Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept? What were you going to do? How did you come up with that concept?

Ankush Sabharwal: The product suites that these banks have are the same. They have savings accounts, checking accounts, and current accounts. I have not seen very innovative products from banks. The functional products are the same and the technology is also from the same provider. Still, in consumer’s mind, this is the top bank. In the consumer’s perception, this is number one, number two, and number three. What makes a bank or any service provider number one?

Pick an industry. Most of the products are kind of the same. Then I started believing that it’s not about functional and the technical specifications that make a company number one. It’s something beyond. It’s about how they engage with the consumers and how they understand the needs of consumers. It was more about the engagement. It’s not just that the population is growing. The reach of consumers towards their service providers is increasing. These companies are available on all the channels.

There are so many channels. It was not practical to have so many people in the call center. It’s required to some extent but not to the extent where if the use cases are increasing, you keep adding. It’s probably not smart to have humans work on highly repetitive and mundane tasks. AI was talked about that time as well. AI in the virtual assistance world is coming up. Most of the virtual assistants were not working about seven to eight years ago.

The problem was replying to the consumers. Then I thought, “Let’s innovate.” We saw companies providing AI virtual assistants solving problems they cannot solve somehow. We did a lot of studies and found out the gaps. Now we are the youngest in this space.

Sramana Mitra: What is the gap? The online multi-channel customer support is a big field. It’s been going on since the mid-90s. My husband founded one of the first companies in automated AI-driven customer support. This has been going on for a long time. In 2016, what was the state of the art? What was the gap that you identified?

Ankush Sabharwal: There were two kinds of companies. One kind was the pure tech company like IBM had Watson. If you go to their website, they say that it’s easy to create chatbots, but they were not using the chatbots themselves.

Sramana Mitra: The strategy of that layer is a PaaS strategy. They give you the stack and then the application developers are supposed to develop on top of that.

Ankush Sabharwal: Absolutely. The service companies like Wipro and Infosys created these virtual assistant chatbots using one of these technologies. That was the setup. Since the technology was being developed, even open-source agents started coming. That gave a huge boost.

Sramana Mitra: There were lots of startups in this field and many have succeeded.

Ankush Sabharwal: Absolutely. 2% of the companies that should have virtual assistants have virtual assistants. Still, there is a huge opportunity. People are not able to figure out the right use case.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover
1 2 3 4 5 6