CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Ashish Santhalia, CEO and Founder of Convin AI
- How are AI startups in India impacting industries like fintech, agriculture, and education?
Automation is now central to business operations, driving significant change across industries. Today’s AI startups are adept at reducing routine, repetitive tasks that require no human intervention, allowing businesses to streamline operations. The most notable business impact achieved through automation is cost reduction. By cutting unnecessary expenses, businesses can invest the saved funds into more strategic areas and projects, ultimately driving growth.
AI startups have introduced several key advancements, including improved data accuracy and precision, actionable insights for both employees and customers, hyper-personalization to deliver highly customized experiences, and greater accessibility for people with disabilities. Additionally, AI helps optimize business processes, enhance predictability and proactivity, and boost overall business efficiency. These improvements enable faster decision-making and more immediate results.
For instance, our startup has assisted Fintech organizations in curbing misselling, reducing escalations, and identifying violations while simultaneously increasing revenue. This was achieved through AI-driven customer conversation analysis and actionable insights. In one example, we uncovered a large-scale scam in a BPO outsourced by a financial services company. In the Edtech sector, we’ve helped reduce misselling of admission packages and increased walk-ins for admissions through effective agent calling. In the insurance industry, we’ve enhanced the claims process and renewal rates, improving customer satisfaction by at least 27%.
Beyond these operational benefits, one often overlooked impact of AI startups is their role in job creation. While automation may displace some roles, AI also generates new opportunities in fields such as AI development, data science, and machine learning engineering. At Convin, for example, we’ve seen a rapid pace of hiring highly qualified engineers over the past two years, and much of our success can be attributed to their expertise.
- How are Indian companies using AI to enhance customer service and business operations?
AI tools are revolutionizing customer service by enabling businesses to offer highly personalized experiences. For instance, AI-powered phone calls can provide tailored responses in real-time, addressing unique customer needs across multiple languages—a critical feature in a diverse country like India. Routine conversations, such as customer feedback, appointment bookings, and handling inquiries 24/7, are now automated with human-like AI agents, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex tasks. This automation also allows businesses to scale their customer service operations without a proportional increase in costs, as AI assistance, real-time support, and AI agents enhance enterprise-grade companies. Additionally, AI-powered analytics enable businesses to better understand customer behavior, predict trends, and identify conversations that lead to retention and repeat purchases, allowing for data-driven decisions that improve service quality. AI also improves operational efficiency by enabling faster resolution of customer issues with higher accuracy, detecting escalations early, and resolving queries often within the same call. By improving key metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution (FCR), businesses can significantly enhance customer satisfaction. Moreover, proactive escalation management tools like Convin can analyze tone, keywords, and sentiment in real-time to identify potential dissatisfaction, allowing businesses to address issues promptly and often resolve them during the same interaction. This approach has led to improved customer satisfaction and retention rates, with some companies seeing a 25% increase in retention.
- What challenges does India face in ensuring ethical AI development and deployment?
India is currently facing several challenges in the development and deployment of AI. One major issue is the lack of comprehensive AI regulations, as the absence of clear legal frameworks for AI ethics often leads to unregulated use and potential harm. Additionally, data privacy and security remain a significant concern, as the lack of stringent policies puts sensitive data at risk of misuse, undermining trust and hindering adoption. Building the necessary AI infrastructure, such as setting up GPU servers and data storage, is another challenge, as it is both resource-intensive and essential for independent AI development in India. There is also a general lack of awareness about ethical AI practices among key stakeholders, including developers and policymakers, which slows progress in creating responsible AI systems. Transparency and accountability are further complicated by challenges in open-source models and datasets, making it difficult to audit and ensure fairness. Another pressing issue is the bias in datasets, as India’s diverse population requires careful attention to prevent discriminatory outcomes in AI systems. Smaller organizations, which often lack the resources to integrate ethical practices into AI development, face additional hurdles in promoting fairness and responsibility. Finally, there is a growing concern about the potential misuse of AI technologies for unethical purposes such as misinformation, surveillance, or other harmful activities.
- How is AI being utilized to bridge the language barrier in India’s diverse linguistic landscape?
India has 22 officially recognized languages and hundreds of regional dialects, making it challenging for businesses to provide consistent support across all languages. Indian customers often switch between languages, such as Hindi and English, during a conversation. The same language can have different accents, tones, and pronunciations based on the region, complicating speech recognition and natural language processing. AI bots are powered by advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) models that support multiple Indian languages. This ensures customers can interact in their preferred language. Convin’s AI tools don’t just translate words—they understand context, ensuring the conversation feels natural and personalized, regardless of language. Businesses can deliver consistent service across regions and engage a broader audience, ensuring inclusivity and expanding their reach to underserved markets.
- What are the key features of the Convin AI conversation intelligence platform that distinguish it from other platforms in the market?
The Convin AI conversation intelligence platform stands out in the market due to its unique and advanced features. It utilizes an in-house speech-to-text model, ensuring high transcription accuracy for seamless analysis. The platform supports multilingual conversation analysis, unlocking valuable insights from customer interactions across various languages. It also leverages generative AI for feedback and summarization capabilities, enabling more effective understanding and decision-making. Convin’s automated AI coaching, coupled with real-time monitoring, guidance, and coaching, ensures continuous improvement in performance. The platform offers omnichannel quality assurance, covering calls, chats, and emails, allowing businesses to monitor and optimize all customer interactions. Additionally, Convin provides actionable insights, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions. The platform also features custom AI agents, or AI phone calls, and post-call actions that are triggered after call completion, further enhancing the overall customer experience and operational efficiency.
- How does Convin AI ensure data privacy and security when handling sensitive customer conversations?
Convin AI takes several robust measures to ensure data privacy and security when handling sensitive customer conversations. One key feature is PII masking, where Convin AI uses a specialized Personal Identifiable Information (PII) masking LLM model to identify and mask all sensitive information in both transcripts and audio recordings, ensuring customer data privacy while preserving the integrity of the conversation. Additionally, transcripts and audio recordings are only stored after being masked, further enhancing security by ensuring no unprotected sensitive information is retained. To protect customer data, all transcripts and audio recordings are securely stored on trusted cloud platforms, with encryption both at rest and in transit, providing robust protection against unauthorized access and ensuring compliance with industry standards. Moreover, all machine learning models used by Convin AI are developed in-house, eliminating reliance on third-party APIs and ensuring complete control over data processing and security.
The post How AI Startups in India Are Transforming Fintech, Agriculture, and Education: Innovation, Challenges, and Ethical Considerations appeared first on CXOToday.com.