Chatbots powered on Artificial Intelligence are the hot new tech trend and India finds it’s trendsetter in Niki.ai
Text: Rochelle D’souza Photos: Various sources
Among the most renowned, famous and successful start-ups that have mushroomed recently around the concept of Artificial Intelligence is Niki.ai, a technology focused company that envisions to make artificial intelligence accessible to everyone, businesses and consumers alike. The company provides a simple and easy to use chat interface for products and services. It provides a plug and play technology that can be easily integrated everywhere including operating systems, on messaging platforms and on the brand’s app and web portals. Started in 2015, and funded by Ratan Tata and Unilazer Ventures, Niki is an AI bot who converses to help you shop for products and services and makes the whole journey from discovery to transaction fast, convenient and extremely simple. Niki.ai has been developing the bot for the past 2 years, serving over 50 million interactions across various services. FWD Business sits down for a face to face with the founders of Niki.ai – Sachin Jaiswal, KeshavPrawasi, Nitin Babel and ShishirModi
What inspired to develop Niki.ai?
Artificial Intelligence has been a rage, owing to its utility and advantages and hottest segment of this current trend is the market for conversational bots. Keeping this in mind, we at Niki.ai started working on a conversational agent named Niki who can help you with all kinds of transactions. We firmly believe that adoption to a new and innovative technology comes when there is a significant utility of the product. Hence we decided to combine the potential of AI and conversations, with the utility of commerce. Started in May 2015, Nikii envisions to become one shop for everything commerce. Niki currently provides 15+ services to over 250k consumers and aiding in interactions across sectors like travel, entertainment, food, home services, utilities like bills and recharges, among others.
Tell us about the scale up in business after Ratan Tata and Ronnie Screwvala’sUnilazer invested in your start-up?
The scale up in our business after Ratan Tata and Ronnie Screwvala’sUnilazer investments has been phenomenal and evident. It has helped us reach out to the bigger Indian business community for our SDKs. Renowned names associated with the company does create a positive impact on the business front and has helped us in expanding our business with respect to our chatbot SDK, considerably.
Can you mention the brands that Niki.ai has partnered with?
Niki.ai has already tied up with quite a lot of India’s leading companies such as HDFC Bank, Oxigen Wallet, Intex, and many others for the chatbot SDK and we have 15+ SDK partnerships in the pipeline currently to go live in a couple of months.
Ultimate vision for Niki.ai and future projects?
We are working on mitigating the hassles of the customers by providing them a simple and friendly conversational interface and improve the experience for a mobile user as well as add the feature of voice communication. The company’s vision is to be ubiquitous – everywhere and for everything commerce.