Buying jewellery is a time-tested process – ask anyone in your family how jewellery was purchased, and the most common answer would be “through the family jeweller”. In India atleast, buying jewellery was traditionally considered an investment more than just a display of wealth.

Over the years, customer preferences have changed drastically, with a direct impact on demand patterns. Customers are keen on buying jewellery that they could use more frequently, instead of keeping them locked up. For instance, it’s become more commonplace to choose sleek and trendy designs, with minor metallic or stone embellishments – more suited for professional environs. Even for marquee family events or festivals, jewellery designs are moving away from the traditional heavyset designs to more elegantly discernible ones.

Gems and jewellery is a significant contributor to GDP; clocking an average of 7% and 15% to the country’s merchandise levels. It is also one of the largest markets in the world – contributing nearly 30% to global consumption. Demand for gold stood at 690.4 tonnes in 2019, and gems and jewellery export was at$29.07 billion in 2020. In the same time, India exported cut and polished diamonds worth $18.66 billion, states data from IBEF.

While the application of technology is not new to the jewellery industry – mass production margins remain high thanks to the extensive use of Computer Aided Design (CAD), 3D printing and electroforming – advanced technologies like AI are making their way into the industry markedly. Some of the popular applications range from streamlining existing workflows using AI to more trade specific usecases like detecting shapes and colours of gemstones, identifying counterfeit/spurious quality metals or stones and even the use of VR headsets for customers to get a comprehensive view of jewellery samples – especially relevant in COVID times when high frequency touchpoint industries have to develop innovative ways to cater to customers.

Earlier this week, the Gems and Jewellery Skill Council of India (GJSCI) launched the Jewellery Artificial Intelligence & Data-science Excellence (JADE), which will focus on AI-based initiatives to accelerate the sector’s ability to address challenges and cater to customers more effectively. In its endeavour to develop solutions to industry-specific challenges and enhance the scope of research, GJSCI is working with a range of technology providers like Persistent Systems, research and academia like IIT. Specifically, IIT Bombay’s C-MInDS (Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science) will be partnering with GJSCI to set up this centre. Prof. Subhasis Choudhary, Director, IIT Bombay noted at the virtual press conference that C-MInDS will bring academia and industry on a single platform to collaborate and deliberate cutting edge solutions to challenges faced by the gems and jewellery industry. He spoke about the application of technologies like GAN (General Adversarial Networks) and DNN (Deep Neural Networks) to automate and streamline processes in the sector. Anand Deshpande, Founder and Chairman of Persistent Systems added that they have been engaging with NASSCOM, Microsoft and IBM to work on specific challenges that include data aggregation, poor hit ratio of designs and minimising rejections, using technology.

This might be the first time in the history of the gems and jewellery industry where it is actively scoping for opportunities to leverage the IT industry’s offerings, for enhanced customer experience and revenue generation, noted Deshpande. Coimbatore-based Emerald Jewellery recently collaborated with IBM to unveil Tej – an AI enabled mobile app to support the B2B market for emerald jewellers. Through this app, more than 200 dealers can get connected to Emerald Jewellery, allowing them to sift through a rich catalogue of over 500,000 designs and simplify the ordering process. IBM has also developed vision APIs to help dealers look for design elements with ease.

Similarly, last year Microsoft dabbled with AI to minimise the time involved in designing stone jewellery and ML for space optimisation. The company’s AI systems have aided jewellery designers in Jaipur to produce trendy jewellery pieces. They also developed a model called Pruning, which discards designs with low visual appeal, and powered by a dataset of 1200 AI-generated designs.

AI has pervaded almost every industry today, and has proven it can be leveraged to solve complex business challenges in addition to making existing workflows easier.