Chatbots are the future interface of companies and are pegged as the next growth engine for enterprises. According to Transparency Market Research, the global chatbot market is expected to touch $994.5 million in 2024 and will grow at 27.8 percent CAGR, in terms of revenue. Analytics India Magazine spoke to Sridhar Marri, CEO and co-founder of Senseforth.ai, one of India’s largest enterprise bot platform. We talked about the chatbot market in India and the rapid integration across various functions in sectors like finance, retail, healthcare and telecom. In a market dominated by Alexa and Cortana that are gaining traction across enterprises for automating a set of work related tasks, Senseforth.ai, Bengaluru and Palo Alto-based is upending the market, with its deep enterprise bots developed on proprietary technology. Some of the clients include HDFC Bank, Club Mahindra, Manipal Hospitals and ICICI Bank among others.
Marri emphasises how his company’s offering is different from big tech players like Amazon & Redmond giant Microsoft — platforms offered by big tech players are highly generic and they are not deep enough for the specific vertical. “Our bots don’t have to be trained and retrained like the big tech generic platforms. One of the huge advantages with our platform is that we can build bots faster, have a big domain footprint, our platform can go live faster and start interacting with the clients and explore new channels for customer chats,” he shared.
The chatbot market in India is heating up and getting increasingly competitive with a host of startups and enterprises offering similar solutions. However, Senseforth is trying to maintain an edge with its deep use cases, domain agnostic platform and proprietary technology.
Top Key Differentiators For Senseforth Are:
Dominant Player In India: The company claims to be the most dominant, emergent chatbot player in India with the largest number of live bot deployments with 30 live bots.
Superior Technology: Marri emphasises that they are the only chatbot player in India with a platform that is proprietary, and home grown, completely enterprise grade, full-stack and domain agnostic. In fact, the entire bot store of nearly 20 bots is built on Senseforth’s homegrown, proprietary platform called a.ware that is the core of the technology. It is a lot more advanced than other generic platforms and most Indian players use generic NLP platforms, available on the cloud which are not deep enough and end up lowering the accuracy of the platform.
Domain Agnostic: The company built the platform to be completely domain agnostic and currently focuses on four verticals – fintech, healthcare, retail and telecom and within these four verticals, there is a deeper penetration of software across various functions such as customer care, sales, lead generation. Senseforth’s platform covers a wide range of use cases that enterprises can get on and keep building other bots for functions. “We have bots prebuilt for these functions and bots for specific domains. For example, we built the first real estate bot for one of the largest real estate players in India, it is yet to go live and is currently in the stage of testing. It will address questions around the construction on their floor, when is the next EMI to be paid etc,” he said.
NLP Engine Accuracy: Currently, Senseforth’s bots achieve an accuracy of about 85.6 percent that is considered top of the line but for mission critical use cases, the company provides an accuracy of 100 percent.
Is The Chatbot Technology In India At A Nascent Stage
Most CTOs who we spoke to dubbed chatbot as a nascent technology, yet to mature. However, Marri believes that the purpose of a chatbot is more than just conversion and it also serves as an additional channel for customer engagement. “We need to understand the purpose of the chatbot. Bot is much more than just getting a conversion. In the future, you will have every company using a dozens of bots for various functions,” he shared, adding that the technology is nascent, but the application would improve gradually with adoption.
While Marri refrained from sharing any numbers, he spoke about the talent crunch model in India and how new joinees are assessed on their learnability factor and trained on cutting-edge technologies like NLP, ML and AI. And when it comes to expanding the global footprint, the company wishes to expand to Canada, UK and Middle East market. “The idea is to make Senseforth a global company and that’s why we want to increase our geographic footprint,” he said, concluding the conversation.
