As the online food ordering trend is becoming more and more prominent in India, the food delivery platforms like Swiggy and Zomato are growing their user base at an exponential rate. A research firm RedSeer stated that the online food delivery market in India is expected to hit $4 billion by 2020. Driven by this surge, the companies are looking forward to artificial intelligence to improve customer experience.
Swiggy
According to a report, the number of user interactions on Swiggy has grown exponentially from 2 billion in October 2017 to a massive 40 billion in January 2019. To keep up with the massive growth the company looks up to Artificial intelligence as a solution to many of the problems. Head of the Engineering and Data Science Team at Swiggy, Dale Vaz says “AI is critical for us to sustain our growth,”.
Artificial intelligence helps Swiggy distinguish the dishes from images classifying them as vegan or non-vegan dishes. Natural Language Processing can greatly help the platform in serving wider geography without having to consider linguistic boundaries that enables search using colloquial terms which customers could use to obtain accurate results.
The platform also makes use of AI to provide a customized interface to customers according to their specific likes or needs. For example, Swiggy recently acquired a Bangaluru-based AI startup Kint.io.
Zomato
As seen by Swiggy as its arch-rival in the food delivery market, Zomato doesn’t seem to be backing down too. Recently the company had raised Rs 284 crore from a US investor Glade Brook Capital Partners as part of its strategy to acquire more market share from its rivals. Last month Zomato made a claim of achieving a 28 million monthly order run rate as of December compared to the 21 million in October which also helps the company in projecting future order volume. The platforms Gold Subscription package also claims to have worked out for the company, bringing on board 7 lakh members and over 6,000 restaurant partners, up from 6 lakh members and 4,000 restaurants.
It was in the late December that Zomato acquired Lucknow-based startup TechEagle Innovations looking forward to establishing a drone-based delivery network in India.
Zomato’s Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said in a press release -“We believe that robots powering the last-mile delivery is an inevitable part of the future and hence is going to be a significant area of investment for us.”
It is not just Zomato and Swiggy, other food delivery services like Foodpanda and Uber-eats also seem to be taking up shares in the market and strategizing. It was recently reported by a news magazine that Uber Eats is experiencing a nearly 50 percent of growth per month in its first year of operations in the Indian market.
Thinking Ahead
Artificial Intelligence has become an inevitable part of future tech that every organization wants to lay their hands on. Although AI has been around for a while in the consumer market in mobile phones, virtual assistants, video games etc, the tech is still a golden bait for organizations in an ever-growing market of Ocean with many organizations competing to take a bite.
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