 Good morning all, I'm Shanti from Entrepreneurial India team. We now move to the first stage of the day, which is on deep tech the way ahead. We will have a keynote by Akrit Vesh, co-founder and CEO of Haptic. On the key tech trends for 2021 and beyond, Haptic is one of the world's largest conversational AI companies. Akrit started the company in 2013 and led it to a successful strategic investment with Reliance Industries in 2019 in a dollar million, 100 million transaction. Haptic today process close to 100 million users annually has presence across seven global locations and counts OU rooms, KFC, Samsung, Coca-Cola amongst its market clients. Akrit invests in startups in the areas of consumer internet, science and director consumer brands. He has been a part of the entrepreneurial 35 under 35 and business world 40 under 40 list. Welcome Akrit, over to you. Great, thank you so much. Thanks Shanti for the introduction and for having me here. I will try and do this in the next 15 minutes as Shanti introduced. My name is Akrit, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Haptic. So today what I'll be sharing is just some of our observations on trends in 2021 and beyond. So on that note, let me share my screen. Can somebody enable screen sharing for me please? Just one second. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I got the answers. Great, hope everybody can see my screen. So I will share some observations and some trends that I've been seeing or we've been seeing you're at Haptic in our world. So we've all spoken about this new normal about how digital transformation is now happening at a more rapid pace than ever driven by the pandemic. And there's typically a bunch of these ports that we've always seen, which is how global CEOs are trying to improve customer experience. People, every CEO thinks that they need to build a lot of new digital capabilities. But here is something that I saw about six months back, which I think is the best way to describe it. And I think you would have seen this meme somewhere before, which is, who led the digital transformation of your company? CEO, CTO, well guess what, it was COVID-19. Driven by the pandemic, it fueled a need to absolutely not be like digital is another part of our company, but more like digital is our company. And this is a staggering statistic. In the US, in the first quarter of 2020, which is around the time frame of when the pandemic first hit, e-commerce grew as much in three months as it had grown in the past 10 years. So literally digital spending in 90 days grew as much as the past 10 years. This is a staggering statistic, which tells you to sort of the degree to which the entire transformation has been happening and how customers today are basically just on digital platforms and on digital mediums to be able to transact and interact with brands. So all of this has made what we call customer experience critical. We all know that there is something about going to a store, there's something about going to a mall that you cannot replicate digitally no matter how hard you try. So as a result, in this new world of where maximum business for you comes through a digital touch point, it becomes very important to think about how the entire customer experience looks like. Here are some statistics again that we've been observing through various reports where 60% of shoppers did not complete a purchase on a digital channel because they had a poor customer experience. Either the UI wasn't correct, the UX wasn't correct or they did not get help on time. For example, 83% of shoppers needed some form of support but even while that didn't happen, they actually ended up dropping off from the conversion fund. And what we've seen is that the companies that truly focus on getting the entire customer experience right are the ones that really can win big. They have the potential of really winning in this new world of being tech and digital first and any 93% of customers come back and make a repeat purchase with a brand that provides an absolutely great service. And for me what was interesting was that close to 70% of people generally are willing to pay more and will pay more if you provide a better customer experience while they are trying to purchase digitally. So we've seen a lot of this right, personalization, loyalty badges, retargeting campaigns. These are absolutely all great tactics to win the attention of of your visitors and your customers but everybody's doing it. So every single person and every single brand and every single business is thinking about all these aspects that how do I build more personalization, how do I build better loyalty and so on and so forth. But what we've been thinking about more and more is that what do brands need to do to operate and succeed in this new normal and the emphasis here on succeed, how can they do things that they will genuinely be successful at. And there are three broad themes that we believe are going to be very persuasive in this new world of customer experience driven through artificial intelligence. Conversational AI is number one, which is basically the business that Haptic is in. And when I say conversational AI, this could mean many different things but primarily basically what this means is chatbots and voice tech and now chatbots now given the world in which everybody is transacting digitally first, they also want the customer service to be digital first. They also want the idea that you can essentially very quickly speak to an AI driven assistant or chat with an AI driven assistant and get help instantly. We have now gotten to the point when 90% of businesses are reporting faster, complain resolution with bots. And what's even more exciting in the coming year is that the impact that voice driven AI is going to have on call centers. Today, when you're trying to go through an IVR menu, you have to press one, then press three, then press seven, then press nine to eventually find a human agent. What if you could skip all of that by simply saying connect me. I need help with my credit card bill. That is super powerful and that is again something that will significantly improve the customer experience in a world where in-person support will become a lot lesser. WhatsApp commerce. So a lot of you I'm guessing over the last year have seen a lot of the traction that people, businesses have been having on WhatsApp. So the idea that as a business, I can now engage with my customers on WhatsApp and be able to not only service them but also actually enable transactions for them. And this way we believe has gotten on to the extent where our belief is that every single brand in the emerging markets, which includes India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, Africa, parts of Asia will enable a WhatsApp channel to enable commerce and communication with their customers. So WhatsApp, I always have always been saying this for a long time now that just like you had a website where you build something and your customers engage, you have app where again, you give a touch point for your customers to interact, now you're going to be able to give them something like a WhatsApp channel where customers will be directly be able to come and interact with you as a business. And this is what some of this will look like. Some of this is live and some of this is coming up. As you must have noticed recently, WhatsApp went live with buttons and interactive menus. So now it becomes a lot easier to engage with a business instead of trying to go through complicated number driven menus. You can see over here that this is a menu button where you can select a particular thing that you want the customers to engage with. There was a technical difficulty of taking care of that. Where you're now able to essentially do business and actually transact also on WhatsApp. So this again, we think will become a huge trend in the times to come. And every single business, small or large, will have a communication channel like this. And then finally, voice assistant. So another area that we think is going to pick up tremendously over the next few months is we think that there is an increased appetite for voice assistance driven through convenience that is a lot easier as well as vernacular. The fact that voice makes speaking in my native language a lot more convenient versus having to use a potentially other medium to do that. So convenience, accessibility and the human touch are three things that voice assistance provide beyond anything else. The estimate is by the end of 2024, the number of digital voice agents will be about 8.4 billion units, which will be more than the world's population. So essentially each person will have access to more than one voice assistant, which can be a combination of something that's on your phone, as well as let's say a device like a smart speaker. You know, one of the other things we're seeing over here is voice based product discovery, right? Like text based search or things like that. You need to do a lot of filters, you need to search through a bunch of different things versus on voice you could simply say show me a red shirt, checks under $60 and it could very quickly show that result for you versus having to go through a cumbersome search menu. So we also think that the entire voice based discovery and search is going to become huge in times to come. So the best way for me to summarize and what I always tell our team internally at Haptic and even otherwise is that for us, it's like 1913 and we're building cars. 1913 was the year in which Ford put out their first ever factory line to manufacture cars and now more than a hundred years later, you can see the impact that the automobile sector has had on everything in our economy. So we think that this is with the acceleration due to COVID and digital and everything. The idea of AI driven customer experience is going to be extremely real for the next hundred years to come and some of the things that are showcased to you are not only going to be key things for 2021 but much, much, much beyond after that. Thank you so much. It was great spending these 15 minutes and sharing some of these anecdotes with everybody and hope you're safe and be well. Thank you Akrit for the wonderful keynote. It was quite insightful. We are running out of time but we have like two questions. We will quickly take that. First one would be which sector has made the best use of AI powered chat boards and virtual assistants according to you and why? That would be the first question. So definitely the digital native e-commerce, basically the new age companies, they've made by far the best use so far of this technology. I think because of combination of reasons but I think the first being that if you think about it they end up being the early adopters of any technology. They end up being adopters of new age tech much faster. The systems are a little better organized. Also their customers are right at the digital touch point compared to let's say other offline customers. So the entire new age sort of startups, funded companies, unicorns, e-commerce, digital native, we've seen them they are finding the most value out of it right now. First but now we're also increasingly seeing traditional companies like FinTech, financial services, CPG and so on catch on to it. Thank you Akrit. We have another interesting question which is with digital first being emphasized, how will it change the scenario in the next few years? I think now it's no longer digital first. I think it's more like digital only I think that back to my car's example. I mean today is saying that I'm on the internet or I buy things online saying like I drive a car or a scooter or I travel by a train or a plane. So I think we're out of this notion of digital is another part of our world versus really digital is our world and we live in a time where everything from consuming content to talking to your friends to speaking with family to like I said buying things and shopping everything is basically happening driven through internet enable means. So I think you're already in that time. I think what's exciting to see is the impact that AI is going to have over some of these technologies in times to come. Digital one way I guess is the keyword today. So thank you for joining us Akrit. I would like to now hand over the session to my colleague Babna. Thank you. Thank you so much for that Shanti. Thank you so much Akrit. What a wonderful session pleasure to have you on our summit. Well with this Akrit we'd love to have your presence for our next set of awards if that's okay with you. Amazing. So ladies and gentlemen after this it is now time to move to our next set of awards which is the set two. So ladies and gentlemen now first up for the innovative startup of the year. So could we have the award set being rolled out. It is now time to applaud and appreciate all the award winners. We'd now request the team to start the screen share and get the awards in place. So ladies and gentlemen now this is all happening. I hope you all are having a great time. Let's start with the awards the first one being the innovative startup of the year and that goes to Ovi Riksha. So I'm just going to request the team. Akrit are you able to see any of the slides? If is it my issue only? No I can't see the slide. Okay we'll just request the team apologies ladies and gentlemen on that front. We just request you to please be patient while we get the team to roll out on the award set for this one. Shanti could you help me with the status on the same please? Sure give me a moment. Yes. So ladies and gentlemen now meanwhile it's going to be great two days of learning and we've got a great set of speakers who are going to be there. It's the biggest tech congregation right there so we're going to be now requesting the team to start with the presets. Okay so what we'll do is since the screen share is not happening right now I'll just be announcing the awards with the kind permission of the team if that's okay. Could I get the go ahead on that? Or maybe we can take just one more question that has come in now. Okay sure. Akrit is okay with that. Akrit would you be fine with that? Yeah sure. Okay please go ahead. You want to know how will AI become more personalized in years to come? Good question. I think personalization is a big topic of debate and general sort of discussion quite a bit because of you know just because that is one thing that in the offline world you know you get very easily like the moment I meet you somewhere in a store or something the discussion is a lot more open-ended and I can help personalize things for you a lot easier versus you know an AI trying to do it digitally. See the data points are all there. My thing on AI and personalization is I think that the data points are all there. I think there's more than enough data to be able to do that. I think how you're going to use it and how wisely you're going to deploy it to build some of the algorithms and you know to be able to you know use it wisely in the you know ways such that the algorithms actually have the end impact on the customer. I think that's the gap right. So let's put it this way right that you've given a big data set and you can now potentially use to customize some things but what is the best way that you put it to work. I think that's going to be tricky and of course it doesn't get any easier when you know a lot of the challenges the privacy and things like that are also coming up because you know you also have to be again a bit more careful in what data do you use and how do you use it. So thank you so much for that Artrik. Well with just the kind permission of the team we'll just see if we can get the presets the awards presets now being displayed. The entrepreneur media team could be get the presets now being displayed if we're okay on the tech front. Perfect yes. So ladies and gentlemen the time has come it is now time to announce the winner of this innovative startup of the year and that goes to the entire team which are redefining mobility for the real part of congratulations. Well it's now time to move on to the next award which is the tech startup of the year artificial intelligence and let's have a look at as who is the winner and it goes to vernacular AI silent technologies. Congratulations to the entire team of vernacular AI well there it goes by we are a young entrepreneurial energetic team that's looking to disrupt the voice domain congratulations to the entire team for this wonderful win well let's move on to the next award which is the tech startup of the year IoT and that goes to the future for humanity and allowing everyone to dream break. Congratulations to the entire team well moving on to the last two awards in the set first up we've got the tech startup of the year security and that goes to AI fast technologies private limited well congratulations to the entire team digital safety for everyone online well for the last award in this set which is the tech startup of the year machine learning let's have a look at who it goes to well it goes to simple well congratulations the entire team out there may at simple belief that the best payment experience is no experience at all well with this congratulations to the entire team and this was for the set two of the entrepreneur awards 2021 on the tech front thank you so much Akrit for your valuable time anything towards the end you'd like to say Akrit no thank you so much for having me this was great congratulations to all the winners pleasure thank you so much miss maria would you say yeah Akrit some wonderful insights that you shared here and you know we wish you all the very best and many more great things happening at your front so thank you so much thank you for having me thank you thank you so much Akrit thank you miss maria for joining us thank you for your valuable time ladies and gentlemen let's see you all at the next session thank you