MarTech Interview with Reshma Iyer, Head of Product Marketing, ecommerce at Algolia

Greetings Reshma, Can you briefly outline your journey to becoming Head of Product Marketing at Algolia and how your experiences have influenced your approach in the tech industry?
After graduating from the University of Westminster with my master’s degree in Marketing Communications, my career began as a generalist in marketing for consulting. With the surge in SaaS, I became increasingly curious about exploring subdomains – like content and customer marketing – and eventually made my way to product marketing, which ultimately felt right. Product marketers are problem solvers, and being in this role allows me to take charge of getting down to the solution. I enjoy getting to the root of the problem and creating alignment to chart the path toward a solution. Before joining Algolia, I’ve had the pleasure of driving and executing strategy at organizations like Shopify and Meta. In my current role, I focus on helping brands deliver exceptional AI-powered Search and Discovery experiences for their customers.

What are the standout features of Algolia’s new Merchandising Studio, and how does it alleviate the challenges faced by retailers in manual merchandising?
Our new AI-enhanced, Merchandising Studio is designed to empower business personas to execute on data-driven strategies impacting business goals like increasing revenue. With this new offering, users can efficiently create and change merchandising strategies and let AI do the heavy work. This will revolutionize the way digital merchandisers operate, allowing for more time to focus on strategic work and omitting the time-consuming tasks. For example, instead of having to manually merchandise hundreds of category and product landing pages, which would take a human a significant amount of time, our new capabilities show businesses a new type of efficiency and profitability by letting technology do it for them.

In addition to saving time, the Merchandising Studio enables the delivery of recommendations and personalization experiences based on user preferences. By providing enhanced visibility through analytics and insights, businesses are able to level up their decision making, tapping into opportunities not possible before thereby resulting in positive business outcomes.

Reflecting on Zenni’s partnership with Algolia, what key factors do you attribute to the significant improvements in search revenue and average order value?
Our partnership with Zenni has been one for the books. We’ve worked with them with one shared goal in mind – revolutionizing its digital customer experience and improving its brand position. The nature of this business is driven by personal preferences and product specifics, by combining Zenni’s proprietary AI solution with our AI-powered search platform, Zenni has been empowered to offer a new, unique shopping experience for its customers. Through our partnership, shoppers are shown products that truly resonate with them, not those they have no chance of purchasing – offering each customer a shopping experience tailored for them.

How does Algolia’s AI Search platform enhance the customer experience, as demonstrated by the success with Zenni?
This generation of consumers is accustomed to quick, seamless experiences, which is exactly what our AI-powered search platform provides. Shoppers don’t want to wait long periods of time for the website they’re shopping on to generate results – and being met with the dreaded “no results” page is an experience that happens entirely too often. With the ability to understand natural, human language, our AI-powered search engines enable users to talk to the website as they would another person – using descriptive language that, before, would be too complicated for the technology to understand. In providing these quick, personalized experiences to customers, their shopping experience can now be enjoyable, which may not have always been the case.

Could you highlight the innovative aspects of Algolia’s generative AI capabilities for shopping experiences and how they cater to evolving consumer needs?
Our generative AI for shopping experiences is a strategic initiative geared at advancing capabilities that are meant to deliver exceptional AI-powered search and discovery experiences for both merchants and shoppers. Retailers will now be able to uplevel their search experiences, creating unique revenue-generating engagements with the seamless ability to experiment with and deploy these new generative AI capabilities. This will equip retailers with a suite of APIs, user experience libraries and merchandising tools, empowering them to navigate the evolving ecommerce industry both confidently and creatively while achieving more with less.

This comes at a time when shoppers are now more specific with how they search – generative AI and large language models understand this expressive language and provide more accurate results. The ultimate goal is to deliver highly personalized engaging experiences that positively impact the shopper and the business.

What strategies do you employ to effectively communicate Algolia’s advancements to your target audience, balancing technical detail with market appeal?
Our go-to-market motion is targeted at developers and business decision makers. We employ extensive outreach through developer relations programs, documentation and developer community events. In addition, through a variety of market activities including digital marketing, Customer-Centric Sales and Service, partner marketing, industry events and conferences, social media and public relations including analyst relations, and other forms of media.

How do you stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape, particularly in AI-driven products, ensuring Algolia remains a leader in innovation?
At Algolia, we’re committed to staying on top of the industry’s latest wants and needs, and delivering continuously innovative, simple to use AI-powered solutions to organizations looking to enhance their search experience. We also have a deep understanding that consumer expectations are constantly changing – they want faster, more accurate results, and our plan is to continue to deliver just that.

What advice would you give to individuals aspiring to pursue a career in product marketing or the tech industry, especially in roles focused on AI-driven solutions?
Understanding the AI landscape is the first step. A number of AI-based solutions and applications are getting launched every day. Getting familiar with the underlying technology and how it can be used and where it can apply is important to grasp the full scope. Lastly, a good number of influencers, developers and domain leaders have started to write about this topic frequently – absorbing point of views from different sources will help paint a rich picture and sense of familiarity with this topic.

What common challenges do businesses encounter when implementing AI-driven technologies like Algolia’s, and how does Algolia address them for successful adoption?
AI capabilities are most successful when trained effectively for a reasonable period of time before fully moving into production. This can be considered as a learning phase which helps prepare the business for what to expect. Baking in time to execute this phase is important. Additionally, we recommend A/B testing new capabilities to gauge impact on performance and tweaks to be made from there.

Lastly, what final thoughts or key takeaways would you like to share about the future of AI in e-commerce and Algolia’s role in shaping it?

For retailers, AI-powered search and discovery tools are crucial when it comes to delivering an exceptional online experience for consumers. As we make our way through 2024, AI will continue to be a pivotal tool in providing this experience and will have a great impact in shaping the trends around them. According to our recent B2C Ecommerce Site Search Trends report, more than half (64%) of respondents see the importance of AI in their search strategies and how it can affect their business. Due to this, there is an important commitment tied to investing in AI solutions that enable increased accuracy and relevancy of website search results.

However, AI will have a strong impact beyond just search solutions – with 52% of B2C retailers planning on implementing AI tools to aid merchandising teams and 51% of retailers interested in leveraging generative AI for enhanced product comparisons. Algolia continues to innovate providing the solutions retailers need to stay ahead of their competitors and deliver an exceptionally quick and seamless consumer experience.