AI expands B2B networking opportunities | Increasing jobs like INDIAMART

AI has expanded the scope of B2B networking, increasing the jobs Indiamart

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded the scope of business-to-business networking similarly B2B, triggering the need for a bigger work force in the sector, according to Dinesh Agarwal, CEO of online B2B marketplace IndiaMart.                  

IndiaMart, which connects wholesale buyers to relevant suppliers of various products and services on its platform, has improved its matching ratio by using AI such as voice search applications, mixed language interpretation or misspelled words, Agarwal said.

“Voice search is something that was not possible before AI; Voice recognition has been perfect only in the last 3-4-5 years. Image recognition or image classification was not very perfect and even today, it is in the process of being perfected. So, we are trying to find many more use cases with various artificial intelligence innovations happening around the world.”

He said, "Whenever a technology comes in, the nature of work changes, the jobs don't decrease. In fact, the jobs increase because now you can serve a market that you couldn't before. It really expands the horizon of the business and that's why we need more people."

The company has added around 60,000 customers to its platform in the last 18 years to reach the figure of 2.80 lakh users. A few months into the post COVID-19 economic recovery process. Aggarwal said the company expects to add around 1,000 people to its workforce every year to service the growing traffic on the platform.

“Before COVID, we had around 3,500 people and during COVID, because we did not hire for 18 months, it came down to less than 3,000 people. Now, we are touching around 5,500 people. "In line with business growth," he said, "we see about 20 percent people joining in a year."

When asked whether IndiaMart and other such platforms may face any competition due to the government's initiative of open network digital commerce, connecting service providers and suppliers directly to their target audience, Agarwal said that the adoption of ON DC in the B2B sector will take more time.

He explained that the networking process becomes complex as B2B transactions become more high-volume and operate in a highly customization manner.

He said, "On DC has a lot of moving parts. You have to work on logistics, you have to work on payments, you have to work on discovery, you have to work on delivery and you have to work on refunds. It's much more complex and much more ambitious. It will take some time, but if it succeeds, it will be good for the country."

To take advantage of the growing international trade involving Indian suppliers, especially post-COVID, IndiaMart said it has relaunched its export offering and has seen around 7,000 exporters using the platform since 2021.

According to Aggarwal, India's exports have increased during COVID, while the demand for medical supplies has increased. Also, the government's move to reduce corporate tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent has also increased the competitiveness of Indian exporters.

“We have relaunched our export offering in 2021 and we are very happy to see that we have already been able to do good business with over 6,000-7,000 exporters on our platform,” he added.

In addition, IndiaMart has also integrated international payment facilitation services on its platform.

"We are now facilitating international payments through Tazapay (payment gateway), a company we have partnered with...they are able to facilitate international payments at zero percent cost only rupee to dollar conversion or rupee to euro conversion fee," he added.

On Thursday, IndiaMart reported a 78 per cent rise in its net profit to Rs 83 crore for the April-June quarter, driven by a rise in revenue due to a rise in user base.

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