E-commerce giant Flipkart is working with Microsoft to start using artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions to make future sales easy said a report.
Flipkart seems to have learnt its lessons from its previous ‘Big Billion Day’ sales and did not face any major glitches this time around. The website saw almost 30 times its usual amount of traffic during the sale and is already looking at improving its technology systems for the next sales, an Economic Times report said.
“AI and ML are becoming the focus for us now. We think there is a lot of opportunities to optimise how we do things like merchandising and offer placement. So we are putting those systems in place and looking to take away any kind of manual tuning and optimisation,” ET quoted Vinay YS, vice-president of engineering at Flipkart.
The e-commerce giant has been working with Microsoft, which has invested $200 million, to build those capabilities. “We mostly look at Microsoft from the point of view of AI and ML. There are a lot of those capabilities on Microsoft side that we would like to leverage. On aspects like voice recognition we want to partner with them deeply,” Vinay said according to the report.
In February, Flipkart had partnered with Microsoft to make Azure its exclusive cloud-computing platform. Currently, it does not use a public cloud, having built a large private cloud infrastructure. The last major investment in its own data centre was in 2015. “On the pure cloud front, we are still evaluating – what they have in India and what we need,” said Vinay, as told by ET.
Recently, Microsoft announced setting up a new healthcare department at its Cambridge research facility, as part of plans to use its artificial intelligence software to enter the health market.
Last week, Microsoft unveiled an AI-based automated threat investigation system to enhance the security of devices. The system will enable the Microsoft users with insight to take action against modern-day threats while also increasing the efficiency of the machines, the company had said.
