Bharti Airtel today announced an acquihire deal with AuthMe ID Services which is a Bengaluru-based start-up focused on developing Artificial Intelligence-based solutions. With this partnership, Airtel is looking to serve its customers with innovative digital products based on AI. Airtel stated that the core team of AuthMe would join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru. Airtel has set up Airtel X Labs with the aim of driving cutting-edge innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR and is building a world-class team for the facility.
Bharti Airtel to Offer AI-Based Customer Service Solutions
Airtel has acquired the intellectual proprietary rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe- Callup AI and Fintech OCR. Diving into both the solutions, Callup AI has created a chat and voice assistant that uses AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls.
Callup AI features include voice integration, unsupervised learning and the application is built for vernacular languages with zero integration time. According to the available information, the solution is used by ten companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains.
Moving onto the Fintech OCR, it's an end-to-end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. The application is designed for processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts.
Bharti Airtel Betting Big on Artificial Intelligence
Since the last one year or so, AI has been a buzzword in both the mobile and telecom industry. Smartphone brands are already making use of AI to detect various scenes and enhance the images. And in the telecom sector, operators such as Reliance Jio and Airtel are focusing to offer AI-based customer services to resolve the queries in a very quick and efficient manner.
Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel said, “We are thrilled to bring on board a bunch of highly talented people who share our passion for building exciting digital solutions that benefit our customers. We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 mn plus customers.”
Going forward, we will see telcos offering in-app and website based customer support. Airtel already has a beta version of chatbot inside the My Airtel app which is providing solutions to basic queries.
