AI in E-commerce Meetup

​​🎉 The MLOps Community in San Francisco is coming together in person for our 2nd meetup of the year, in partnership with RubberDuckyLabs and Bain Capital Ventures!

In a reprieve from the simultaneous hype and hustle of LLMs, our upcoming gathering offers a refreshing dive into the tangible, critical intersection of AI and e-commerce. This event is tailored for founders, product managers, and engineers eager to move beyond the theoretical allure of generative AI, focusing instead on the practical challenges that businesses face when implementing and optimizing AI technologies in real-world settings. We're setting the stage for an in-depth exploration of evaluating, debugging, and productionizing AI within the dynamic realm of e-commerce—a sector where the stakes for AI's success are exceptionally high.

​Agenda:

• ​5:30 pm - 6:15 pm: Networking
  

• ​6:15 pm - 6:20 pm: Kickoff and intro to the community and the event
  

• ​6:20 pm - 6:45 pm - Alexandra Johnson, CEO of Rubber Ducky Labs - Alexandra will talk about how her company is on a mission to demystify the efficacy of recommender systems combining data from existing data warehouses to enhance revenue and engagement.
  

• ​6:45 pm -7:05 pm: Faye Zhang, Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest - Faye will talk about search relevance and personalization in e-commerce at scale, bridging the gap between the theoretical promise of AI and practical execution.
  

• ​7:05 pm- 7:30 pm: Lightning Talks:
  - CV with Fashion Colors by Kelsey Pederson, CTO of Capsule - Kelsey Pedersen demystifies the process of extracting and applying fashion colors from product images to enhance e-commerce search algorithms.
  - Technical Architecture for an AI Shopping Assistant by Nalin Gupta, founder of ShopAdvisor - Nalin Gupta unveils the cutting-edge architecture behind ShopAdvisor's AI, transforming online shopping with advanced reasoning, data aggregation, and hyper-realistic interactions.
  

• ​7:30 pm - close: Moar Networking.
  
  ​This event is brought to you in partnership with Rubber Ducky Labs and Bain Capital Ventures.

​More about the speakers:

​Kelsey Pederson, co-founder and CTO at CAPSULE (backed by YC, Goodwater, and GRF Fund), a visual e-commerce search engine -- like Shazam for Shopping. She will share her expertise in nuanced understanding of color in fashion products from her experience as a software engineer at Stitch Fix. Her lightning talk will walk us through how to look at an image of a product, identify the most dominant colors, and how we're currently implementing this data into our ranking algorithms.

​Nalin Gupta is the founder of ShopAdvisor, an LLM-powered sales rep for e-commerce stores. The AI can answer product-related questions, explain product features, and even help customers find the best items for their needs, like a salesperson at a retail store. In his presentation, Nalin will focus on the technical architecture and techniques used to build a shopping assistant that goes beyond a typical chatbot implementation. We will cover topics such as fine-tuning for reasoning capabilities, RAG on knowledge graphs, fine-tuning on sales conversations, aggregating data from 3rd party sources, and adding hyper-realism using voice and mouse interactions.

Joining them is Faye Zhang, a Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest, who will share her expertise in boosting recommendation engagement through ML platforms. Her presentation will illuminate the critical importance of search relevance and personalization in e-commerce, offering actionable insights for businesses aiming to deepen consumer engagement through AI. Talking about operationalizing AI at scale her insights promise to bridge the gap between AI's theoretical promise and its practical execution, guiding attendees through the intricacies of optimizing AI systems for real-world impact.

​Alexandra Johnson, CEO of Rubber Ducky Labs (backed by YC, BCV, and Cadenza) is a trailblazer in AI and e-commerce. With over a decade of experience in ML that spans working on recommender systems in fashion tech at Polyvore to leading the Platform Team at SigOpt, and now at Rubber Ducky Labs Alexandra's journey has focused on operationalizing AI in business. We'll hear how Rubber Ducky Labs has embarked on a mission to demystify the efficacy of recommender systems, providing a platform that leverages existing data warehouses to enhance revenue and engagement with unparalleled efficiency.

​​NOTE: PLEASE RSVP BY TUESDAY April 2nd 5:00 pm. Due to building security updates, we might not be able to allow walk-ins, or registrations on Thursday.

​​Thanks to the amazing folks at Microsoft Reactor for being a community partner and hosting our upcoming events!!

Note: To comply with the venue, we've added a few questions that have been requested of us. Thank you for understanding.