In Data They Trust

Extreme personalisation is the holy grail of ecommerce, and Flipkart is gearing up with big-data analytics and deep learning to know its customers like open books. Speech recognition may not be far behind

- Harichandan Arakali

Utkarsh Bhriguvanshi is a sort of a freewheeling one-man army at Flipkart. Formally, he is a principal architect and an ‘IC’ or an individual contributor who loves to code, offer his expertise where needed and is generally among the top tinkerers at the Bengaluru headquartered company, India’s biggest ecommerce business.

“I came here more than six years ago; people must think I’m a dinosaur,” he jokes. The self deprecatory humour hides a razor-sharp mind that is among those constantly tapped by the company’s senior most people, including Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy, 45, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Ravi Garikipati, 52.

Bhriguvanshi, 37, says Flipkart is in its third phase of technological advancement: From solving problems like ensuring a trustworthy sale of a book or a mobile accessory in the early years, to figuring out how to support scale—meaning, a very large number of transactions—“by 2014, when we had become a monster [company]”, to now doing things intelligently.

“That means personalised experience. That is the holy grail,” said Garikipati in a recent interview to Forbes India. “The app experience that you see should be different from what I see.”

For instance, at its five-day Big 10 sale that concluded on May 18— part of celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary—Flipkart was able to target specific products at women in metros, while men were shown something else on their app home page. “Gender affinity” is what they call it.