Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming India's call center industry, with startups like LimeChat and Haptik at the forefront of this change. These companies are developing AI-powered chatbots that can handle customer inquiries, complaints, and other tasks traditionally performed by humans. According to Nikhil Gupta, co-founder of LimeChat, their generative AI agents can enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.
LimeChat's AI agents have already automated 5,000 jobs across India, handling 70% of customer complaints for its clients. The company plans to achieve 90-95% automation within a year. Haptik, another major player in the industry, offers "AI agents that deliver human-like customer experiences" that cost $120 and can cut support costs by 30%. Its revenue skyrocketed to almost $18 million last year from less than $1 million in 2020.
The impact of AI on India's workforce is significant, with investment bank Jefferies predicting a 50% revenue hit for call centers and 35% for other back-office functions over the next five years. This would spell near-term job losses in India, which accounts for 52% of the global outsourcing market. Current and former customer-service workers have described increasing job insecurity and integration of AI, including tools that suggest responses and bots that handle nearly all routine queries autonomously.
Despite the potential job losses, industry experts believe that AI will create new opportunities for those displaced. India is betting that a let-it-rip approach will create enough new opportunities to absorb those displaced. As Haptik product manager Suji Ravi notes, "Brands are not investing in human agents and they want to deploy AI agents." With AI-powered systems like LimeChat's Neha, a voice agent that speaks in near-flawless, Indian-accented English, the future of customer service in India is likely to be increasingly automated.
