Flipkart is making LLMs, AI now writes 40 per cent code for company
Flipkart's chief product and technology officer Balaji Thiagarajan says that AI is now writing up to 40 per cent of all code at the company. The e-commerce giant is also building its own large language models (LLMs) for its operations.
As AI becomes an increasingly important tool across industries, e-commerce giant Flipkart is doubling down on building specialised large language models (LLMs). As per Flipkart’s chief product and technology officer Balaji Thiagarajan, AI is now writing just about 40 per cent of the company’s code on its own.
Thiagarajan says that Flipkart is building an "agentic e-commerce platform" powered by a mix of frontier AI models and proprietary models. To do this, the company is creating its building specialised e-commerce LLMs for specific tasks. He told Moneycontrol, "We have deployed over 250 models across our ecosystem.”
According to the Flipkart executive, using only “general-purpose models won't be enough.” Rather, companies will need their own models to get the most out of AI. He added, "To specialise for those tasks, you have to build your own models. That's the secret sauce."
Flipkart is using AI models across various areas – product discovery, conversational shopping, seller operations and internal productivity. And this includes writing code. Balaji Thiagarajan added, "Around 35-40 per cent of our code is already generated by AI tools."
This is in line with many other tech platforms. For context, another e-commerce player, Meesho, reportedly has over 70 per cent of its code now generated by AI. Previously, OpenAI President Greg Brockman had claimed that AI was writing around 80 per cent of all code at the AI startup.
Flipkart building expert AI models
So far, AI agents have seen massive adoption globally, particularly when it comes to tools like Claude Code or Codex. However, Balaji Thiagarajan believes that companies will likely use different AI models for different activities.
That is, Flipkart will likely use external tools like Claude Code along with its own models. He explained, "The future of AI will be a mixture of experts... many of the other experts will be models we build ourselves. That's where our differentiation comes from – our data, our engineering capabilities and our ability to develop specialised ecommerce LLMs for specific tasks."
Flipkart has also made changes in its senior leadership as it focuses on AI. Vinay Vaidya was recently appointed as SVP, Technology for Supply Chain.
At a time when companies like Uber and Flipkart’s parent company Walmart, have started to cut back on AI usage for employees due to rising costs, Thiagarajan says that the e-commerce giant is not worried about return on investment (ROI), at least for now. He explained, "We're not overly concerned about the ROI of AI right now because we're still in investment mode," The Flipkart executive added, “Where we spend much more time today is on AI governance – content moderation, response fidelity, human-in-the-loop systems and reinforcement learning."
As Flipkart increases focus on AI, its rival Amazon plans to further invest in its India operations. The company recently announced a $13 billion investment in India through 2030 to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure, taking its total planned investment in the country to $48 billion.
As AI becomes an increasingly important tool across industries, e-commerce giant Flipkart is doubling down on building specialised large language models (LLMs). As per Flipkart’s chief product and technology officer Balaji Thiagarajan, AI is now writing just about 40 per cent of the company’s code on its own.
Thiagarajan says that Flipkart is building an "agentic e-commerce platform" powered by a mix of frontier AI models and proprietary models. To do this, the company is creating its building specialised e-commerce LLMs for specific tasks. He told Moneycontrol, "We have deployed over 250 models across our ecosystem.”
According to the Flipkart executive, using only “general-purpose models won't be enough.” Rather, companies will need their own models to get the most out of AI. He added, "To specialise for those tasks, you have to build your own models. That's the secret sauce."
Flipkart is using AI models across various areas – product discovery, conversational shopping, seller operations and internal productivity. And this includes writing code. Balaji Thiagarajan added, "Around 35-40 per cent of our code is already generated by AI tools."
This is in line with many other tech platforms. For context, another e-commerce player, Meesho, reportedly has over 70 per cent of its code now generated by AI. Previously, OpenAI President Greg Brockman had claimed that AI was writing around 80 per cent of all code at the AI startup.
Flipkart building expert AI models
So far, AI agents have seen massive adoption globally, particularly when it comes to tools like Claude Code or Codex. However, Balaji Thiagarajan believes that companies will likely use different AI models for different activities.
That is, Flipkart will likely use external tools like Claude Code along with its own models. He explained, "The future of AI will be a mixture of experts... many of the other experts will be models we build ourselves. That's where our differentiation comes from – our data, our engineering capabilities and our ability to develop specialised ecommerce LLMs for specific tasks."
Flipkart has also made changes in its senior leadership as it focuses on AI. Vinay Vaidya was recently appointed as SVP, Technology for Supply Chain.
At a time when companies like Uber and Flipkart’s parent company Walmart, have started to cut back on AI usage for employees due to rising costs, Thiagarajan says that the e-commerce giant is not worried about return on investment (ROI), at least for now. He explained, "We're not overly concerned about the ROI of AI right now because we're still in investment mode," The Flipkart executive added, “Where we spend much more time today is on AI governance – content moderation, response fidelity, human-in-the-loop systems and reinforcement learning."
As Flipkart increases focus on AI, its rival Amazon plans to further invest in its India operations. The company recently announced a $13 billion investment in India through 2030 to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure, taking its total planned investment in the country to $48 billion.
