About the speaker: Kamiya Motwani is the Director of Data Science for the Personalization and Recommendations team at Walmart Global Tech. Kamiya leads a team of strong applied scientists who leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to develop data-driven recommendation engines that manifest across a customer’s journey at Walmart. Prior to Walmart, Kamiya has worked at Oracle Corporation and Yahoo Inc. She holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BITS Pilani. Kamiya has also filed several patents and published papers at premier conferences including NIPSIEEE  and ICASSP.

Abstract: The talk started with an overview of Walmart's customer-centric approach, which aims to make the shopping journey more convenient and personalized. It provided an overview of the usage of AI in the customer's shopping journey – from online browsing to order fulfillment. Following this, it deep-dived into the usage of AI for personalizing the customer journey – where  AI/ML models are leveraged to  develop data-driven recommendation engines that manifest across the customer journey – covering cases like personalized recommendations in online carousels, along with a graph neural network-based end-to-end system for predicting substitutions. Finally, the talk ended with how the usage of a strong AI ecosystem in such use cases fundamentally enhanced the customer journey.