Aloka’s team builds AI solutions at Walmart

It’s an exciting time to work in AI. The advances represented by ChatGPT have made it more so. Aloka Sudhodanan, senior manager of data science at Walmart Global Tech, Bengaluru, is in the thick of it. She says developing an AI-powered solution requires a good understanding of the domain or industry for which you are developing it.
Developing that expertise is not easy.In the retail industry, she says, each sub-sector – assortment, pricing, supply chain – is like an ocean. "A fresher who joins a retail company needs to work on a wide variety of problems to gather that kind of expertise," she says.
Aloka, a BITS Pilani alumna, was introduced to AI when she was pursuing her Master’s degree. Her first job was at IBM India Research Laboratory, where she developed machine learning solutions for weather prediction, renewable energy, and crop modelling.
She has been with Walmart for over seven years now, has developed a substantial understanding of the retail industry, and holds multiple patents. She today leads teams that build AI-powered solutions for Walmart's marketplace business. An email communication system developed by her team is powered by state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. This system, used in the marketplace business, helps to detect spams, threats and abuse emails. It also detects the underlying customer intent and auto classifies messages from customers, helping marketplace sellers to respond to emails faster. "This helps us to achieve our vision to serve customers better and have seamless shopping experiences," Aloka says.
Aloka and team have also developed a data science model that can help sellers get optimum visibility. The model, she says, helps the company's marketing team to predict if a seller’s product is ready for marketing. The system is designed to make recommendations based on multiple attributes such as seasonality, trends, quality, shipping, and price.
Aloka says learning newer programming languages will help AI tech developers to smartly tackle new challenges that a rapidly evolving AI space throws at them on a regular basis. "Python, Pyspark and Scala are some of the programming languages widely used by AI professionals today," she says.
Freshers entering AI-focused tech companies, she says, will have to identify the platform requirements and upskill accordingly, and she says there are online courses available today that can help them to learn and grow. ”Kaggle is yet another forum that provides freshers an opportunity to solve real-world problems using AI and learn from experts in the field," she says