Pushing ahead the conversations

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to have been making a lot of buzz in the past few years as more users look for quicker and better fixes for their issues. Market estimates say that the sector is likely to be valued at a whopping $ 15 billion by 2024. The year gone by was quite monumental for conversational AI startup Haptik. In April. Reliance Jio acquired an 87% stake in the company for a whopping Rs 700 crore. Reliance had said that it would leverage Haptik’s capabilities to build an AI assistant across chat, voice and vernacular languages.

Meanwhile, in September, Haptik acquired an AI recommendation chatbot Buzzo.ai. The company had said that it would allow them to enhance its voice and chat offerings for e-commerce, and also strengthen its multilingual customer service experience.

The company has seen a growth of more than 200% over the last two years and aims to leverage its partnership with Reliance to turn profitable within the next three years, Aakrit Vaish, CEO and co-founder, Haptik told DH in an interaction recently. It also plans to expand its geographical spread.

According to Vaish, the conversational AI space has been on an upward trajectory in the last few years. The industry is worth about $3 billion presently and will be worth more than $15 billion in the next three years.

In March 2014, the Haptik app, a chat-based personal assistant for Android and iOS platforms was launched. By November 2017, the company had launched a full-scale enterprise level bot management platform including an analytics dashboard.

Currently, Haptik works as a B2B solution for enterprises. It builds chatbots that companies can deploy on websites, apps and other platforms. It uses a mix of AI, ML, and natural language processing for its chat platform. “For instance, we help offer quicker solutions for call centres and in interfaces that uses voice and make things faster and easier for the end customer.”

It has reached more than 100 million devices and processed more than 2 billion conversations to date. Some of the startup’s notable clients and enterprise partners include Samsung, OYO, KFC, Coca-Cola, Tata Group, and Club Mahindra among others.

On partnership with Reliance

According to Vaish, the partnership with oil to data conglomerate Reliance has been mutually beneficial.

He says, “They are our largest customers. We help enable solutions for customer care and conversational commerce. We also work with them to co-develop new products and business.”

He states that this allows them to scale much faster and grow bigger. “It operates with the agility of a startup, alongside the resources of an institution. We continue to learn a lot and hope to make it independently scale as much as possible.”

The company sees a huge oppurtunity in the B2C space in the conversational AI technology front but is wary about entering the B2C market at present. “We are comfortable in the B2B space. We see many use cases emerging in the B2C space also, but feel that we are happier in B2B.”