "Rufus is an expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon's product catalogue and information from across the web, to answer customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons, make recommendations based on this context, and facilitate product discovery in the same Amazon shopping experience customers use regularly."

"If this is the largest sale event of the year and customers are waiting for the whole year to make that big purchase, then you want to give them as many tools as possible to do the research and be ready. And therefore, yes, from that perspective it makes sense to have it before the event," shared Ranjit Babu, director, Consumer Electronics, Amazon India.

Making Selling Efficient

As of September 2024, the India platform had over 16 lakh sellers. Amit Nanda, director, Selling Partner Services, Amazon India notes on the usage of AI to make it easy for them to do business, "Whether it is managing advertising or listings, all of them were enabled by AI. It's made it simpler for them to run their business on a day-to-day basis."

"Initially, it was hard for our sellers to estimate how much they should stock up or how much they will sell. We've used ML in that space, and can now actually recommend to them that they should expect this many units of products to sell. We are also able to recommend to them which region they should store their products so that it can reach customers the fastest," said KN Srikanth, director, Home, Kitchen and Outdoors, Amazon India.

Fueling Decision Making

Amazon India counts electronics, home and kitchen, clothing and jewelry, beauty and personal care, and health and household as some of its top selling categories.

Notably, home, kitchen and outdoors are one of the fastest growing categories on the platform. The category witnessed 25-27 per cent CAGR in three year period. KN Srikanth, category's director at Amazon India said that it expects to grow no less than 40-42 per cent year-on-year. Under the category, he highlights paints as a fast growing sub-segment. There is a strong trend of DIY painting going on. "We thought, what are the typical questions one might have? If you are to buy paint online, you'll ask how much paint should I buy and what accessories do I need? We launched a product solution for this. If you input the wall size, the tool will tell you how much paint to buy. It'll suggest interior, exterior, what should you mix with it, a thinner or something else, and what brush do you need to paint this. In the first month of launch, we sold more than 25,000 litres of paint," he shared with us.

In 2023, it introduced AI-generated review highlights 'Customer Say'— a short paragraph that appears on the product description page, highlighting the product's features and the popular customer reviews.

With regards to home and furnishing, Srikanth feels the immersive visualisation feature has helped in making customers feel a lot more confident of going ahead and ordering products, "that is something that we have definitely seen."

According to market research firm Datum Intelligence, e-commerce companies and online sellers are expected to ship merchandise worth USD 12 billion to consumers in India this festive season. Last year, Amazon India saw 1.1 billion customer visits on the platform during the sale and almost four million new customers. "This year, we believe all those records will be broken," said Srivastava in the media.