Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd (Part 1)

Unbxd focuses on the trend where manually created rule-based systems are being rapidly replaced by real-time, AI-based, dynamic systems that drive personalization in e-commerce sites.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Unbxd.

Pavan Sondur: I’m one of the Co-Founders of Unbxd. We are a five-year-old startup. We started off to solve the problem of matching user intent with the right content on digital platforms. For anybody coming to an e-commerce site, the engine that we plug in understands that intent and brings up the right product content to them.

That’s how we’ve been able to get users happy and e-commerce sites pretty successful in matching how and what products show up for what visitors at the right time. This is the problem that we’re out to solve. In the past five years, we’ve been able to grow significantly and have been scaling ever since. North America has been the growth engine for us.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s try to understand how your solution works and where it fits. Are you sitting on top of other e-commerce catalog engines? How does it work? Where does it plug in? Where does it draw the data from? Where does it develop the heuristics from? Walk us through the workflow.

Pavan Sondur: We are a cloud-based engine. We have our own cloud and we host all of our systems there. The input to this engine is the product catalog of the online retailers themselves. We track behavior of users and that also becomes an input. We use all of this and the semantic web. We crawl the web and make sense of that data. We use all these three elements to crunch and use multiple models to get what it is that the user is actually looking for.

We compute that and go back in when we see such a request. All in all, think of it as an intelligence heavy lifting engine outside of the system that gets plugged in easily into an e-commerce site. Whenever a request comes in, we just ping the server and the server responds back with the most intelligent result at that period of time.

Sramana Mitra: So, all traffic that is coming to an e-commerce site gets processed by your engine and the configuration that the user gets shown is determined by your engine, is that right?

Pavan Sondur: Yes. All traffic that involves search, browse or any sort of product assortment goes through us.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Pavan Sondur, CEO of Unbxd
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