ALI KOHAN
Ali Kohan:
Data Scientist and AI consultant with a background in computer vision and deep learning. After several years working as a computer vision engineer, I am now focused on building recommendation and personalization systems. Passionate about applied AI, I enjoy exploring how intelligent systems can better understand and adapt to human behavior.
Reza Ebrahimpour:
Software engineer with a decade of experience building scalable, cloud-native systems in the JVM ecosystem. Passionate about microservice architectures, data-driven design, and high-availability services. Recently focused on integrating machine learning and AI solutions into production systems at Bol.
Session
When we at Bol decided to personalize campaign banners, we did what many companies do: bought an expensive solution. As a software engineering team with zero data science experience, we integrated a third-party recommender system for €1 million annually, built the cloud infrastructure, and waited for results. After our first season, the data told a harsh truth—the third-party tool wasn't delivering value proportional to its cost. We faced a crossroads: accept mediocrity or build our own solution from scratch, tailored to our requirements and architecture.
We'll walk you through our journey of building a more intelligent and flexible recommendation system from the ground up, and how this journey saved us over a million euros per year. We will share the incremental steps that shaped our journey, alongside the valuable lessons learned along the way