Flipkart says AI now writes 40% of its code
What's the story
Leading e-commerce giant Flipkart is making major strides in the artificial intelligence (AI) space. The company is building specialized e-commerce large language models (LLMs) and has integrated over 250 AI models into its ecosystem. Balaji Thiagarajan, Flipkart's Chief Product and Technology Officer, revealed this in an interview with Moneycontrol. He also said that around 35-40% of the company's software code is now being generated by AI.
AI deployment
Building an 'agentic ecommerce platform'
Thiagarajan also said that the company's AI models are being used in a number of areas, including customer experiences, seller services, and engineering. He added that Flipkart is building an "agentic e-commerce platform" using both frontier and proprietary AI models. "The future of AI will be a mixture of experts... many of the other experts will be models we build ourselves," Thiagarajan said.
Team expansion
Flipkart bolsters AI team with senior-level hires
To bolster its AI capabilities, Flipkart has made a number of senior-level hires. The company has hired executives from Amazon, Tata Digital, Coupang, Razorpay, and Groupon. Thiagarajan said that the strategy behind these hires was to scale the company's AI efforts after seeing initial success. "Scaling requires expanding our leadership capabilities, engineering expertise, product skills, and design capabilities," he explained.
AI integration
Generative AI integrated into various aspects of operations
Flipkart's AI ambitions go beyond just coding assistants. The company is integrating generative AI into product discovery, conversational shopping, seller tools, catalog creation, customer support, and internal operations. Thiagarajan said these systems already make around 90,000 personalized calls a month to sellers for payment reminders, operational updates, and business recommendations. He expects this number will scale to hundreds of thousands and eventually millions in the future.
AI strategy
Why Flipkart isn't worried about the cost of generative AI
Despite the high cost of generative AI, Thiagarajan said that Flipkart is focusing on governance rather than immediate financial returns. "We're not overly concerned about the ROI of AI right now because we're still in investment mode," he said. Instead of just looking at cost savings, Flipkart measures its AI performance using business metrics like click-through rates, conversions, average basket sizes, and customer engagement.