Conversational AI, which started with the inception of Apple’s Siri in 2011 followed by Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana in 2014, is witnessing exponential growth across the globe as AI adoption has surged.
According to media reports in 2021, the market size of conversational AI is expected to grow to $15.7 billion by 2024 from $4.2 billion in 2019.
Rashi Gupta, co-founder of Rezo.ai, a consumer automation startup, spoke with us about the future of conversational AI, challenges for it in a country like India, and other aspects of the new technology in an interview with Sputnik.
Sputnik: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly catching the attention of the entire business ecosystem and conversational AI appears to be a natural successor. How do you view its growth in the coming years?
Rashi Gupta: The industry is already showing positive traction for conversational AI, which is expected to reach a global market of $41.39 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 23.6 percent.
However, we believe that the potential of conversational AI is much larger when seen in tandem with a very essential piece of data analytics. Once we integrate the two, it is not just about automating and taking away the painstaking agent tasks but about learning, improving, and expanding its capabilities.
This allows conversational AI to transcend its current abilities around customer support and become a tool to generate revenue by venturing into improving the effectiveness of sales and marketing teams, something which can lead to its exponential growth.
Sputnik: Despite rapid growth, what challenges do you think this field is likely to meet in a country as diverse as India?
Rashi Gupta: India is a land of more than 22 official languages, and as per a media report there are 19,500 dialects. Apart from this, another media report says that out of 7,000 languages spoken in the world, 2,000 are spoken in India itself. Hence, implementing a conversational AI solution that speaks to customers will always present a challenge.
However, we have always taken this challenge head-on. We have built sophisticated language models trained on more than 20 million data points which are able to understand multiple dialects across 10+ languages.
Still, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. We are aiming for a truly intelligent solution as opposed to the dialogue flow-based model which is widely available in the market. When you do that, it presents a myriad of challenges like initiating open-ended conversations, handling unstructured data pieces, and achieving first contact resolution to name a few.
So according to me, it’s all about aiming high, taking up challenges, and finding solutions.
Sputnik: Which sectors do you think are likely to reap the benefits of conversational AI when it comes to implementing customer care services?
Rashi Gupta: I believe the solution is truly industry-agnostic and can be applied to practically any field which requires business owners to interact with their customers on a massive scale. The solution presents potential not only for enterprises but for Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) as well.
Having said that, I see massive potential for conversational AI in the automobile sector, financial services, insurance, other service sectors, etc. because this will help all these sectors in greater penetration to the areas where customer service is a challenge due to the language barrier.
Sputnik: The interactions through conversational AI are automated while the interactions through traditional customer care centers have a personal touch. Don’t you think this will also be a hindrance to the penetration of the technology?
Rashi Gupta: I think AI versus humans is the biggest debate of the hour. However, I don’t see AI as a replacement of the humans, rather, they complement each other.
AI not only helps in building a solution that is not just automating interactions but providing handovers wherever necessary with the idea of reducing their load, which leads to low attrition and a huge saving in recruitment and training costs.
With the help of AI, we can develop solutions which could not only provide prompt suggestions but also list and map every call to determine personalized training plan allowing them to perform better at their respective jobs.
Sputnik: Every year businesses lose thousands of customers to their competitors and new entrants in the market. Two of the key reasons for this loss are poor customer experience and inefficient customer relationship management by the company. How could conversational AI help businesses to optimize costs and serve consumers in a better way along with generating more revenue?
Rashi Gupta: Conversational AI allows organizations to optimize their resources and communicate with their customers and potential clients using tech enabled tools such as automated voice or text chat features instead of phone calls or emails.
Conversational AI systems can be customized to learn and analyze from customer interactions enabling organizations to improve the customer relations and brand loyalty. This has a proven record of contributing big time in the revenue as it’s a widely known fact that Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is much higher than the Retention cost which in this case is further reduced with Conversational AI.
Sputnik: How did you decide to foray into the segment and start Rezo? How are you planning to stay alive in the sector amid competition?
Rashi Gupta: While in our jobs, me and [my husband] Manish [the company's co-creator] always had a knack for starting our own ventures. I was working largely in a data analytics company while Manish was the CTO of a travel tech firm.
We saw this gap and realized a huge potential in this segment very early on. We took some time to plan things out and then took the plunge which landed us where we are today.
As the industry gains momentum, our philosophy to sustain is very simple. Keep taking on the challenges and solve the most difficult problems which everyone else is running away from. This has allowed us to build a truly rounded and intelligent product that allows playing in a different league altogether which has very few players.