What The E-Comm AI Shift Means For MSMEs

This announcement comes at the heels of Shiprocket filing a confidential draft red herring prospectus (DHRP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in May 2025 for their Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company is expected to raise around Rs 2500 crore in its IPO. 

What does the AI model offer?

As per Shiprocket’s website, Shunya.ai is built on a freemium model, with unlimited access priced at Rs 499 a month for MSMEs. It is directly integrated into the Shiprocket platform and offers AI agents across multiple languages. According to the company, the agents can perform the following tasks:

• Catalogue management and creation: It automates the creation and management of catalogues, and enables product listings in multiple languages. 
• Ad campaign creation: It can assist in generating marketing campaigns in multiple languages as well as in creating the advertising content.
• Automated customer support: Offers AI chatbots for customer support.
• Streamlining delivery and logistics: The model can find the most efficient and affordable methods for delivery, as well as tracking orders. 

Shiprocket CEO Saahil Goel stated, “We’ve adapted Shunya.ai from the ground up for Indian languages, commerce workflows, and MSME needs. By embedding it directly into our platform, we’re giving over 1,50,000 sellers instant access to tools that are intelligent, local, and scalable, levelling the playing field for businesses across Bharat.” Notably, Larsen and Toubro’s AI cloud arm, Cloudfiniti is reportedly providing the underlying GPU infrastructure, ensuring that all data processing and storage remains within India.

This AI model does offer multiple benefits but it will not level the playing field against big players, as per Devangshu Dutta who is the founder of specialist consulting firm, Third Eyesight.

“While Shunya AI can help small businesses compete better, it won’t completely level the playing field. Large companies still have greater organisational capacity and capability to respond to the insights offered, including more data and bigger budgets. The real benefit for small businesses is improving how they work and serve customers within their current markets, rather than suddenly competing with giants,” Dutta said. 

The E-Commerce AI Pivot 

This is not the first time that an Indian e-commerce platform has unveiled a B2B AI service through its existing platform. Zepto recently launched Zepto Atom in May 2025, a real-time tool that offers consumer brands available on the platform minute-level updates, PIN-code level performance maps, and Zepto GPT, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) assistant trained on internal data that brands can query about their stock keeping units (SKUs) and performance data. 

Zomato and its e-commerce arm Blinkit have also been growing their AI capabilities. Analytics India Magazine previously reported that the company’s generative AI team has grown from 3 to 20 engineers in the time-span of a year. Zomato introduced a personalised AI food assistant for users, and also uses AI in its backend to optimise delivery times and improve consumer support. Blinkit also released the Recipe Rover AI in May 2023, an AI assistant for recipes.

Other companies like Swiggy with ‘What to Eat’ AI, Myntra’s MyFashionGPT AI shopping assistant, and Amazon’s Rufus have also adopted AI assistants on their platform as a tool for the consumer.

The issue of merchant stickiness

Dutta asserts that this shift means platforms like Zepto and Shiprocket are changing from being service providers to becoming data intelligence companies. They are generating, or are in the process of generating revenue through transactional data that flows through the company.

“While this can create better insights and automation for merchants on these platforms, it also could make the merchants more dependent on the platforms. Once a merchant builds its operations around a platform’s specific AI tools and insights, it becomes much harder to switch to a competitor – creating stronger merchant stickiness. We already see this in infrastructure and core services such as banking and financial services, enterprise cloud services, building management etc. and the same is likely to happen in AI-enabled process management”, he said. 

Why this matters

As Shiprocket is preparing for an IPO, Shunya.ai becomes another means to generate revenue for the company. This app can extend Shiprocket’s reach to local physical stores and MSMEs, by offering them the opportunity to provide the same experiences and support to the consumer that larger retailers and e-commerce platforms do, while automating delivery automation, cataloguing, and customer support. 

Furthermore, the launch of this model is also part of the larger trend of AI integration and automation, both within e-commerce platforms for their consumers and within the back-end for optimisation. 

Advertisements

Competition in these sectors and merchant stickiness may also become an issue, as businesses hosted on these e-commerce services may become reliant on specific AI tools and their outputs.

Questions of data privacy are also important when it comes to service companies moving towards data intelligence: How do these AI models gather and use data? The consent of end-consumers in these B2B models, data storage, and security are all issues that need to be studied as e-commerce and retails pivots towards AI.

Some Unanswered Questions

MediaNama has reached out to Shiprocket with the following questions and will update the article when we receive a response.

1. How does Shunya AI differentiate itself from other global or domestic AI tools being used in the logistics and e-commerce sectors such as Zepto Atom or Shopify Magic?

2. What data is Shunya AI trained on? Is the training dataset sourced exclusively from Shiprocket’s operations, or are third-party data streams also used?

3. What data will Shunya AI’s marketing campaign models access? How will it ensure privacy and data protection of the end consumer of the business who is using these models?

4. How does Shiprocket ensure compliance with Indian data protection laws, especially given the scale of customer and seller data being used?