How Swiggy is disrupting food delivery with ML, AI

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Online food delivery firm Swiggy has been one of India’s start-up success stories since its launch in 2014, having raised funding of $450 million. Joining the select group of unicorns, this tech start-up believes technology is the backbone behind its early success amidst rapid growth and expansion.

With over 35,000 restaurant partners on board, across 15 cities (Lucknow being the latest), Swiggy offers consumers a variety of restaurant options, delivered at lightning fast speeds, right to their doorstep. Aided by Machine Learning (ML), the app personalises the list of restaurants that users can view, based on their past orders, searches, and interactions, helping customers choose their favourite food in a jiffy. A faster discovery of restaurants is powered by algorithms which make thousands of calculations like food preferences, live snapshot of delivery partners in your area, restaurants across price points and cuisines.

Swiggy generates terabytes of data every week and leverages this data for delivery efficiency and to connect customers to the right restaurant by using new-age technologies such as ML and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The company had been building capabilities stronger in engineering, automation, data sciences and personalisation.

“There are a lot of restaurants out there. When you multiply that with a customer preferences, it makes the problem very difficult. It’s a problem more suited to the world of machine learning than the world of human computation,” says Anuj Rathi, VP, Products, Swiggy. “After you place a food order online and the restaurant confirms it, the assignment algorithm takes numerous factors like restaurant efficiency and traffic conditions into consideration and assigns a delivery partner and the best route for him to follow. All of this happens in a matter of a few minutes. We use ML and AI heavily in driving machine intelligence, which in turn optimises the experience of all the players in the marketplace, especially customers.”

Banking heavily on technology capabilities, Swiggy has recently introduced two new features into its feathers, ‘Swiggy Scheduled’ which enables users to plan and order their meals in advance and Swiggy POP, for people looking for the simplest ordering-in experience at affordable prices. Both these services are in line with Swiggy’s promise of being the most reliable and convenient food delivery platform in the marketplace.

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