India sees surge in AI-enabled automated customer service agents

New Delhi, June 20 Automated customer service agents became the top Artificial Intelligence (AI) use case for the Indian organisations in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic kept millions at home and face-to-face interactions diminished across industries, according to a new report.

The AI use cases gained momentum in India, driven by the need to ensure speed of new product development, facilitate better customer experience, improve higher employee productivity, and achieve high competitiveness in the market, according to an IDC report.

"For 2020, automated customer service agent is the top AI use case, and we are also witnessing other use cases like fraud analysis and investigation, IT automation, recommendation system, and diagnosis and treatment gain momentum," said Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and AI at IDC India.

Indian organisations are leveraging AI to help them with real-time analysis, providing enhanced experiences and automation.

With AI that supports innovations at scale, delivers enhanced customer experience and improves operational efficiency, organisations will continue to find ways to gain more value from their data and improve overall customer experience, the report showed.

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of intelligent technologies across organisations in India.

Businesses today look to develop resiliency through technologies that can help them prepare better for future uncertainties.

Increasingly, said the report, the need for businesses to collect, process, and leverage data for real-time decisions has resulted in businesses' AI adoption.

"Organisations have started to re-think their business strategies and move towards intelligent technology adoption. COVID-19 has fuelled Indian organisations to accelerate digitisation and move beyond AI pilot phase, and start leveraging AI for multiple business functions," said Swapnil Shende, Senior Market Analyst, Artificial Intelligence at IDC India.

The BFSI sector was the leading vertical in AI spending with a 29 per cent share in 2020, and is exploring multiple use cases varying from fraud analysis and investigation, video KYC and conversational AI platforms.

"Adoption of AI technology in core process is giving a cutting-edge by making the business more innovative, agile by refining the information (data collected) and converting that into useful insight to address different business problems more efficiently," informed Ashutosh Bisht, Senior Research Manager at IDC Asia/Pacific.