SeekNShop.IO: Transforming E-commerce with Innovative Natural Language Search and Recommendation

SeekNShop.IO is an Artificial Intelligence company that offers e-commerce and other shopping domains (travel, recruitment, finance, automotive (cars) etc.) with the ability to perform natural language-based discovery to drive decision-making. The company's flagship products include:

•  DeepSeek which is a natural language-based text/voice search service that is pluggable into any website/app or kiosk for any business domains.

•  Chatbot which is integrated with search and provides a chat-based search and conversational recommendations.

•  Recommendation Engine for Car Discovery.

SeeknShop.IO also provides e-commerce specific services such as inventory insights (which brands to focus on or which categories convert more etc.), search merchandizing, ability to customize search, search experience and visual search. The company specializes in Enterprise Search and Domain Language Understanding.

Shaping the Innovation Journey

While working with Amazon and several other e-commerce companies, the founder realized that discovery and decision-making are the biggest problems when it comes to shopping, be it e-commerce, travel, real estate, automotive or even banking or insurance services or stocks. For end-consumers, the discovery and decision-making activities take a lot of time and are a very difficult and frustrating process to suffer due to the number of clicks, page refreshes and information to go through. This causes shoppers to leave the website halfway through and the seller loses on conversion, average order value and all the money spent in getting the user to the website (CAC – customer acquisition cost) in the first place.

The ability to explain what they want is what differentiates an end-user discovery and decision-making aspects of user journey in a physical store vs. digital store and SeeknShop.IO wanted to augment user search experience in the digital domains by offering a Natural Language and Voice Search just the way they explain in a physical store. In addition to this, the company is launching conversational recommendations, the first of its kind where an end-user can get product suggestions based on what he explains and not based on a random product he viewed.

A Dynamic Leader

The company is led by S S V S Sarath, Chief Executive Officer who has about 13 years of experience in Machine Learning (ML), Data Science and Product Management and comes with a vast enterprise, consumer experience while working with Microsoft, Amazon, CA Technologies and few startups. He has a strong vision towards enhancing digital lives and improving discovery and decision-making needed in companies' daily tasks leveraging Data and AI. Sarath currently holds 4 patents and plans to file 20+ patents for the company. Sarath primarily takes care of Product Vision, Strategy, Roadmap, Sales and Customer Engagement apart from defining all the cultural and corporate aspects of the company.

Leveraging NLU and ML to Enhance User Experience

SeekNShop.IO leverages patent-pending algorithms in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning for DeepSeek – Natural Language Search product (Voice Search / Chatbot). Moreover, the company provides Inventory Insights and Search insights using Big Data Analytics. In addition to this, SeeknShop.IO plans to launch a Visual Search interspersed with Natural Language Search which would use Computer Vision algorithms for delivering a unique user experience in Discovery. The purpose of any technology is to enhance user experience and delight and through company's various products, SeeknShop.IO's focus is to improve business for clients in the enterprise segment by offering the end-users with seamless, easy to use and natural discovery and decision-making experiences.

AI Driving Cutting-Edge Innovation

Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity as quoted by several pioneers in the field. However, the company is just seeing some intelligent data-oriented solutions but still far from true AI. "A child can grasp and learn anything quite quickly whereas to make a machine learn the same it would take a humongous amount of data because the approach for Machine Learning is still evolving. Evolution, Intuition and a few other capabilities of the mind have to be brought into the field to experience true AI," Sarath said. SeeknShop.IO, however, has advanced quite well so far in building industrial AI and Robotics and the current outlook for AI is quite promising for commercial applications. These disruptive technologies will become the bread and butter of the technology industry for the next few decades.

Further, Sarath feels Innovation always comes from NOT accepting the status quo and constantly challenging it. For a company to be innovative, one should welcome open conversations, let the employees be inquisitive in the right direction, allow them time to think beyond their daily work and ensure they constantly challenge the existing solutions. Also, getting various user research and consumer feedback surveys constantly helps in making it a market relevant product innovation.

Admirable Recognitions

Over the years, SeeknShop.IO has received several awards from various organizations. Some of the notable ones include:

1. Super Startup Asia 2018 Award which is a Consumer Research based award.

2. IET UK 2018 Top 5 Innovative companies award in Information Technology Category.

3. Top 25 Hottest AI Companies in APAC 2018 by CIO Outlook.

4. HYSEA Top 10 Hottest Startups 2018 Award from Vice President of India.

5. Top 10 Multi-Disciplinary Data Science Providers in US 2018 Award featured in MirrorReview.

6. Top 20 AI providers in APAC 2018 Award featured in APACCIO

Also, several SeeknShop.IO clients are excited about the amount of the conversion and user experience score improvements and the quality of Search experience company provides which is inspiring and motivating for everyone.

Tackling Initial Roadblocks

Hiring and Sales are a challenge in the early stages of any company. However, SeeknShop.IO has cracked both these challenges with some useful industry and university partnerships and this has helped the company get to a stage of current scale. With Digital Marketing explosion and various tools around Sales and Marketing, it is quite easy for any company to gain early traction pretty quickly these days. However, in most cases, generic models don't always work and as an entrepreneur, you have got to figure out the hybrid yet simple model that would work for your business which could involve identifying the right customer segment to quickly expand or identifying the right price points or figuring out the customer reach and brand awareness.

Beholding the Future

Sarath asserts that AI is the new electricity, data is the new fuel and IoT are the new engines. These technologies will become more pervasive and influence the digital living in drastic ways. The ease of doing daily chores has simplified drastically within the last 5 years. The world has seen a technology explosion in the last decade like never before and it is only going to grow exponentially every year. From SeekNShop.IO point of view, the team would want to be part of this technological wave, keep leveraging its expertise to build innovative solutions to ease the way they make discovery and decision-making across all our daily life tasks ranging from shopping and tour planning to financial decisions and buying an apartment, and company will continue to work towards this vision.