The top 7 people in artificial-intelligence e-commerce

Jaffer leads a team incorporating AI across Shopify, which powers online stores for millions of sellers. His work includes launching Shopify Magic, a suite of AI tools meant to help merchants run their businesses that use a combination of Shopify data and OpenAI's ChatGPT tools. Jaffer's team also launched an in-app shopping assistant called Shop.ai, and another chat-assistant product called "Sidekick" is in the works. "Entrepreneurship is hard because of all the things you have to learn and become an expert at," Jaffer told Business Insider. "I develop purpose-built AI innovations that make entrepreneurship accessible to everyone."

Mehrotra is Walmart's vice president of applied AI. He's among the most recognized leaders in the AI and machine-learning field, leading his team to win the 2023 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for its work in advanced analytics and management science. At Walmart, his team oversees all aspects of merchandising, including assortment, pricing, and inventory management. Before Walmart, Mehrotra was a lead data scientist at Uber and worked as a data scientist at X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mekel-Bobrov, eBay's chief AI officer, is developing an AI-first culture in the e-commerce marketplace. He launched its Office of Responsible AI to define best practices for AI across the company. eBay's AI tools make it easier to list products, enable 3D imaging, improve buyer's search results through natural-language search, and include AI-generated content for product categories such as electronics and motor parts. He previously held leadership roles at Booking.com, Capital One, and Boston Scientific. "It will no longer be about taking a user to different websites or product pages, but rather bringing the information from these sources to the user," Mekel-Bobrov said. "This paradigm shift will completely transform e-commerce."

Prasad was recently promoted to lead a new artificial general-intelligence group at Amazon. As Amazon's senior vice president and head scientist, Prasad is in charge of creating the company's "most ambitious" and "most expansive" large language models, according to an internal email from June. As part of the promotion, Prasad now reports directly to Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO. Previously, Prasad spent about a decade on Amazon's Alexa team, quickly rising up the ranks to eventually lead the Alexa business. He helped build Alexa's conversational AI-research arm; prior to that, he was the director of Alexa's machine-learning team.

Shankar, who studied computer science at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, was the first machine-learning engineer at Viaduct, a vehicle-health analytics company. Prior to that, she did engineering work at Google Brain and Facebook. Shankar is now the chief scientist at Alta, a stealth e-commerce startup building foundation models for the fashion space. On her personal website, Shankar says she's interested in "practical applications of machine learning (ML) and solving their annoying data management challenges."

Ström is a vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon, working primarily on Alexa's AI and speech technology. He was a founding member of the team that built Amazon's Echo device and Alexa voice assistant. Ström has over 30 years of experience in AI and automatic speech recognition. He's worked at Amazon for more than 12 years and before that, worked at Microsoft and Tellme Networks. A former colleague of Ström's described him as "quietly very influential at Amazon."

At Waabi, Urtasun leads efforts to revolutionize trucking by teaching virtual self-driving vehicles inside an AI-generated simulator. This system can train its technology without needing to test it on the road. "We can leverage this groundbreaking technology across multiple use cases beyond trucking," Urtasun said. Urtasun has spent more than two decades in AI. Before founding Waabi, she was the chief scientist and head of research and development at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group. She cofounded the Vector Institute, a research organization that studies AI and teaches computer science at the University of Toronto.