On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself. Piyush Patel is chief ecosystem officer at AI search and discovery company Algolia, whose customers include PetSmart, Hershey, and Walgreens. How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? We help the world’s largest retailers turn chaotic product data and fragmented digital experiences into something that actually feels intuitive for shoppers. At Algolia, that means making search, discovery, and AI-driven experiences fast, relevant, and scalable—so customers can find what they want instantly, and brands don’t lose them in the process. My job specifically is to build the ecosystem around Algolia that customers already invest in and need to leverage for success, including our tech partners, our SI partners, and our Cloud partners, as well as our largest customers who push the limits and help us innovate for the broader customer base. One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? A big part of my job is translating between worlds. Technical teams, merchandisers, and executives all think about “search” and “AI” very differently. The real work is aligning those perspectives into something that can actually be operationalized at scale. What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Honestly, building a home lab with my son last summer—setting up performance servers, large-scale storage, and running our own containers and AI inference workloads. It’s nowhere near foundation-model scale, but that wasn’t the point. Keep reading here.—EC |