Rohit Kapoor, vice chairman & CEO of EXL, one of India’s biggest business process management (BPM) companies, says it used to take one of their insurance clients six to 12 months to launch a new product. It involved creating the IT system, putting the policy in place, defining the underwriting standards, testing those standards, going through compliance checks, pricing checks, and finally the rolling out.
“But now, with the use of automation, the use of AI and Gen AI, we can actually launch a new product for them in six weeks. And in six weeks, they have the same rigour on compliance, they have actually better testing of their product, because it’s not sample testing, but is 100% testing of the code,” he says.
What’s more, as the insurance company’s end-customer preferences change, they can adapt to that very quickly, Kapoor says. This is enabling EXL to powerfully influence their client’s growth. Technology, Kapoor says, is enabling them to bring together data from disparate data sources, and tie them all together, analyse them, it’s enabling the ability to test and control changes quickly, and it is creating the ability to personalise products and services.
Over the past 25 years, India has built the strongest BPM base in the world, taking on more and more of the processes of the world’s largest companies. And now, AI and Gen AI are enabling them to more substantially influence the operations of their customers.
K S Viswanathan, VP of industry initiatives at Nasscom, says AI is impacting four ?Ps’ – productivity, performance, prediction, and personalisation. Gen AI proofs-of-concepts (PoCs), he says, have clearly demonstrated significant improvement in productivity (like in code generation, content summarisation). It is improving business performance – by enabling use of data to impact topline, bottomline and customer satisfaction. It is enabling predictions through data, which is crucial in today’s world of uncertainty. And it is enabling companies to understand customers in ways that were unimaginable till recently, allowing for personalisation of products. All of these, Viswanathan says, are further strengthening the BPM industry’s partnerships with global corporations.
Unparalleled capabilities
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Harita Gupta, SVP & Apac head at BPM company Sutherland, and chair of the Nasscom BPM Council, says Gen AI is enabling the transformation of chatbots into conversa tional AI that is providing customers a substantially better experience. “A chatbot is a static bot that chats with you. It does not have much memory, it does not have much history of what happened on your earlier chats, it is not able to correlate (data from different sources), it is not even able to do a good job of curating knowledge. But now, when you add AI to the bots, we’ve got this completely new field called conversational AI,” she says. It can have a chat with you exactly like a human, correlating data from many sources, and previous chats. Gupta says it is even enabling Indian BPM staff to service Spanish-speaking customers – write in English, and it instantly translates it to Spanish. “We deliver 15 global languages sitting out of India with Indian workforce,” she says.
Right now it’s happening on chat, but voice is just a matter of time.
Conversational AI, Gupta says, is particularly useful when, for instance, e-commerce sites see a surge in traffic on special days, when it would be impossible for human agents to manage it.
Gen AI’s knowledge management capabilities, Gupta says, is also a huge benefit for human agents, enabling them to service customers far better. “And once the call is over with a client, or the back office process is complete, there’s a lot of documentation the consultant or the agent needs to do. Imagine if I could automate that through my AI tool! Just solving that business challenge will be a big game changer,” she says.
Kapoor says they’ve built a product that can predict, based on a number of attributes, who is likely to become a high networth individual, so that a customer using the product can get to them early, serve them, and build their loyalty, before competitors get to them.
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He says it’s possible for the BPM industry to do such things because their knowledge of each industry is phenomenal. “In insurance, we work with about 200 large companies. So, our domain knowledge of insurance is far superior today as compared to any single insurance company. Also, because we handle the core operating processes of our clients, we get to see the data flows. All of this gives us tremendous capability to do largescale, enterprise-wide changes for our clients,” he says.
