Latest news with #RajivMehta
CNET
22-05-2025
- Business
- CNET
Talk to Me, Amazon Shopping App: How AI Could Sort Through All the Products You're Looking At
Online shopping excursions can quickly get overwhelming as you plow through product pages to find what's really right for you. Now Amazon is trying out a new tool to help you figure out potential purchases. All you have to do is listen. With Memorial Day deals in full swing, the e-commerce giant is making a trial run with short audio summaries for Amazon Shopping app users, delivered by "AI-powered shopping experts" that will analyze product details, customer reviews and other information they find on the web. "The feature makes product research fun and convenient — it's like having helpful friends discuss potential purchases to make your shopping easier," Rajiv Mehta, Amazon's vice president of search and conversational shopping, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. Amazon is starting out the "hear the highlights" AI feature in the US for a "subset" of customers on a limited number products before rolling it out more broadly in the coming months. Those products include the Ninja Blender, OSEA Undaria Algae Body Oil, the Rain Showers Splash Pond Toddler Water Table, the SafeRest 100% Waterproof King Size Mattress Protector and the Shokz OpenRun Pro Open-Ear Bluetooth Bone Conduction Sport Headphones. The new Amazon feature is another iteration in what has become an AI flood tide in online shopping. Google earlier this week introduced AI Mode, which is designed to suggest, select and pay for items for you, and also showed off a new AI service called Try On that depicts how clothes you see online will look on you. Walmart is working on its own AI shopping agent to perform tasks such as placing reorders and filling online shopping baskets based on user suggestions. And Shopify has launched Bluecore, which can answer shopper questions and recommend products. Klarna has an AI shopping assistant for comparison shopping. CNET deals expert Adam Oram noted that Amazon's new audio summaries will have to prove their value for consumers. "This feature may be helpful for some shoppers, as there's a lot of information on an Amazon product page and it can be difficult to parse all of it to find out what you need to know," he said. "But it's worth noting that there is a risk with it incorporating customer reviews, especially as these have been known to be gamed in the past. There's also the inherent risk of LLMs hallucinating, which may lead to inaccuracies if this is applied at scale, which is the opposite of what people making buying decisions need." As always with generative AI tools, it's essential to not take results at face value and to do some double-checking. "Using tools to help you gain a sense of what you're looking at quickly is generally a good idea, so long as you follow up with your own research to vet that the information is accurate," said Adrian Marlow, another member of the CNET Deals team. Consumer skepticism could be at least a short-term hurdle for all AI e-commerce tools. A recent study commissioned by Akeneo, a product experience company, showed that only 45% of consumers have "some level of trust in AI-powered recommendations and chatbots to provide accurate product suggestions based on their interests and preferences." The research also found that only 38% of shoppers who've used AI chatbots reported being satisfied with the support they received. Amazon, with net sales of nearly $638 billion last year, is incorporating AI into more and more sectors of its business. Rufus is a generative AI shopping assistant, Alexa Plus has been revamped and Audible will start using AI to narrate audiobooks.
CNET
22-05-2025
- Business
- CNET
Amazon Shopping App Tries Out AI Audio Summaries to Ease Your Shopping Research
A shopping excursion online can get overwhelming quickly as you plow through product pages to find what's really right for you. Amazon is trying out a new tool to help you figure out potential purchases. All you have to do is listen. With Memorial Day deals in full swing, the e-commerce giant is making a trial run with short audio summaries for users of the Amazon Shopping app, delivered by "AI-powered shopping experts" that will analyze product details, customer reviews and other information they find on the web. "The feature makes product research fun and convenient — it's like having helpful friends discuss potential purchases to make your shopping easier," Rajiv Mehta, Amazon's vice president of search and conversational shopping, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. Amazon is starting out the "hear the highlights" AI feature in the US for a "subset" of customers on a limited number products before rolling it out more broadly in the coming months. Those products include the Ninja Blender, OSEA Undaria Algae Body Oil, the Rain Showers Splash Pond Toddler Water Table, the SafeRest 100% Waterproof King Size Mattress Protector and the Shokz OpenRun Pro - Open-Ear Bluetooth Bone Conduction Sport Headphones.
Geek Wire
21-05-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Amazon's AI-generated ‘shopping experts' summarize product details in new audio feature
In-depth Amazon coverage from the tech giant's hometown, including e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more. A 'Hear the highlights' button on some Amazon product pages initiates an AI-generated audio clip with details about the product. (Amazon Image) Amazon is adding another AI twist to its shopping app with an audio feature that provides highlights and insight about certain products. The generative AI-powered feature, which Amazon refers to as 'AI shopping experts,' analyzes product details, customer reviews and information from across the web to allow customers to simply hear key information. 'It's like having helpful friends discuss potential purchases to make your shopping easier, even if you're multitasking or on the go,' wrote Rajiv Mehta, vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping at Amazon, in a blog post about the release on Wednesday. In the Amazon shopping app, a 'Hear the highlights' button shows up on a product details page. Customers click the button to initiate the audio experience. The feature uses large language models to generate scripts, according to Amazon, translating content from Amazon and elsewhere on the web into short audio clips. The initiative is in line with other AI-powered shopping tools released by Amazon, including the shopping assistant Rufus; the product research tool Shopping Guides; the Interests tool that continuously monitors new products in Amazon's store; and others. Mehta said the new audio summaries are currently available on select products to a subset of U.S. customers, with plans to roll out the feature on more product detail pages and to more U.S. customers in the coming months.
Time of India
26-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Laghu Udyog Bharti celebrates foundation day
Jhansi: The Jhansi chapter of Laghu Udyog Bharti , a branch of RSS, which promotes small-scale industries countrywide, observed its 32nd founder's day here on Friday. Association president, Rajiv Mehta, in his welcome address, highlighted the organisation's proactive role in addressing issues faced by regional small industries and other sectors at both district and state levels. He noted that members of the organisation are presently being appointed to advisory positions in various state govt boards, including the MSME Facilitation Council , labour, and pollution boards. Sanjay Patwari, national senior vice-president of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), underlined the nationwide impact of Laghu Udyog Bharti in supporting small and marginal businessmen and fostering young entrepreneurs while promoting MSME at the state level. Participants also deliberated on harnessing upcoming business opportunities expected from the Defence Corridor and BIDA, which are anticipated to significantly benefit local entrepreneurs and generate substantial employment prospects. Association secretary Mukesh Gupta, urged all members to contribute new ideas and business models aimed at enhancing the economic landscape of the Bundelkhand region . The gathering paid tribute to Arun Bansal, a founding member of the association, acknowledging his pivotal role in advancing the organisation. A moment of silence was also observed in remembrance of the 26 people who lost their lives in the recent Pahalgam incident.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Health
- Forbes
An Invisible Leadership Crisis: Rebuilding Connection Starts With Knowing Ourselves
We hear it all the time: teams are disconnected. Cultures feel brittle. Belonging is down, burnout is up, and even the most well-intentioned leaders are struggling to create connection in increasingly complex environments. But what if the root cause of this crisis isn't what we think? Apple and NASA veteran, Rajiv Mehta, a brilliant systems thinker and longtime advocate for personal science, recently pointed out something that should be obvious, but rarely is: 'A lack of connection and belonging in teams is not only due to circumstances, busyness, or technology. It is because we don't know ourselves.' Rajiv Mehta reminds us "A lack of connection and belonging in teams is not only due to ... More circumstances, busyness, or technology. It is because we don't know ourselves." This insight gets to the heart of 3D leadership: the idea that sustainable, impactful leadership isn't about doing more, but aligning our efforts across three dimensions—ME (our personal wellbeing), WE (team and organizational performance), and WORLD (broader impact on communities and systems). When we lack connection to ourselves (ME), we struggle to build genuine relationships with others (WE), and our ability to contribute meaningfully to the wider world (WORLD) is compromised. Mehta's work offers a powerful example of how this plays out—and how we can begin to heal it. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a wellness collective called Body Politic became a lifeline for people suffering from Long Covid. Founded in 2018, the collective's leadership quickly mobilized to support thousands of patients, conducting some of the first and most influential research into the new illness. But while they poured their limited energy into serving the WORLD, they were quietly sacrificing ME—their own health and relationships—and even skipping over the WE: the bonds between each other as leaders. When Mehta led a seven-week workshop for the Body Politic team using his "Mapping Ourselves" tools, the results were revelatory. Participants, many of them seasoned scientists, discovered profound insights about their daily lives and bodies that even months of meticulous symptom tracking hadn't revealed. One participant, for example, learned to recognize early signals of migraines and tinnitus, allowing her to intervene and avoid debilitating crashes. That's the ME dimension. But the real surprise? The WE. Though these leaders were in constant communication, they realized they had been neglecting their own internal community. They had been so focused on the mission that they forgot to nurture joy, empathy, and friendship within the team. Mehta's program helped them rediscover that connection—and, in doing so, amplified their ability to serve the WORLD. Mehta's program helped them strengthen their WE dimension, and amplified their ability to serve the ... More WORLD. As Mehta notes, the WE dimension is often the most neglected in American culture, thanks to our obsession with individualism. Author Mia Birdsong captures this beautifully in her book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, writing: 'The do-it-yourself-ness of the American dream narrative … doesn't work for anyone because none of us is self-sufficient. Interdependence is part of who we are as people.' And yet, our workplaces often run on the myth of the lone hero leader. We invest in technologies, toolkits, and culture initiatives—but skip the human work of helping people know themselves and one another more deeply. This echoes the findings of the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 Advisory on Social Connection, which declared loneliness a public health epidemic. And in A Call to Connection by the Einhorn Collaborative, the authors point out that 'our strategies for cultivating connection can be found wanting.' In other words: we have a connection crisis, and our solutions aren't keeping up. So what can we do? Start by understanding your own care ecosystem. Mehta's Atlas CareMap tool is a deceptively simple yet profound way to begin. Who do you care for? Who cares for you? Mapping those relationships reveals both the hidden work of care and the possibilities for deeper connection. Mapping our relationships reveals both the hidden work of care and the possibilities for deeper ... More connection. In conversation with leaders across finance, healthcare, and professional services, I often hear a version of the same question: How can I do more good without burning out? The answer isn't more hustle or more hacks. It's clarity. Do what only you can do. As Mehta has modeled in his own shift toward keynote speaking, scaling your impact doesn't mean abandoning self-care or community—it means anchoring in them. When we lead in 3D, we: Ask yourself: Then explore your own CareMap. Use the tools. Start the conversations. Because true connection doesn't start with a new Slack channel or offsite agenda. It starts with ourselves. And the good news? That work doesn't just benefit you. It's the fastest path to doing more good—in your company, your community, and your corner of the world.
