As one of the world’s largest Conversational AI companies, Haptik is on a mission to enable enterprises to deliver amazing experiences for their customers. Much like our industry-leading AI platform and Intelligent Virtual Assistants, we are constantly growing and evolving as a company. The $100 million strategic investment by Reliance Jio earlier this year made Haptik one of the most well-funded Conversational AI companies globally. More recently, we bolstered our operations in North America by bringing on-board the founding team of LA-based Conversational AI startup Convrg. And today, we take yet another important step in our ongoing journey…
Haptik has acquired Buzzo.ai, a Mumbai-based conversational commerce startup. The Buzzo.ai platform enables the creation of an expert advisor-like conversational shopping experience in any eCommerce or Retail domain.
Unlocking Conversational Commerce
Buzzo.ai was established in 2016 by serial entrepreneurs Anand Ramachandran and Vivek Arya. Their previous venture, Makesense Technologies, was a semantic search engine acquired by Naukri in 2013, for $1.5 million.
In a world that is rapidly becoming voice-first, Buzzo.ai enables an AI assistant which can understand a customer’s requirement by naturally conversing with them. It then comes up with the most relevant recommendations that match the specific inputs and explains why that may be the best-fit choice. The idea is to simulate the in-store sales agent behavior as closely as possible.
You can watch a demo of Buzzo.ai’s voice-based shopping assistant below:
According to Forrester, 47% of consumers will abandon online purchases if they can’t find a quick answer. This is precisely the problem Buzzo.ai has been trying to solve.
Anand describes Buzzo.ai as being akin to “a blend of your closest friends who know you inside out, and also has the wisdom of the crowds”.The AI Assistant gets its in-depth knowledge through product information and user reviews, with the key differentiation being that an expert-level domain understanding for any product or service category can be implemented within 1 to 4 weeks. It is this deep domain expertise that enables better personalization, which in turn leads to a higher conversion rate for transactions.
With these capabilities now added to Haptik’s Conversational AI platform, we will be able to further enhance our text and voice conversational commerce solutions, for enterprise partners all across the globe!
Looking Ahead
“Over the last 18 months, we have been primarily focused on customer service AI solutions. But given our mission to enable the paradigm shift from clicks to conversations, commerce was always the obvious next frontier. The Buzzo.ai team has taken a very unique approach to solving this problem, which is totally different from what we have today. This is what attracted us to them, and then once we got to know the team better it was a no brainer”, said Swapan Rajdev, Co-Founder and CTO of Haptik.
Reflecting on the creation of the platform, Anand Ramchandran, Co-Founder of Buzzo.ai, said, “We have been working in the areas of NLP, Text Processing, Semantic Search and Information Retrieval for more than 10 years. In 2016 we were looking for a new problem to solve in the same area and found that conversational commerce was still a wide open space. We were confident that our approach would lead to genuine end-user impact, and combining that with the world moving to being voice first, we knew we were on to something.”
“As creators of technology, the only way to see the fruit of our work is with massive scale. And that’s what got us excited about Haptik, particularly after their alliance with Reliance Jio. They have been pioneers in this space for many years and we look forward to joining them on this journey”, said Vivek Arya, Co-Founder of Buzzo.ai, commenting on the acquisition.
With the five-member Buzzo.ai team joining our ranks, Haptik is now more than well-equipped to rise to the challenge of addressing the $80 billion voice commerce market!
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