Bots-Up Gurugram: Highlights from India’s largest Chatbot Meetup

After 2 successful editions of India’s largest chatbot meetup, Bots-Up in Mumbai and Bengaluru, this time around, we decided to take the meetup to the startup center of the country — Gurugram! Yes, you heard that right!

Haptik, in association with Amazon Web Services, hosted the 3rd edition of Bots-Up on 29th March in 91springboard’s office in Gurugram. This meetup was focused on bringing together business leaders, industry experts, and passionate minds to discuss all that’s happening in the conversation AI ecosystem. The event was bustling with leaders and enthusiasts from renowned companies such as Times Internet, TCS, Axis Bank, HDFC Life and many more.

If you think you missed all the fun, think again! Here’s an extensive round-up of Bots-Up meetup, Gurugram.

Keynote Session

The evening began with a keynote session by our SVP and Business Head, Kartik Poddar. In his session, Kartik covered interesting topics such as the USP of chatbots, level of personalization on this platform, the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the future of the conversational AI industry.

The key highlight of Kartik’s session was the importance of chatbot design.

He said that chatbots are interfaces that can be personalized at scale and hence, it is extremely vital to pay attention to design while building a chatbot. A good design encompasses of objective, personality, and tone of the chatbot. He also shed some light on the three key aspects — visual elements, content formats and chat elements — which are essential to design a scalable bot. He ended with the evolution of user interfaces, leaving the audience quite intrigued by his session.

Panel Discussion

The keynote session was followed by a panel discussion where an interesting lineup of speakers shared their insights into how their respective businesses deploy conversational AI solutions to their benefit.

The esteemed set of panelists included-
Harnath Babu — CIO, KPMG India
Navdeep Manaktala — Head — Business Development, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd.
Prashant Pitti — Founder and CEO, NearGroup
Sandeep Singh — Digital Head, Dr. Lal PathLabs

This discussion was moderated by our very own CEO and Co-founder, Aakrit Vaish who steered the conversation towards how each business is leveraging the power of conversational AI solutions and is contributing to the growth of this industry. He also delved deeper to gather their views on the current trends of this space and the direction in which the conversational industry is headed.

An interesting point of discussion was when Aakrit quizzed Navdeep on why Amazon believes that voice bots were the ‘next big thing’ in technology. To this, he replied that the process of using apps to get things done was slowly becoming archaic. This is where easy-to-use voice bots like Alexa step in. Another fascinating point of discussion was by Sandeep when he mentioned that inspite of being a 60-year old company, Dr. Lal PathLabs invested in chatbots to automate multiple services in their business.

Prashant spoke about how NearGroup uses chatbots as enablers to facilitate conversations between people. Chatbots play a vital role in getting people’s interest back when a conversation is dropped. These chatbots also use machine learning techniques to learn from past conversations of the user and personalize their future recommendations.
Harnath highlighted that their tryst with chatbots began at KPMG, as an internal use case where they wanted to automate their IT and HR processes. Since it worked wonderfully for them, they have automated their customer support services and now recommend chatbot solutions to their client base as well.

One key conversation that stood out during this discussion was the viability of a vernacular language in the AI space. Hinglish, which is a mix of Hindi and English, seems to be the next step in this space and businesses like Amazon are exploring this capability on their platforms.

Apart from this, a few discussions revolved around automated testing of chatbots and the challenges faced by startups while deploying chatbot solutions.

Networking

The meetup soon transformed into a networking session where like-minded enthusiasts had candid discussions about the current developments in conversational AI, major players in this space and what the future holds for this industry. The participants also engaged in interesting conversations with us to know how Haptik builds chatbots for various businesses across industries and our journey of becoming one of the largest chatbot platforms in the world.

If we’ve inspired you enough to explore the magic of chatbots and conversational AI, then our job here is done! Reach out to us at hello@haptik.ai to know how we can help you leverage the power of chatbots to automate and boost your business. Till then, stay tuned and let us know ‘Bots-Up’! 🙂

Originally published at haptik.ai on March 29, 2018.