The Engineering Teams Driving the Next Wave of AI in E-Commerce at Zoro

How Zoro’s AI and Engineering Teams Are Transforming E-Commerce

There are many things about AI that excite Addhyan Pandey, but there’s one emerging trend that he can’t stop thinking about. 

“Agentic commerce excites me,” he said. “Not because it’s new or widely talked about, but because it represents a real leap forward in making commerce more accessible.”

Pandey serves as Head of AI and Data at Zoro, a subsidiary of Grainger that sells maintenance, repair and operating supplies to business owners, where he oversees the teams that build and run the company’s end-to-end engineering, AI and data ecosystem. He’s responsible for driving the company’s AI transformation, including setting clear technical and ethical standards, investing in engineers and analysts, and building AI-first teams that can scale sustainably.

Throughout this career, Pandey has built a variety of marketplace and e-commerce products, which requires understanding shopper psychology and behavior before purchase decisions are made. As he applies this knowledge to his current work at Zoro, he enables his teams to leverage agentic AI to more fully understand the ways transactions are made, which will enable them to add a new dimension to the online shopping experience. 

How Zoro Engineers Use AI to Improve Search and Customer Experience

According to Pandey, Zoro’s AI strategy centers around its customers. 

Recently, a key customer insight led his teams to enhance the product search experience on Zoro’s platform: Customers often describe the same product in different ways. For example, a technical business customer may search for a “deck box,” while an individual consumer may look for the same product while referring to it as a “storage box” or an “outdoor box.”   

So, Pandey’s team scaled a standardized approach across the company’s extensive assortment of tools, parts and supplies for businesses, enabling its website to interpret the language customers use and return the right product results. 

“By using generative AI to enrich, normalize, and scale our product data, we were able to close that gap much faster than expected, helping customers find the products they need more quickly and with greater confidence,” he said. “The results are already improving search relevance and product discoverability across our website.” 

“By using generative AI to enrich, normalize, and scale our product data, we were able to close that gap much faster than expected, helping customers find the products they need more quickly and with greater confidence.”

According to Pandey, several key elements made this solution a success: “close collaboration across teams, a clearly defined customer need, and a disciplined focus on improving the shopping experience rather than showcasing the technology itself.”

How Zoro Builds Responsible, Human-in-the-Loop AI

Zoro has always approached AI responsibly, ensuring governance and risk management remains at the forefront, Pandey said. 

This approach is reinforced with clear guardrails and proactive reviews, ensuring AI is accurate and safe before it’s deployed. Across all of the company’s generative AI applications, human-in-the-loop processes involve evaluation standards and peer reviews. 

Furthermore, Pandey’s teams are intentional about access controls, validation and guidelines around how AI is used, ensuring these capabilities are applied responsibly and are in line with the company’s values. 

“Ultimately, this approach allows us to earn trust by doing the right thing consistently, even when it means moving more deliberately rather than quickly,” he said.

With these measures in place, Zoro has prioritized enterprise-wide enablement, empowering teams across the company to apply AI in ways that improve customer outcomes. To that end, Pandey said Zoro has launched an internal AI learning program that enables all team members to learn core AI skills and gain access to enterprise tools, giving them the knowledge and resources they need to put their training into practice. 

“The training was tailored by role and job function, making it directly applicable to the work team members do every day,” Pandey said. “Just as importantly, it emphasized adaptability, so teams can continue to meet changing customer needs as AI tools and applications advance.”

Adaptability is key to Zoro’s AI approach, which is why employees intentionally avoid relying on a single AI model or tool. For scaled customer-facing applications, for example, Pandey said they use champion and challenger systems to continuously test performance, while for internal productivity tooling, they rely on multiple tools, choosing each one based on clear evaluation criteria. 

“Because the AI landscape is evolving quickly, and we plan for change, we design applications to be model-agnostic and AI-ready rather than tightly coupled to any one model, which gives teams the flexibility to adopt new capabilities over time while continuing to meet customer needs,” Pandey said.

When it comes to tracking the success of their AI initiatives, Pandey said that it depends on the application in question. With customer-facing applications, they gauge success based on customer outcomes and internal key performance indicators. They also prioritize qualitative feedback from customers and team members, which sheds light on the story behind the numbers.

Inside Zoro’s Engineering Culture: Ownership, Feedback and Empowerment

Zoro’s engineers directly shape every AI initiative, which Pandey said leads to better solutions and empowers them to perform at their very best. 

“When engineers feel ownership and see the impact of their work, it creates momentum and confidence,” he said. 

“When engineers feel ownership and see the impact of their work, it creates momentum and confidence.” 

To foster empowerment, Pandey relies on frequent feedback, creating space for open and transparent dialogue through communities of practices, and encouraging honest discussion around risks and opportunities, enabling everyone to learn and improve together. 

“My role is to listen carefully, remove friction, and make sure we are making decisions that are right for our team members and grounded in what will best serve our customers over the long term,” Pandey said.

AI has unlocked a new avenue of possibilities for Zoro, enabling its engineers to thrive in their roles while delivering a customer experience that sets the organization apart. 

“AI is becoming a key enabler of how we deliver,” Pandey said. “As the company evolves, we’re intentionally reshaping how we work, how we build, and how we use data and AI to create meaningful, differentiated customer value.”

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