Meesho, IISc to conduct joint research in generative AI to drive ecommerce

Meesho is collaborating with Vision & AI Lab of IISc for joint research in the area of generative AI with a focus on driving technological advancements in the e-commerce industry

Meesho is planning to foster developments and progress in domains including generative artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal large language model (LLMs) for future expansions of the e-commerce sector. To achieve this the e-commerce marketplace has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) of one year with the Vision & AI Lab (VAL) of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as part of an industry-academia collaboration.

Under the MoU, Meesho's data scientists will collaborate with lab researchers from the institute to focus on multimodal representation learning and generative AI capabilities. The aim is to make a substantial impact on the e-commerce industry by enhancing the e-commerce experience for e-commerce users.

The collaborators also hope that this could potentially result in the publication of research papers along with keeping Meesho at the forefront of the growing competition in the e-commerce sector.

“E-commerce is undergoing a tremendous shift that is being fueled by innovative thinking and technology. Consumers’ behavior of shopping online is changing, and new trends are emerging. We at Meesho are embracing this significant transformation fueled by emerging technology. This collaboration will further strengthen our goal of creating solutions that will ultimately benefit the customers and sellers equally,” said Rajesh Kumar SA, the director of data science at Meesho.

Venkatesh Babu, the head of Vision & AI lab - IISc, added, “By pooling our resources, we can create new opportunities and enhance technology that will provide valuable business solutions for millions of customers.”

In June, the company had stated that it planned to double down on its investment in AI and machine learning (ML) seeing an ever-increasing integration of both these technologies across sectors.

“Investments in AI are going to be the biggest focus area for us from a technology standpoint. We plan on leveraging the latest advancements in the sector, be it generative AI, Chat GPT, or any other emerging technology, to improve the customer experience,” Kirti Varun Avasarala, Chief Product Officer, Meesho, had told Business Standard.