
At the “NextShift” event, two of Digikala’s technical managers, Tawheed Aristotle and Kasra Fakhari, presented a new and detailed account of the behind-the-scenes birth of the artificial intelligence assistant “Dia”; An assistant that is supposed to transform the online shopping experience from a “word search” to an “intelligent conversation”.
Users have changed; Search is not enough
According to Aristotle, research conducted since 1400 has shown that user behavior has changed fundamentally: “Users no longer want to keep the exact model of a product. They want to define their needs, get guidance and talk to the store like in the real world.”
This insight led the technical team to concepts such as semantic understanding and transformer-based models, and the result was the formation of the Dia shopping assistant.
From an Instagram bot to a full-fledged assistant
To ensure direction, DigiCala started with a small MVP: a limited bot on Instagram called DiaExplorer. The reception of users showed the need for a real dialogue, and this initial success was the green light for making the final version.
Now Dia is not just a shopping guide; A support bot is also active next to it, so that the user is not alone in all the purchase steps.
A different way to build a scalable AI
The next challenge was choosing an artificial intelligence model. Aristotle explained that giant LLM models are either too slow and expensive, or not suitable for the scale of DigiCala. Instead, Digikala chose a multi-agent architecture; A collection of small and specialized agents who work together to ensure high speed and accuracy.
Kesra Fakhari, Dia’s technical officer, explained the operational part of the story as follows: “The bot must survive Digikala’s megacampaigns. In such days, the online population increases up to 10 times and the price and stock of thousands of goods change moment by moment. “Our biggest concern was that the artificial intelligence would make the wrong suggestion.”
According to him, the direct connection of Chat UI to internal services and deep optimizations have minimized this risk.
Perspective: from assistant to shopping companion
Digikala’s technical managers say that Dia is still in its early stages and new features are added every week; But the ultimate goal is very ambitious:
“Dia must be able to recognize the user’s need even before it is expressed and turn the shopping experience from a separate task into an intelligent and continuous relationship.”
It seems that Digikala with “Dia” is defining a new standard for Iranian e-commerce; A standard where conversation, personalization and artificial intelligence replace manual search and keywords.
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