1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And what are you seeing on the BPO side? BPO is the lowest hanging fruit for AI to automate. This discussion that we just had applies very well to BPO, right? You can automate a very large part of what is being done in a human BPO mode. A lot of that can be AI enabled, but it can still continue to be in this do-it-for-me (DIFM) mode.

 So are you seeing whole BPO workflows turning to AI companies?

Gaurav Chaturvedi: We’re, but I think it is still not as prevalent, but a lot of companies have started to take voice agents as a core technology and convert it into a customer support agent. A lot of companies have taken the DIFM approach, wherein instead ofhiring ten customer support agents for any use case, you can just outsource it to them. Most of them are, by the way, targeting specific industries, mostly in India. None of them is looking at the global market right now. In India itself, it’s a large enough market.

M of them are going category by category. So some folks are building it specifically for retail. Some folks are building specifically for BFSI or banking and finance, which is a very, very large use case. The companies are right now figuring out teething issues, which are typically in terms of quality, reliability. Specifically in the case of financial services, you need accuracy and reliability because of technology and of course, latency. So, technology is still probably not there a hundred percent for them to scale it up very quickly. A lot of them are in the POC stages. We hope that a few of them will sort the technology out and we’ll start scaling up.

Sramana Mitra: And what about the language? In India, there are so many languages and there is a whole population that is not English speaking.

Is that coming into the forefront now? Because a lot of things are doable with AI on the language side now. Is that starting to show applications?

Gaurav Chaturvedi: Absolutely. Interesting that you asked that. We have invested in a company like Super AGI, which is pure software in a different way. We’ve invested in a services company, which is a marketing agency. On the consumer side, we’ve invested in a company called Supernova, which is an English language tutor for vernacular students in middle India. Right now, it’s a huge market which nobody was able to really crack because it is middle India. The AOVs are lower over there.

What’s interesting about these guys is, they have built a AI tutor for English, which is right now focused on vernacular and specifically from Tamil and South Indian languages. This is at a much lower price point. This is, of course, fully AI driven, wherein you converse with an AI and they’ve built very interesting technology around typical use of foundation models. But what is more interesting about them is that they have actually used AI to automate all their business processes – their sales funnel and support functions – are using AI. Because of that, they’ve been able to bring down their cost of acquiring a customer and cost of supporting a customer by 60-70%.

That’s the whole reason why they could make it at a price point, which is palatable to middle India. This kind of a business model in itself was not possible before AI technology came up, but we are seeing a lot of these kinds of applications.

Sramana Mitra: So I think this is what you’re highlighting is a very big opportunity, not just in India and in a lot of the developing markets of being able to cater to those markets at a very, very low price point. I think the entire African continent is up for grabs because it hasn’t really had the level of training, education has been low and it’s a very large youth population that needs education.

So I think for consumer and tech applications, there are lots of opportunities in all these cases and both from a price point point of view and from a language point of view. This is a very wide opportunity.

Well, wonderful conversation. Gaurav, any other last thoughts before we switch to the entrepreneurs segment?

Gaurav Chaturvedi: Well, I think this has been great. Again, thanks for having me. I’d just like to underscore the point that we believe AI is one of the biggest platform shifts after probably cloud, and it will have a lot of second order effects that we are right now not able to even see. It’ll change how software or technology is created, distributed and consumed. But we are still in the early phase. A lot of things to be excited about for us as well as for the entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Very good, wonderful conversation. Thank you for coming.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital
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