If you’ve shopped on Amazon in the past few months, you might have noticed it has gotten easier to find what you’re looking for. Listings now have more images, detailed product names, and better descriptions. The website’s predictive search feature uses the listing updates to anticipate needs and suggests a list of items in real time as you type in the search bar.
The improved shopping experience is thanks to Abhishek Agrawal and his Catalog AI system. Launched in July, the tool collects information from across the Internet about products being sold on Amazon and, based on the data, updates listings to make them more detailed and organized.
Abhishek Agrawal
Employer
Amazon Web Services in Seattle
Job title
Engineering leader
Member grade
Senior member
Alma maters
University of Allahabad in India and the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata
Agrawal is an engineering leader at Amazon Web Services in Seattle. An expert in AI and machine learning, the IEEE senior member worked on Microsoft’s Bing search engine before moving to Amazon. He also developed several features for Microsoft Teams, the company’s direct messaging platform.
“I’ve been working in AI for more than 20 years now,” he says. ”Seeing how much we can do with technology still amazes me.”
He shares his expertise and passion for the technology as an active member and volunteer at the IEEE Seattle Section. He organizes and hosts career development workshops that teach people to create an AI agent, which can perform tasks autonomously with minimal human oversight.
An AI career inspired by a computer
Agrawal was born and raised in Chirgaon, a remote village in Uttar Pradesh, India. When he was growing up, no one in Chirgaon had a computer. His family owned a pharmacy, which Agrawal was expected to join after he graduated from high school. Instead, his uncle and older brother encouraged him to attend college and find his own passion.
He enjoyed mathematics and physics, and he decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in statistics at the University of Allahabad. After graduating in 1996, he pursued a master’s degree in statistics, statistical quality control, and operations research at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata.
While at the ISI, he saw a computer for the first time in the laboratory of Nikhil R. Pal, an electronics and communication sciences professor. Pal worked on identifying abnormal clumps of cells in mammogram images using the fuzzy c-means model, a data-clustering technique employing a machine learning algorithm.
Agrawal earned his master’s degree in 1998. He was so inspired by Pal’s work, he says, that he stayed on at the university to earn a second master’s degree, in computer science.
After graduating in 2001, he joined Novell as a senior software engineer working out of its Bengaluru office in India. He helped develop iFolder, a storage platform that allows users across different…
Read full article: Amazon’s AI Product Platform Helps You Shop Smarter
The post “Amazon’s AI Product Platform Helps You Shop Smarter” by Joanna Goodrich was published on 12/08/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org