On 21st May 2020, Bharti Airtel acquired a10% strategic stake in Voicezen, a Gurgaon based startup in early stage focused on conversational AI technologies under the fast expanding Airtel Startup Accelerator Program as a part of its strategy to deliver highly differentiated service experience.The acquisition was made in an all cash transaction basis and the deal is expected to close by May 30.
Key Points:
i.Voicezen has been working on developing solutions that leverage machine learning, Artificial Intelligence(AI), speech to text and voice technologies to offer real time analytics and to help in better service to the customers.
ii.The global conversational AI market is expected to grow from 4.2 billion USD(Rs. 3lakh crore) in 2019 to 15.7 billion USD(Rs.11lakh crore) in 2024.
iii.The megatrend will be driven by the demand of AI powered customer support through social media and integrated advanced AI will offer major opportunities.
iv.This investment will enable airtel to access the technologies of Voicezen, which can deploy across its customers touch points in multiple languages. These solutions will provide insights to make conversations with customers more engaging and frictionless and enable faster resolution and allow Airtel to make contextual offers to the customers based on real time conversation.
v.Voicezen is the third startup becoming a part of the Airtel Startup Accelerator Program to get opportunities to deploy its technologies on a large scale.
vi.Founder of Voicezen Apurba Nath mentioned that knowing that the work done in the lab does not work in real life due to the lack of huge and relevant training data or the problem has little business significance. This partnership with Airtel will help in solving these challenges
About Bharti Airtel Limited:
CEO & MD – Gopal Vittal(India and South Asia)
COO – Ajay Puri
Global CIO – Harmeen Mehta (Head of Digital)
Headquarters – New Delhi
