Zomato, Swiggy using AI, machine learning to drive more growth

Bengaluru: When food-tech company Zomato let go of around 540 of its support staff last week, it said improvement in its after-sales technology forced its hand. The automation made up for almost 10% of the workforce in certain support roles across Zomato's customer, merchant, and delivery partner teams, redundant. While routine jobs will continue to give way to automation, food-tech companies such as Swiggy and Zomato are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) and automation to drive their businesses, using years of data accumulated from food orders and user-level consumption patterns. And each customer order is now being influenced by the customer's own previous history of order preferences. Swiggy boasts of more than 1.3 lakh restaurant partners on its platform, while Zomato claims to have added around 1.5 lakh restaurants. With such a large supply base in place, both food-tech apps are now primarily using data to tap demand.