Rajiv Mehta, Amazon | Modern Retail Vanguard 2024
This is part of the Modern Retail Vanguard, a series highlighting the behind-the-scenes talent powering the world’s top retail brands. More from the series →
Over the past 30 years, Amazon has transformed from online bookstore to artificial intelligence powerhouse.
Behind the scenes, Rajiv Mehta, a vice president at Amazon who works on conversational AI shopping, plays an instrumental role in helping the retail giant produce a rolodex of AI-powered shopping tools. His role is all the more crucial given how competitive the market is, with everyone from Walmart to smaller retailers such as Boot Barn investing in AI to enhance the shopping experience. Mehta, who joined Amazon in 2014, leads a global team of product managers, engineers, designers and scientists who build products and services that help customers find the products they’re looking for on the platform.
Amazon already has AI-powered search on its app and website, as well as a new shopping assistant named Rufus. Rufus can help answer customer questions such as, “What are the best wireless outdoor speakers?” and “What’s the difference between gas and wood-fired pizza ovens?”
Mehta oversaw the development and execution of Rufus, and the chatbot has arguably been his buzziest contribution.
“My role with Rufus has been leading the product and engineering aspects from the beginning and helping shape and define our features and the capabilities of the product since its inception,” Mehta says.
Mehta says the development of Rufus was borne, in part, out of his prior experience at Amazon’s Alexa Shopping, an older service. The chatbot’s inspiration came from the shopping behavior of Amazon’s customers, who often want to compare prices and product recommendations before they hit “add to cart.”
Even before generative AI became one of the retail industry’s biggest buzzwords, Amazon has been at the forefront of AI-based solutions, according to Mehta.
“Some of our earliest features go back even 20 years, when we were making product recommendations and helping customers find things that were similar to others,” Mehta says. “We view this journey with AI and the most recent one with conversational shopping as a continuation of those investments and building upon things that we’ve done over the years.”