Reliance Jio-owned Haptik develops AI assistant for Kotak Life

Reliance Jio-owned conversational AI (artificial intelligence) company Haptik has developed a new virtual assistant called KAYA for Kotak Mahindra’s life insurance firm, Kotak Life.

KAYA, Kotak Life At Your Assistance, provides round-the-clock assistance and instant solutions to consumers of the financial firm, a statement from Kotak said on Tuesday.

“KAYA has reduced the wait time for our customers by as much as four times, and has reduced human dependence to resolve a large number of routine queries. With its self-learning architecture, KAYA can connect to various sections of the support team for a smooth customer experience,” Kirti Patil, CTO at Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance said.

Kotak Mahindra Bank already has a chatbot for its credit card and debit card division, called Keya, a virtual assistant capable of fielding questions on these card-related topics.

Read: How souped-up AI chatbots will take over our financial sector

KAYA, as the company claims, has self-learning capabilities and equipped with advanced agent chat solution, where queries outside its scope are transferred to Kotak Life’s customer support teams.

“Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is really transforming the customer support function by providing real time, accurate and emphatic resolution at scale...” Kartik Poddar, a business head at Haptik, said. 

Founded by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev in 2013, Haptik claims to have reached over 100 million devices, and processed over 2 billion conversations to date.

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance had acquired a majority stake in the company in a $100 million deal in April 2019.

Apart from artificial intelligence, Haptik’s technology infrastructure involves the use of natural language processing and machine learning. The company is one of the world's largest platforms of conversational AI.

The chatbot market size is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7% during the forecast period, according to a market research report from MarketsAndMarkets.

Advancement in technology coupled with rising customer demand for self-service and round-the-clock customer assistance at lower operational costs are key factors of such a market growth, the report published in November 2019 added.