In the past 20 years e-commerce has evolved and transformed to grow exponentially with technological advancements growing at a rapid pace as well. Artificial intelligence and IoT are disrupting business models and these new advancements in technology provide a huge potential to enhance the way e-commerce companies can run their businesses.

The age-old shopping experience of visiting a physical store has its own advantages like touching and feeling the product, personal attention from the salesmen, guided product discovery, contextualized recommendations and an opportunity to avail a discount during the bargain and negotiations. This helps the buyer make a well-informed and satisfied decision. In today’s modern age business world, online stores are leveraging artificial intelligence-based technologies to provide a similar experience that a buyer would expect while purchasing a product in store.

Online shopping experience has its own challenges for buyers like searches provide less relevant results and it takes a lot of clicks to filter down to the product of choice leading to hours of research and confusion. There is lack of pre-purchase sales support. Also, current search technologies have their own limitations. Natural language and voice search are key needs. From the seller’s point of view complexity of presenting search, contextual recommendations to help buyers, real time promotions, real time understanding of buyers’ preferences are the key areas to address.

SeekNShop.IO is an Artificial Intelligence company that aims to bring an enhanced online and mobile shopping for e-commerce businesses. The company is aimed at addressing the discovery and decision-making gaps in most shopping and enterprise domains (automotive, real estate, finance, pharma, healthcare). The company offers e-commerce and other shopping domains (travel, recruitment, finance, automotive (cars) etc.) with the ability to perform natural language-based discovery to drive decision-making.

The company’s flagship products include:

• DeepSeek which is a natural language-based text/voice search service that is pluggable into any website/app or kiosk for any business domains.
• Chatbotwhich is integrated with search and provides a chat-based search and conversational recommendations.
• Recommendation Engine for Car Discovery.

SeeknShop.IO also provides e-commerce specific services such as inventory insights (which brands to focus on or which categories convert more etc.), search merchandizing, ability to customize search, search experience and visual search. The company specializes in Enterprise Search and Domain Language Understanding. 

The beginning of the journey with a dynamic leader

SeeknShop.IO was founded by S S V S Sarath, Chief Executive Officer who has about 13 years of experience in Machine Learning (ML), Data Science and Product Management. He comes with a vast enterprise and consumer experience while working with Microsoft, Amazon, CA Technologies and a few start-ups. He has a strong vision towards enhancing digital lives and improving discovery and decision-making needed in companies’ daily tasks leveraging Data and AI. Sarath currently holds 4 patents and plans to file 20+ patents for the company. Sarath primarily takes care of Product Vision, Strategy, Roadmap, Sales and Customer Engagement apart from defining all the cultural and corporate aspects of the company.

Overcoming the challenges

During the early stages of any start-up hiring and sales are few of the challenges. However,SeeknShop.IO cracked both these challenges with some useful industry and university partnerships and this helped the company get to a stage of current scale. With digital marketing explosion and various tools around sales and marketing, it is quite easy for any company to gain early traction quickly these days. However, in most cases, generic models don’t always work and as an entrepreneur, you have got to figure out the hybrid yet simple model that would work for your business which could involve identifying the right customer segment to quickly expand or identifying the right price points or figuring out the customer reach and brand awareness. This is exactly what SeeknShop.IO did to overcome these initial challenges

Ongoing business challenge that any business must face is to be relevant, to find an appropriate business value, product-market fit and to be able to market the same with larger customer reach. Company has been addressing this with variety of partnerships.

Other important areas include delivering high accuracy and precision of natural language search. Also, many customers need a customized search suited to their preferences and needs. This needed a lot of customizations based of customer needs. Company had to fine-tune and enable a lot of customizations into its product to enable and handle merchandising needs of the customers which eventually helped it in becoming a complete product which is required by the market.

Core of the technology

SeekNShop.IO leverages patent-pending algorithms in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning for DeepSeek – Natural Language Search product (Voice Search / Chatbot). Moreover, the company provides Inventory Insights and Search insights using Big Data Analytics. In addition to this, SeeknShop.IO plans to launch a Visual Search interspersed with Natural Language Search which would use Computer Vision algorithms for delivering a unique user experience in Discovery. The purpose of any technology is to enhance user experience and delight and through company’s various products, SeeknShop.IO’s focus is to improve business for clients in the enterprise segment by offering the end-users with seamless, easy to use and natural discovery and decision-making experiences.

The core of what SeekNShop.IO offers is the Domain Language Understanding algorithm and the overall intent matching and noise elimination. All these algorithms and design approaches are the core of what shaped the product SeekNShop.IO offers and benefits customers. These algorithms help achieve a seamless conversational experience for end-consumers given the mechanism of how natural language search product understands heavily unstructured conversations/queries and eliminates noise and identifies the right intent to provide highly accurate results.

A brighter future with continuous innovation, global expansion and new offerings

Sarath asserts that AI is the new electricity, data is the new fuel and IoT are the new engines. These technologies will become more pervasive and influence the digital living in drastic ways. The ease of doing daily chores has simplified drastically within the last 5 years. The world has seen a technology explosion in the last decade like never and it is only going to grow exponentially every year. From SeekNShop.IO point of view, the team would want to be part of this technological wave, keep leveraging its expertise to build innovative solutions to ease the way they make discovery and decision-making across all our daily life tasks ranging from shopping and tour planning to financial decisions and buying an apartment, and company will continue to work towards this vision.

SeekNShop has partnered with various e-commerce and automotive agencies and platforms along with other strategic marketing and sales partners to help it reach its target customer base. The company is also venturing out into other segments through similar partnership models to help itself with maximum outreach.

Since inception, SeekNShop.IO started its foray by expanding into e-commerce verticals as a search and AI service provider, focusing on APAC and UAE markets, with e-commerce as the main segment for its operations. However, the dynamic CEO and his team have recently started endeavouring into US, UK, Australia and Canada as their focus markets for the next few years, with eyes on automotive, online travel, and finance sectors as their focus verticals apart from e-commerce. The skilled team also wants to keep expanding both horizontally and vertically in their area of operations and continue to build more data science / AI based products for these verticals in the areas of discovery, personalization and decision-making.

In addition to SeekNShop, Sarath has founded another start-up called IntentBI (InPrivate Beta/Stealth) which offers natural language and voice-based reporting and eliminates the dependency of SQL developers or report builders. This product helps any SME/enterprise to just upload a flat file of data (TXT/CSV/XML/JSON) with any number of columns and rows and start asking queries in their natural languages (English/Spanish/German, etc). For instance, a physical retail store can upload with their financial data and ask queries like “Find the top 10 stores in the Eastern US where GMV is greater than USD 20 million and sales quantity is greater than 5000 units sorted by GMV as a pie chart”. The chart will be generated in less than 0.1 seconds. Sarath believes in bringing the best of the in-store experience to digital shopping while leveraging the power of data from the digital world.  With IntentBI, this eliminates the delay in decision making caused by the lack of instantaneous actionable insights as there is a dependency on developers and various complex reporting systems to get the required analytics and reports at the user’s disposal. It would also reduce the cost of hiring report developer and SQL developers for instantaneous reporting by making it natural language driven data reporting.

Awards recognizing the success stories

Over the years, SeeknShop.IO has received several awards from various organizations. Some of the notable ones include:

• Super Start-up Asia 2018 Award which is a Consumer Research based award.
• IET UK 2018 Top 5 Innovative companies award in Information Technology Category.
• Top 25 Hottest AI Companies in APAC 2018 by CIO Outlook.
• HYSEA Top 10 Hottest Startups 2018 Award from Vice President of India.
• Top 10 Multi-Disciplinary Data Science Providers in US 2018 Award featured in MirrorReview.
• Top 20 AI providers in APAC 2018 Award featured in APACCIO
• Top 40 under 40 Innovators in AI and Data Science by Analytics Insight
• Top 20 Cognitive Technology Solution Providers in India 2019 by CIO Review
• The Brand and Place to work for by Innovative Zone magazine
• The 10 Most Innovative Global AI Executives by Analytics Insight
• The 10 Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs of 2019 by Booklet Media
• Most Innovative Techpreneur of the year 2019 by SWI awards.

Also, several SeeknShop.IO clients are excited about the amount of the conversion and user experience score improvements and the quality of search experience company provides which is inspiring and motivating for everyone. Most of the company’s customers have seen an uptick in conversion by more than 20-50 percent and its accuracy rates for various user queries have been greater than 99 percent with an average response time being 53 milli seconds. With SeeknShop’s high speed and high accuracy, businesses have improved their ROI and conversions considerably in addition to achieving great user satisfaction and user experience.