AI redefines customer centricity, beyond language, region for IndiaMART: Nikhil Prabhakar

In a short span of 28 years, IndiaMART has emerged as India’s chosen B2B marketplace and has increased ease of business while simultaneously creating a connected marketplace for all buyers and suppliers across the country.

With a renewed focus on micro, small and medium enterprises, the company has now oriented towards digital inclusion through their platform. At the helm of efforts is Nikhil Prabhakar, CIO, IndiaMART, who dives in-depth into how the e-commerce platform is creating systems where market players can be more digitally savvy, using AI for optimized buyer-seller connections and how robust technology has them poised to scale their business until sky is the limit.

Pairing robustness with scale

IndiaMART’s enterprise is vast, boasting of 20 crore registered buyers, 80 lac registered sellers, all amounting to over 13 crores enquiries per quarter. With business steadily humongous, and data demands massive, technology needs to rise to the challenge.

Nikhil explains, “When scaling both vertically and horizontally, we realized that we could not manage everything on-premises. To always keep the platform active, we moved to a dual cloud setup, which is backed up for disaster recovery and prepped for multi-region performance. This helped us attain 99.99% availability and made scaling easy.”

A cybersecurity ‘fortress’

Nikhil has experienced the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and affirms that cybersecurity measures need to outpace them. He says, “A lot of security mismanagement happens less due to poor technology, and more due to inefficient policies and frameworks.” Thus, identifying the right principles of security framework and leveraging them in building organizational security becomes paramount.

Securing sensitive data follows a similar protocol. As Nikhil explains, “We have designed role-based access control for sensitive data, allowing people to gain access to only data that is relevant to them. All PII (Personal Identification Information) is encrypted. We have also invested in multi factor authentication for our internal platform.”

Speaking of the website, he says, “The marketplace website also needs to be protected because there are always bad actors trying to over utilize our resources and create instances of denial of service to our users. We have built AI-based armors which will identify these miscreants based on different criteria such as IP address or their signature tactics and block them.”

Nikhil also mentions the firewall system leveraged by the organization to protect their application from injection of data by an external bad actor on their web-based applications. With continuous monitoring, incidents can be caught and rectified in real time. Nikhil adds, “To stay a step ahead of even the most unforeseen attacks, we perform Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. These VAPTs help us catch anything which we have missed.”

AI-redefined marketplace

While AI is a buzzword for many companies, IndiaMART joined the bandwagon early on. “Almost every single large process of our platform is AI-driven,” Nikhil states confidently.

He elucidates with their ‘search and discovery’ functionality on the platform, where buyers can input text for what they seek. “Largely 70% of our buyers are from Tier 2, Tier 3 or Tier 4 cities. Often when searching, they do not use the right spelling or mention vernacular words instead of English. AI’s job is to identify the right context of their search regardless and offer relevant results.”

They are also using AI to uplevel matchmaking between the buyer and the seller, by identifying product quality, proximity, ratings of both parties, reviews and other parameters. AI is being used in conversational commerce, segmentation, and cataloguing. Keeping business needs at the center, AI has found its place in the platform’s ecosystem.

Nikhil outlines their strategy for increased AI adoption – moving one step at a time. “We are seeing success with our implementations, although it won’t give a result on day one,” asserts Nikhil.

Customer-centric strategy

As a CIO, Nikhil acknowledges his role in driving digital transformation in IndiaMART. Given India’s vastness as a nation and our varied demographic which creates unique challenges, technology is instrumental in the e-commerce platform’s success.

Nikhil feels, “We are focused on improving our customer centricity by providing customized experience for different languages and geographies and providing hyperlocal support.”

Using AI and other emerging technologies for business strategies that are focused on the customer, IndiaMART is committed to enhancing user experience and meeting their business goals through these efforts. Ultimately, Nikhil affirms that one needs to assess their technology needs before blindly incorporating them, and focus on requirements beyond the noise.