Published on 07, Aug 2023

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian and His Contributions to the Flourishing Landscape of E-Commerce

E-commerce has experienced incredible growth these past ten years. Being able to sell online has created a more even playing field for businesses of all kinds as they’re able to appeal to their own target audiences and carve niches for themselves. The cost of a brick and mortar location has been replaced with the upkeep of a personalized website; drawing traffic to one’s products or services comes down to the connection made with prospective customers online. Many aspects about the retail process continue to change with every iteration of e-commerce. However, a new factor has recently introduced itself and has gained growing popularity in the last few years: artificial intelligence, or AI.

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian, who also goes by “Vijay”, has been working in data science for almost twenty years and has been using his expertise to advance AI in digital retail spaces. More specifically, he’s been working on building “recommender systems”, which uses machine learning (ML), a subset of AI, to enhance shopping experiences for online consumers. What a recommender system does is that it will suggest products or services to users based on a variety of factors such as transaction history, viewing history, and similar buying habits from other users. While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when recommender systems became widespread, they’ve subtly become part of the norm and have irrevocably changed the way we shop online.

“This space has grown exponentially,” says Vijay, “and I’m always in awe to think that I helped play a part in it. But as consumer habits grow and as a diversity of currencies become more accessible, I believe that there will be another boom for e-commerce in the coming years. I’m already taking the next steps to meet that incoming demand.”

Developing recommender systems is but a facet of Vijay’s data science expertise. His experience began back in 2006 when distributed computing was developing as a topic of conversation. He was one of the forerunners implementing this technology to organize and create insights from multi-terabyte unstructured data for British Telecom, the largest telecom provider in the UK, operating in 180+ countries.

Working with British Telecom sparked his interest in data science and put Vijay on a path to enrolling at the University of Notre Dame where he graduated with a Master’s in Data Science. The algorithms and techniques he subsequently learned helped him create enterprise scale data products and apply advanced machine learning to solve real world problems.

His career continued to advance after he moved to the United States, and this was when he began to hone his skill in the retail and telecom domains. His expertise grew as he developed advanced data science solutions in multi cloud environments, developing state-of-the-art machine learning models, and deriving key insights of large allocated data sets. These key insights could include analyzing and organizing data into groups separated by demographic, geographic location, and product or service popularity. He uses these insights to hone various AI technologies, such as the ML used for recommendation algorithms.

The discussion around AI has grown to a fever pitch among consumers and creators, but AI, as a neutral force, has been used to streamline various experiences. For Vijay, the technology has only fully blossomed in the past decade or so, leading to a landscape of possibilities across a number of industries.

According to a Digital Commerce 360 analysis, e-commerce sales in the U.S. alone reached $1.03 trillion in 2022. Because of such impressive turnout in just one country, businesses of all sizes are motivated to extend their reach into this space. And in order to do that, they need minds like Vijay to help them stay the course.

“I’m excited about the future of AI and its growing integration in various aspects of our lives, especially with the recent advancements in processing power, the realization of complex algorithms, and the creation of models such as ChatGPT,” says Vijay. He also cautions the usage, adding, “I believe that artificial intelligence is only as good as the companies and individuals who use it. Companies can really benefit from its intentional utility. Once properly implemented, consumers will appreciate smoother sales processes and might even be excited about buying things in the future.”

Vijay currently works as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft where he continues to use his 17 years of experience to further explore the potential of AI and develop cutting edge solutions using the technology. He also actively mentors AI/ML startup founders and data science professionals. Vijay labels himself as an ardent reader and is an enthusiastic contributor to the scholastic community. He is also contributing to technical communities including IEEE, IET, and BCS.

When thinking about the future, Vijay positively states, “I’m looking forward to what comes next, both in regards to data science and for myself. I feel like I’m still getting started, and I have big plans for what I want to do next. For now, though, I’m very happy doing what I’m doing right now.”

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian has seventeen years of data science experience, specializing in telecom and e-commerce spaces. Currently, he works at a leading cloud solution provider as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist for Microsoft. He contributes his expertise to a number of open source communities, such as Apache Airflow, Beam, and TensorFlow.

To learn more about Vijay or his future pursuits, you can find him on his website.