Alibaba seeks to expand its cloud business in India with AR, personalized experiences and customer analytics

Alibaba, the Chinese retailer giant, is making efforts for the expansion of its cloud business in India. Last week, the company had launched its second data centre and now it is looking forward to introduce its new retail concept in the country. Alibaba Cloud has also made plans of enhancing the customer experience in the Indian retail industry by combining its augmented reality technology in shopping events. It will work with the major companies in the retail space, but for now, it has only mentioned of its collaboration with DLF shopping malls.

Vivek Gupta, Head and Director of Business Development India and SAARC at Alibaba Cloud, says that focusing on the retail sector in India is a big thing for them. He added, “We are talking to almost every single retail brand in the country. We want to partner with them in their omni-channel journey, as well as strengthen supply chain, offer intelligence on business operations, and enhance customer experience.”

The new retail concept offers a customized experience for customers in a physical store, makes use of customer analytics to provide matching products, and integrates online experience at offline stores. This is supposed to cater to the demands of the retail industry and help retailers digitize their operations. After launching Taobao Buy as an AR experience application for shoppers, there have also been speculations stating that Alibaba will integrate the same augmented reality experience for Indian customers as well.

In addition to that, Alibaba recently partnered with Paytm to launch Paytm AI cloud, which marks the movement of Paytm in the cloud business.