Mumbai, August 29, 2024: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is redefining the consumption space by reducing time and cost for retailers and customers through their search engine tools of conversation and engagement aided by rising active internet users, according to a cross-section of industry experts at the India D2C Summit 2024.

Indian jewellery chain Tanishq reduced CAC (customer acquisition cost) by 38% with Google’s AI powered omni-channel solutions, said Bhaskar Ramesh, Director – Omnichannel Businesses, Google India delivering his keynote address on Day 1 of the two-day summit here in Mumbai.

Similarly, Tira Beauty, an omnichannel beauty retail platform, owned by Reliance Retail, revolutionized product discoverability by leveraging Google’s GenAI capabilities that led to 50% increase in organic click, conversational value improvement by 27% and increase in online ROAS (return on ad spend) by 47%, said Bhaskar Ramesh.

Generative AI capabilities will transform the retail industry by driving hyper personalization, improve visual experience as part of customer experience; boost market ROI (return on investment) with profitable growth and reduce creative cost with improved operational efficiency, Ramesh said.

The redefining retail space by the new age shoppers is significantly seen driven more by visuals these days than keywords or filters as visuals and voice search can increase digital commerce revenue by 30%, according to Gartner and 72% prefer product info in native language according to Harvard Business Review.

However, retailers are also exploring artificial intelligence tools beyond the well-known legacy search engines at one-tenth the cost, said Shridhar Marri, CEO & Founder, Flyfish, that offers multimodal AI search for e-commerce entities.

“If there is one investment that a new age e-commerce retailer can make, it is multimodal search that includes image, voice and is multilingual,” Marri said, adding that AI catalogue curator could aid image search, forecast demand and recommend products for the user.

Experts also attributed the entire euphoria about AI tools to the increased internet penetration and tech start-ups.

Speaking at the summit, Sanket Deodhar, Vice President, SAP India said, “India will have over 900 million active internet users by 2025, of which 56% of all new internet users will be rural areas and 65% will be female.”

“The perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you need,” Ramesh said, quoting Larry Page – an American businessman and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.

The Indian tech space will continue to be disrupted with the country having 1.8 lakh tech start-ups by 2030 compared to 68,000 in 2023, Deodhar said.