On Thursday, Amazon launched Multi Channel Fulfillment for sellers, even those not on its platform, along with striking deals with India Post and Indian Railways. This and more in today's ETtech Top 5.
Also in this letter: ■ Generative AI moving tech outside IT departments: Google Cloud CEO
■ SoftBank likely to fully exit Zomato in coming months
■ Lessons from Chandrayaan-3 may land in IIM classrooms
Amazon to offer fulfillment infrastructure to sellers outside its platform
(From left) Amazon SVP international consumer, Russell Grandinetti and Amazon SVP India and emerging markets Amit Agarwal Amazon on Thursday
announced the launch of Multi Channel Fulfillment (MCF), which will enable sellers to run their online businesses by accessing its infrastructure, even if they are not on the ecommerce platform.
Details: With this, direct to consumer (D2C) sellers can use Amazon's logistics and supply chain capabilities to pick, pack and ship to customers from their inventory in Amazon fulfillment centres via multiple sales channels, including their own websites.
Logistics deal with India Post, railway services: Amazon has also signed a memorandum of understanding with India Post to create a cross-border logistics solution that will expand the opportunity of global selling for businesses. The company is also partnering with the Indian Railways' Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India to make use of freight corridors.
Also read | Amazon shrugs off ups and downs in its decade-long India journey AI-based virtual assistant: The company also rolled out Amazon Sah-AI, a generative artificial intelligence-driven virtual assistant that will help sellers on Amazon clarify their queries, list products, generate product attributes, analyse trends in their sales, and so on.
Also read | Amazon set to cross $8 billion in cumulative exports from India in 2023 Uptick in sales: Talking about the India ecommerce market, Manish Tiwary, vice president and country manager, Amazon India consumer business, said the company has seen a "clear improvement" over the last two to three months. "We had the Prime Day in July, and it was the first time the response was well ahead of our plan. We had a good situation where a lot of our sellers sold out. On the output side…14-15% more Prime members bought (during Prime Day)," Tiwary said.
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Garena's Free Fire returns to India a year after it was blocked
Game developer Garena on Thursday announced the
relaunch of the Indian version of its popular battle royale game, Free Fire, over a year and a half after it was blocked by the government.
With Indian tadka: "Garena is employing servers run by Yotta, a unit of the Hiranandani group, to provide cloud hosting and data storage services," the firm said in a statement.
In February last year,
the government banned over 50 apps, including Free Fire, over concerns that Indian user data was being sent to servers in China. The Indian government did not specify why Free Fire in particular was blocked.
BGMI relaunch: The Sea Ltd-owned game has been relaunched just a few months after the most popular game in the Indian esports ecosystem, Krafton's Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI),
returned from a government block on a three-month trial basis late in May. BGMI had roughly 100 million registered users in the country pre-block.
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Generative AI moving tech outside IT departments: Google Cloud CEO
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is making functions such as marketing and human resources adopt technology, which, in turn, is expanding the overall addressable market, according to
Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian. Quote, unquote: "Generative AI is moving technology out of the IT department into many other functions in companies. Before generative AI, the marketing, HR, procurement, supply chain departments—none were talking to us. In this conference alone, a lot of attendees are not necessarily engineers but people from different business lines," said Kurian, during a media roundtable at the Google Cloud Next 2023 event.
The executive said the company is making AI for all—through a chat interface—similar to how it made the internet for all through its search engine in the late 1990s.
IBM CEO on AI: A week ago, global technology giant IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna said the company was
internally using AI to drive productivity in lower-order cognitive tasks. He added that Big Blue has been deploying the technology in 90% of the "mundane" tasks under the human resources department, such as promoting and assessing candidates.
Google brings generative AI to Search in India: Google
is rolling out its Search Generative Experience (SGE), which offers generative AI-powered responses to search-engine queries, for users to experiment with and share feedback under the company's Search Labs programme. SGE is available in English and Hindi, and includes India-focused features such as language toggle, text-to-speech, and voice input in a conversational mode.
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SoftBank likely to fully exit Zomato in coming months
Japanese investment giant SoftBank, which has sold nearly 10 crore shares in online food delivery platform Zomato, amounting to 1.17% of the company's equity, is
planning to fully exit the online food-delivery platform in the next few months. According to sources, SoftBank still has a stake of around 2.18% in Zomato, which it is likely to sell via block deals.
Background: On Wednesday, around 10 crore shares of Zomato
changed hands at a total deal value of around Rs 947 crore. SoftBank's SVF Growth Fund was the likely seller in this mega transaction. SVF Growth (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. had a 3.35% stake in Zomato, totalling around 28 crore shares.
Following the Tiger trail: The fresh block sale came after another foreign institutional investor, Tiger Global Management,
offloaded its entire shareholding of 1.44% in Zomato earlier this week. The deal earned Tiger Global a total of Rs 1,123 crore. The New York-based fund sold around 12.34 crore shares or 1.44% in Zomato at an average price of Rs 91.01 per share.
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Lessons from Chandrayaan-3 may land in IIM classrooms
Chandrayaan-3's historic moon landing is set to provide plenty of food for thought for
budding managers at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The plan: The mission, executed on a mere Rs 615 crore budget, is a case study in frugal innovation. Management students can study the project to imbibe lessons in strategy, collaboration, innovation, cost control and optimisation of resources, how leaders process failure and move on, etc.
Case study in works: At IIM Sirmaur, faculty members are working on a case study on the topic, said director Prafulla Agnihotri. "It's an amazing example of how an organisation should learn from its experiences, improvise its efforts, and achieve a near-impossible goal."
This phenomenon will have implications and learnings for leadership and management practice too, said Debashis Chatterjee, director, IIM Kozhikode.
Today's ETtech Top 5 newsletter was curated by Erick Massey in New Delhi and Megha Mishra in Mumbai. 
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