New Delhi, March 25 -- E-commerce marketplace Meesho is gearing up for a future where product discovery increasingly shifts to AI-powered chat assistants, even as adoption of these tools among its core users in small-town India remains uneven and continues to evolve.

To be sure, chat-based artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are gaining traction among a subset of users, especially in urban markets. However, it is still unclear how quickly they will become mainstream across the broader internet population, Sanjeev Kumar, co-founder and chief technology officer of Meesho, told Mint in an interview.

"It's not either-or, it's both," Kumar said, referring to the company's approach of building for emerging AI-driven discovery channels whi...