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.

Both Swiggy and Zomato boast of handling over a million orders a day across more than 300 cities. And each customer order is now being influenced by the customer’s own previous history of order preferences.