Sivakumar Ganesan, Co-founder and CEO of ExotelAs AI continues to evolve, its role in business communications continues to expand, providing marketers with innovative solutions to drive engagement and growth in ways never before imagined. At the 6th Brand World Summit hosted by ETBrandEquity, Shivakumar Ganesan, Co-founder and CEO, Exotel, laid out a visionary roadmap for the future of communications in the AI era and shared actionable insights on leveraging AI to enhance businesses' customer interactions.
“AI is here and it's changing the way we communicate,” Ganesan began. He emphasized the importance of understanding the evolution of AI by referencing the 2017 research paper “Attention is All You Need,” which laid the foundation for the development of the Transformer model that powers today's generative AI tools.
Ganesan noted that many people are now familiar with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, but warned against relying too heavily on generative AI to get factual information: “Generative AI is good at producing vague answers, but it can also lie with confidence,” he said.
Moving beyond the idea of chatbots and voice bots, Ganesan introduced the concept of “conversational context.” He explained that the conversations that bots and employees have with customers hold valuable information that traditional CRM and CDP systems can't capture. By focusing on three distinct elements behind a customer interaction — intent, status, and sentiment — businesses can create more meaningful, personalized communication experiences. “The conversations that a bot or agent has with a customer are always 20% ahead of what's on a brand's website.”
Ganesan spoke about Exotel's efforts to make generative AI work for the enterprise, highlighting the practical challenges and benefits of taking AI from theory to production. “Bringing generative AI from theory to production takes a lot of effort and requires constant monitoring to ensure the bots are working accurately,” he noted.
For companies considering adopting AI, Ganesan suggested three hybrid strategies. First, he recommended conversation quality analysis, encouraging companies that haven't yet started using it. Analyzing the quality of conversations can provide deep insights and improve customer interactions without having to interact with the end user.
Secondly, he suggested implementing AI-assisted marketing campaigns, where bots can enhance customer engagement by intelligently responding to marketing messages: “Most of the marketing messages received on WhatsApp are often not replied to, which does not provide the best customer experience.”Thirdly, Ganesan advocated for a unified conversation context, consolidating all customer conversations into one system and applying AI to derive meaningful insights.
Looking to the future, Ganesan outlined a phased approach to AI adoption. The first step is “agent assist,” where organizations leverage AI to provide real-time support to human agents. “The next step is to switch the model to 'agent supervised,' where the AI handles the initial interaction and a human agent oversees multiple conversations.”
Speaking about a future where AI can fully automate customer interactions, Ganesan questioned whether that would be desirable: “You're always going to need that human touch to differentiate,” he reflected.
