Food Delivery Platforms Swiggy & Zomato Embrace AI to Uplift Delivery Services in India

A few years back Ex-US President Barack Obama said: "India is not simply emerging, it has emerged". The whole surge of startups in India has changed its dynamic in the past decade. Lately, the trend of online food delivery startups has taken the market by the boom. Especially among millennials, the trend is attaining a big shelter. Most of the leading food delivery applications are underpinning with technological advancements to boost their services in India.

To gain a better understanding of customer behavior and preferences, reduce error and build a customer-friendly experience, these platforms are grabbing the hands of Artificial Intelligence.

According to RedSeer (Bengaluru-based research firm) survey report, Online food delivery market in India is likely to strike $4 billion in the next 1-2 years. In order to handle and clout a pool of data to offer better efficiency, platforms like Swiggy and Zomato are betting big on AI/ML technologies.

Dale Vaz, Head of Engineering and Data Science, Swiggy who joined in July 2018 from Amazon India, said: "Swiggy's mission is to bring unparalleled convenience into the lives of urban consumers. We do this by operating a three-way, hyper-local marketplace where we match consumer demand with supply from restaurants and delivery partners… We use AI/ML across this three-way marketplace to deliver a wow customer experience, unlock business growth and drive operational efficiency."

Swiggy's AI service designed for consumer's end is using personalized discovery experience tools such as catalog intelligence, customer intelligence, relevance, and personalized customer experience and real-time signals (distance between the restaurant and customer location). While on the other hand, to carve the demand prediction model in order to provide better services further and plan ahead of demand, restaurants are employing artificial intelligence.

Further Dale Vaz added: "In addition to our dedicated delivery fleet (the largest in the country), AI models help us ensure that we provide a highly accurate delivery promise to our customers and meet that promise in an efficient manner."

Deepinder Goyal, Zomato CEO informed that in the starting of the year 2018, the app experienced 3.5 million orders a month. He further said: "With 21 million orders per month, as far as we know, we are now the market leader in the food ordering space in India."

Recently, Swiggy acqui-hired Bengaluru-based AI startupKint.io. Kint.io specializes in leveraging deep learning and computer vision for subject recognition in videos. Also, Zomato had acquired drone delivery desi startup TechEagle Innovations.

Zomato CEO asserted "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."

Beside Swiggy and Zomato, the American online food delivering platform Uber Eats is witnessing around 50 percent month-on-month growth in its initial year operation in India. In the last 3 months, the number of orders using Uber Eats got doubled.  Bhavik Rathod, Head of Uber Eats, India said "Uber Eats has gained great momentum in India and is one of its fastest growing markets in the Asia Pacific region." Currently, Uber Eats is providing its delivery services in 37 cities in India.