Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how India’s food delivery business operates, with Swiggy deploying generative AI tools across its platform to provide real-time insights to everyone from top leadership to restaurant partners and delivery personnel, a senior company executive told PTI.
Customer service interactions
Swiggy Food Marketplace chief executive Rohit Kapoor said generative AI is being used to analyse customer service interactions in real time, allowing the company to assess the quality of conversations and respond immediately. “That’s the power that Gen AI is unleashing,” he said.
More broadly, Kapoor said AI is helping democratise access to business intelligence across the platform. Restaurant partners are able to see which dishes performed well and which did not, delivery partners can identify locations that offer higher order density, while leadership teams get a clearer, near-instant picture of how the business performed the previous day.
Alongside AI, Kapoor said robotics is playing an increasing role in Swiggy’s operations, particularly in warehouses.
He was speaking to PTI on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. Kapoor added that AI is no longer limited to backend experimentation but is already embedded across core business functions.
Drone delivery in food logistics
However, he struck a cautious note on the adoption of drone delivery in food logistics, saying that beyond limited pilots and experiments, the technology is far from becoming mainstream in the sector.
“I never bet against technology,” Kapoor said, adding that large-scale adoption will depend on costs coming down over time. As long as alternative resources can perform the same job more efficiently, adoption of newer technologies such as drones will remain slow, the PTI report added.
Kapoor said neither robotics nor drone delivery has reached a stage where it can be described as anything beyond experimental. According to the PTI report, while drones can deliver to fixed points, he said challenges remain in addressing last-mile delivery requirements, such as reaching individual homes within residential complexes or office campuses.
“These are questions that will need to be answered first,” Kapoor told PTI, adding that technology models will continue to evolve over time.