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[Virtual] OPEN Session (DataWeek): Transforming Seller Onboarding in Retail: Responsible AI, RAG, and Risk Management
Friday September 12, 2025 2:00pm - 2:25pm PDT
VIRTUAL DataWeek -- Main Stage
Banani Mohapatra, Walmart, Senior Manager, Data Science
Bhavnish Walia, Amazon, Senior Risk Manager AI/ML

Onboarding new sellers onto retail platforms like Walmart and Amazon involves a complex, multi-step process designed to mitigate fraud and ensure compliance with global regulations. One of the most critical and cumbersome steps is Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, requiring sellers to upload documentation for identity verification, business registration, and compliance checks. This manual review process often leads to long approval times and delays, frustrating legitimate sellers and creating operational bottlenecks for compliance teams.
To address these challenges, we leveraged foundational models with custom prompting strategies, in-document summarization, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground responses in trusted data sources, powered by open-source LLM APIs. By automating document analysis and augmenting human reviewers with AI outputs, we reduced overall onboarding time by more than 20 percent, improving seller experience and operational efficiency.
However, deploying AI into a regulated process like KYC required a robust responsible AI framework combining scalability with governance. We implemented guardrail models to flag edge cases and ensure human oversight, enforced strict data anonymization protocols to protect sensitive information, and applied privacy-preserving techniques for model training. We also established a rigorous validation pipeline to test outputs against regulatory standards, mitigating risks such as hallucinations and interpretability gaps.
This talk offers actionable insights for data scientists, compliance officers, regulators, and machine learning practitioners working at the intersection of AI, risk management, and regulatory compliance. Presented by Bhavnish Walia, Senior Risk Manager at Amazon, and Banani Mohapatra, Senior Data Science Manager at Walmart, attendees will walk away with a practical framework for deploying AI in sensitive domains—covering risk management strategies, scalable AI architectures aligned with compliance, and key lessons on balancing innovation with accountability.  
Speakers
avatar for Bhavnish Walia

Bhavnish Walia

Senior Risk Manager AI/ML, Amazon
Bhavnish Walia is a Senior Risk Manager at Amazon, where he leads AI Risk Management efforts focused on developing large language model (LLM) frameworks for data governance and regulatory compliance. He ensures the safe and compliant deployment of AI systems at scale. With over 12... Read More →
avatar for Banani Mohapatra

Banani Mohapatra

Senior Manager, Data Science, Walmart
Banani Mohapatra is a data science leader with 12+ years of experience in e-commerce, payments, and real estate, specializing in machine learning, generative AI, LLMs, and causal AI. She leads a global data science team at Walmart, driving subscription growth with multi-billion-dollar... Read More →
Friday September 12, 2025 2:00pm - 2:25pm PDT
VIRTUAL DataWeek -- Main Stage
  DataWeek

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