31-07-2025
Exclusive: How Glu.ai blends brand safety with AI-driven commerce
As eCommerce brands race to adopt generative AI, is betting big on doing it safely - with brand integrity and human oversight baked in.
The company, which specialises in creative automation for conversational commerce, is investing heavily in agentic AI while embedding human oversight into every layer of development and deployment. It's a strategy built not just for scale - but for trust.
In an exclusive interview with TechDay, Chief Technology Officer, Sangeeta Mudnal, said the company's approach is rooted in balancing ambition with accountability.
"One of the key things that I have learned through my experience in these big tech companies is how AI can be both deeply scalable and profoundly human-centred," she said.
Mudnal, who held senior roles at Amazon and Microsoft, explained that platform has been designed around the principle of "human-in-the-loop" AI.
It's a philosophy that informs everything from the way chatbot responses are evaluated to how brand elements are integrated into campaign workflows.
"Whatever AI tools and capabilities we are building, we make sure they are trustworthy, transparent and that customers feel confident and comfortable in using them," she added.
This commitment translates into a development process where human reviewers are involved even before deployment.
"When we test our responses from our chatbots or AI agents, we're not using just LLMs as a judge, but we're using humans in the loop to make sure that the answers are accurate, coherent and relevant."
Once AI features go live, users are kept in control. Features such as brand font extraction and colour scheme suggestions include confirmation steps that form a continuous feedback loop. These measures improve efficiency while reinforcing the customer's authority over final outputs.
The need for such checks is particularly urgent in eCommerce, where AI tools now span the full customer lifecycle. "That end-to-end journey is now powered by AI," Mudnal said, citing the rise of single-window chats that take consumers from product discovery to purchase in seconds.
But speed introduces its own risks - especially when scaling brand messaging.
"When you generate thousands of copies and creatives, how do you come off not sounding templated, or off-tone or off-brand?" she asked.
answer is to personalise automation at a foundational level. "We move to more content-aware and brand-consistent automation," she said.
" learns the brand's identity - fonts, colours, tone, mission statements - and we infuse that in everything our customers do within the platform."
The result is a system that lets teams launch coordinated campaigns across email, TikTok or Instagram while maintaining a consistent brand voice and aesthetic.
The technical infrastructure powering this capability is built on three core tenets: clear problem framing, modular architecture and post-deployment resilience.
"You can build AI agents in two days," Mudnal explained, "but keeping them performant and safe is a different matter."
She emphasised that modern AI systems demand a new engineering mindset. "Eighty percent of the code is now moving to post-production - to make sure these LLMs are not hallucinating, they're behaving, they're not going rogue." For organisations used to deterministic codebases, she said, this shift will be a steep learning curve.
Trust and compliance are critical in this environment, especially when AI models interact with sensitive business data.
At that trust is safeguarded through strict data contracts and a "minimum required data" philosophy. Models are trained on brand-approved assets only.
"We include AI fine-tuned on brand-consented content," Mudnal explained.
"Brands upload their catalogues or kits, and we learn and fine tune our models based on that. This ensures outputs are not hallucinating or leaking sensitive details."
The next major leap, she said, is conversational commerce - where entire shopping journeys happen through natural, real-time dialogue.
"Twenty-four percent of consumers now use generative AI in shopping experiences, with a prediction of almost 50% in conversational settings within this year."
This evolution will require creative teams to think less about search engine optimisation and more about emotional design. "Now, creative producers need to design conversations that resonate with human emotion and personality," she added.
Tackling the ethical risks of these technologies, employs multiple safeguards - from toxicity and bias detection to prompt injection defences. Transparency is reinforced with prompt libraries, explainable outputs, and rigorous internal reviews.
"It's an ongoing practice," she said. "We hope to be agile, but it's important to do cross-functional audits - legal, product, data science, prompt engineering - so we build trust with the customer."
For startups looking to enter the AI commerce space, Mudnal's advice is clear. "Dive in. There might be some limitations and disadvantages now, but over time, technology is going to increase the quality of these models."
She believes is positioned to lead the next wave of innovation through its agentic AI focus. These AI systems will work autonomously on behalf of brands, managing workflows and driving campaign efficiency - always under human direction.
"We want agents to work on behalf of our customers, to make their workflow seamless and really drive efficiencies for them."
