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Reimagining B2B Commerce: How IndiaMART is Powering Growth with AI and Digital Innovation


CXO Today has engaged in an exclusive interview with Nikhil Prabhakar, Chief Information Officer, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Q: How is IndiaMART integrating AI/ML tools to enhance operational efficiency, user experience, and personalization?

Being a tech-first organization, we remain committed to bringing innovations in the B2B space and creating an ecosystem that supports seamless conversation between business buyers and sellers.  A couple of places where AI integration has been used drastically include:

Reading customer behavior: AI analyzes the buyer & seller behavior and preferences on the platform, and suggests tailored recommendations for products or suppliers, making the platform more personalized, intuitive, and responsive to the specific needs of the user.

Search: Use of AI to enhance search capabilities, as 65 lakh misspellings and Hinglish searches happen on our platform every month. By comprehensively understanding Indian languages, including common misspellings and even ‘Hinglish’ or other multilingual searches, we ensure precise search results, simplifying the process for users to find what they need effortlessly.

Catalog management: AI-powered image editing tools have greatly streamlined and enhanced the cataloging capability for our users. From seamless background removal to automated cropping, these features have made product cataloging more efficient, elevating the visual appeal of listings and driving higher engagement.

Q: What measures are in place to ensure cybersecurity and data privacy within IndiaMART’s vast MSME ecosystem?

The increased sophistication of cyberattacks in the e-commerce sector makes it mandatory for any company to have a robust security infrastructure in place. At IndiaMART, we follow a multi-cloud strategy to distribute our workloads across our cloud partners. This prevents any bad actors at the initial stage itself. In addition to this, we continue to invest in evolving our practices to thwart potential data breaches, staying ahead of emerging threats. This includes:

Advanced Threat Detection: Our strong encryption protocols and systems, such as integrated web application firewalls, a robust monitoring system for potential breaches, and other tools ensure overall data security. Routine security audits and penetration testing proactively identify vulnerabilities in our systems and promptly address these weaknesses. This helps in mitigating the risk of exploitation by cyber attackers, bolstering the resilience of our digital infrastructure.

Robust security infrastructure: Our teams maintain a multi-layered defense strategy to protect the vast amount of customer data. This includes following strict access control policies with role-based permissions and multi-factor authentication to limit data access to authorized personnel only.

Incident Response and Disaster Recovery: In the event of a security breach, IndiaMART has a well-defined incident response plan to mitigate the impact and restore normal operations promptly. Furthermore, regular data backup procedures and a comprehensive disaster recovery plan are implemented to minimize downtime and data loss, ensuring business continuity even in the face of cyberattacks.

Certifications & compliance:

  • Beyond the technical safeguards, we are fully compliant with relevant data protection regulations such as GDPR and ISO 27001, which ensure that our customers’ data is handled responsibly and securely.
  • IndiaMART holds several active certifications, including ISO 27001 for Information Security Management System, ISO 22301 for Business Continuity Management System, ISO 27701 for Privacy Information Management System, ISO 31000 for Enterprise Risk Management, and ISO 12207 for Software and System Engineering.

Q: How has the role of a CIO evolved, particularly in a platform-led, tech-driven business model like IndiaMART?

Growth, operational efficiency, and transformative change are now inextricably linked to strategic technology implementation. CIOs are responsible for this transformation, led by technology – be it a process, product or people. Over the years, the role has shifted from supporting innovation to now leading the tech-driven transformation within the organization.

Being a tech-first organisation, our decisions are tech-led, rather than tech-enabled. As a CIO, it remains important to incorporate business needs while formulating the technology strategy of the organization. This includes:

  • Cross-functional teams: In a world of data-sharing, operating in silos is never a smart decision. Ensuring cross-functional teams that include representatives from IT, finance, operations, and marketing to develop and implement technology strategies for smarter business decisions.
  • Shared KPIs: Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with both technology and business objectives can help in determining the right business value against each vertical. Forrester research showed that organizations with strong alignment between IT and business strategies achieve up to 36% higher profitability.
  • Regular communication: Open and transparent communication between CIOs and other CXOs ensures better alignment to address potential challenges in real time. It helps with the early detection of issues, better trust within the leadership (and thus the organisation as it trickles from the top down).

Q: What does the technology roadmap look like for IndiaMART in terms of innovation and digital infrastructure investment in the near future?

We remain committed to bringing innovations into the B2B space and creating an ecosystem that supports seamless conversation between business buyers and sellers. On the tech front, our key focus remains:

AI-based Enablement: With inclusivity at the core, we are working to make our platform accessible for millions of users across India by introducing voice search with seamless multilingual search functionality, simplifying transactions in multiple languages and photo search, based on AI-driven Vision Language Model (IM-VLM) and DaViT. We are also focusing on enhancing AI-powered chatbots that can offer an intelligent conversational interface and further improve customer experience on the platform beyond text search.

Scalability: More than 70% of our traffic comes from mobile phones (divided across app and mobile site), making it imperative for us to have a dynamic and scalable mobile ecosystem. Our focus remains on implementing horizontal scaling and load balancer sharding in our Mobile Site infrastructure to distribute traffic more efficiently and improve overall system performance. These upgrades help in ensuring better scalability during high-traffic periods, such as efficient management of increased requests and sudden spikes, among others.

Modernisation of applications: To ensure scalability and resilience on the website, we are focusing on modernization of applications via containerization through Kubernetes & Docker. This enables seamless orchestration of containerized applications, efficient management of microservices architectures, and ensures rapid deployment. Additionally, we are focusing on the consolidation of Logic and the promotion of functional programming, embracing use Effect. These functional components align with modern JavaScript and promote stateless components, fostering cleaner architecture and easier adoption of other React hooks, thus modernizing the code base further.

Online Coverage: CXO Today

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