ChatGPT took the world by storm when it launched late last year, but no one was evidently hit harder than conversational AI platforms. Companies that were previously in the business of providing chatbot solutions now bore witness to the disruption that ChatGPT could bring to the field. However, some were able to capitalise on the huge technological leap and adapt to the behemoth chatbot.

One of these companies is Gupshup, an AI platform focused on providing conversational messaging for commerce, marketing, and support. Analytics India Magazine reached out to Krishna Tammana, CTO at Gupshup, to know more about how the platform is adapting to the future of AI chatbots. 

Staying relevant in the face of ChatGPT

The pace of innovation in generative AI was perhaps one of the biggest shocks for new-age conversational platforms. However, Gupshup aims to capitalise on this trend through intense research in its R&D wing Gupshup Labs. Tammana stated, 

“The amount of automation that we can build at the back of GenerativeAI is 10X more efficient in terms of building and deploying automation workflows, translations and so much more.”

Gupshup aims to bring the power of generative AI to its business users, which includes companies such as Tata CLiQ, NoBroker, Doubtnut, and Livon. Meanwhile, the platform plans to integrate ChatGPT as the building block to better conversational engagement solutions for specialised sectors. In Tammana’s words,

“We hope to leverage [ChatGPT’s] capabilities at Gupshup to build solutions for enterprises that are smarter and more accurate. It is in line with our vision of building a product stack that offers integrated conversational engagement solutions.”

In the past few years, Gupshup has acquired Dotgo, a WhatsApp bot store; Active.ai, an conversational platform for financial services; AskSid, a digital shopping assistant for eCommerce; OneDirect, a customer experience management platform; and Knowlarity, a virtual number and IVR services company. Through these, Gupshup is aiming to be a platform that can provide integrated solutions to enterprises across multiple verticals. 

How Gupshup helps companies

Gupshup’s AI service provides solutions to companies by offering an integrated platform which has in-built features focused on optimisation. Using this formula, Gupshup was able to net a 10x higher ROI and a $500,000 sales increase in only one month for Tata CLiQ. Similarly, they were able to cut down property listing time from three days to six minutes on NoBroker. This resulted in a 20X annualised ROI and 2.8X increase in property let outs and sales for the platform. Tammana offered some examples of how the platform can be used across verticals,

“For ecommerce, lead generation systems are built into our chatbots which help with gathering data. For enterprises. . . in the BFSI sector, there are bots for KYC authentication which solve the major pain point people face.”

Such customised solutions can help companies optimise operations by orders of magnitude. Moreover, Gupshup’s nature as an integrated platform saves time by ensuring that enterprises don’t have to switch across different platforms for their business needs. 

Behind Gupshup’s AI 

In their most recent Google for India summit, Google announced that they will be working on an undertaking termed Project Vaani to get a more complete picture of the vernacular landscape in India. The Indian government also announced Project Bhashini, which is focused on local language translation. Gupshup is working with both parties to contribute to the body of knowledge on Indian languages. Tammana stated, 

“Voice search queries in India are currently growing at 270% per year. This, coupled with the developments in Indian language-processing abilities, [implies that] more Indians will be able to use the Internet to access content and interact with brands in their own language.”

Gupshup’s tech stack also represents their ever-evolving tech mindset, with discrete data pipelines and a quietly scalable cloud computing infrastructure. Even if one of Gupshup’s 45,000 brands needs to increase their bandwidth, the company’s architecture can enable it. In Tammana’s words, 

“We also have a multi-cloud strategy to deploy and maintain our carrier-grade network infrastructure. We leverage technologies like Kubernetes with micro-service architecture and auto-scale.”

It is established that data is one of the most important aspects of running an AI company. Gupshup not only runs data pipelines dedicated to customer analytics and reporting use cases but also for moving data from transactional systems to their in-house analytics platform. However, this isn’t enough for the company, as they are targeting real-time data pipelines. 

“Next phase of our evolution is real-time. We are evaluating techniques to power these use cases and we anticipate that data pipelines play a role in this as well.”

This approach enables Gupshup to provide comprehensive chatbot solutions to their customers. It also shows that the Indian chatbot market is far from done with the launch of ChatGPT, with companies like Gupshup leading the way for a future beyond LLMs.