As demand soars, Zomato, Swiggy turn to AI, machine learning to drive growth

BENGALURU: When food tech company, Zomato, let go of around 540 of its support staff last week, it said that improvement in its after-sales technology had forced its hand. The automation made 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 firms like 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 130,000 restaurant partners on its platform, while Zomato claims to have added around 150,000 restaurants. With such a large supply base in place, both the food tech apps are now solving for demand, mainly using data.