“AI is not new…whether you are able to use these technologies to build businesses is what is important. Every investor pitch today that comes has the word AI. GMV (gross merchandise value) used to be the cool word, now AI is the cool word. But what you need to build is the culture and talent in the company who can use technology to solve problems. AI is the enabler,” Bansal said.
He shared an anecdote about the omnichannel eyewear retailer’s early days when it was expanding its offline presence. “…people used to ask if we should open at this location, and I didn’t have the answer…so we started using AI since there was so much data on the internet about visitor traffic, what is the size of a Swiggy or Zomato order in that locality – can we use all of this data to make a prediction,” he said.
“We wanted to use AI to predict revenue at a particular latitude and longitude and everybody said this could not be done…we started with 50% accuracy, and today with 90% accuracy it can tell us that if we open a store at a particular latitude and longitude, how much revenue will it do. It may not sound cool, but it is allowing us to do what we want to do,” Bansal added.
Lenskart, which earlier this year closed a $500 million funding round, currently has more than 2,000 stores, of which 1,500 are in India, with the remainder in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The company has a manufacturing unit in Haryana and is scaling up with a fully-automated facility in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan.
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Speaking at the same event, Peak XV Partners managing director Rajan Anandan said that for India to become a powerhouse, the country needs to set up additional computing capacity to run AI models and facilitate research and development. “The Indian government should build a large GPU (graphics processing unit) cluster and give it to Indian developers, research institutions, startups (to build AI solutions)…at 1/100th the cost of AWS (Amazon Web Services),” Anandan said. “We have a lot of data, a massive talent pool and a frugal but world class engineering capability,” he said, adding that the only aspect lacking is compute capability.