IIT Madras incubated Uniphore, one of the world’s largest AI-native companies, on Wednesday inaugurated its India AI Innovation Hub at IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai. The Centre will work on areas like Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI), Emotion AI and generative AI across voice, video, textual and tonal data to make the enterprise more human, according to a release.
“We want to lead the AI ecosystem in Chennai,” Umesh Sachdev, co-founder & CEO of Uniphore, told businessline.
Giving an example of the company’s application being used in an enterprise, Sachdev said if a person calls a telecom operator complaining about a variation in the bill amount, the agent in the call centre usually puts the call on hold; checks the system and tells the customer that the variation was due to delayed payment. However, it will be reversed being a loyal customer.
However, dealing with the same issue with Uniphore’s Co-Pilot application, the moment the person finished complaining to the agent about the variation in the bill amount, the AI would have understood the issue; searched the system to find the reasons and reversed the amount. The AI would have also alerted the agent with an alert that the reversal had been done.
What could usually been an 8-9 minute conversation, it was less than three minutes using AI. For the customer, it would be a tremendous experience and for the company, the agent could attend a larger number of calls in a day using AI, he said.
Demands for AI
In India, the demand for AI is coming from across many sectors, including government. People want to lead in AI, he said “Right from the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the IT Ministry in the Centre and the IT minister in Tamil Nadu, everybody is talking about AI. India is looking to lead the AI, not follow,” he said.
Nearly 16 years ago, Uniphore was given a small lab at IIT Madras and the venture was started with a small vision and idea of using AI to connect humans with the Internet. Today, coming back to the city to open the AI Innovation Hub is a major milestone, he said.
Uniphore globally services over 1,500 enterprise customers; with over 750,000 users in those enterprises in 20 countries covering 13 different industries. It has around 1,000 employees globally, including 200 in Chennai and 160 in Bengaluru, he said.
In February 2022, Uniphore announced its Series E funding round of $400 million. The round brought the company’s total funding to more than half a billion ($610 million) and raised the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion, according to a release.