The Enterprise Opportunity: SaaS Startups, India’s IT Giants Riding The GenAI Wave

India’s IT services companies are today large enterprises themselves, but they were once startups too, and this context is critical in understanding how GenAI is changing the Indian enterprise landscape.

India’s digital product startups have been built on top of the legacy established by IT services giants, and the GenAI revolution neatly ties this chain together, unlike any technology movement before it. Arguably, software as a service or SaaS was the first step in this link, but the upside of generative AI for large enterprises is by many accounts the largest enterprise opportunity for startups and tech companies.

For instance, recently Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced that it would integrate Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) GenAI capabilities and solutions for its customers. Infosys, an investor in AI giant OpenAI, has partnered with Google Cloud to sell GenAI services and products to its end customers. 

On the other end of this GenAI adoption spectrum are companies such as Wipro, which are looking at GenAI to solve operational inefficiencies and also as a potential product for its customers. Wipro has roped in Avaamo to ease hardware procurement, travel and employee management and other parts of its operations.

In a recent interaction with Inc42, GenAI startup Avaamo’s CEO Ram Menon explained how Wipro’s deployment for 40 use cases and over 2.5 Lakh employees spread over 53 countries, is the largest of its kind globally in the GenAI space. 

These are just three examples of how GenAI is changing the way IT and tech enterprises are run and the products they offer. Everything from employee experience, workflow management, CRMs and ERPs are being overhauled by GenAI. 

“One of the things I say is that no technology is real and future-proof till enterprise adoption kicks in, and when it comes to GenAI, this is yet to happen. So watch out for this in 2024,” Naganand Doraswamy, founder of Ideaspring Capital, told Inc42 earlier this year.

Inc42’s discussion with multiple industry stakeholders over the past few months revealed that the pace of GenAI adoption in India and worldwide is almost the same, with enterprises driving the adoption. 

Though this technology adoption is expected to usher in a major shift in the way big enterprises function, most companies are adopting it in a little cautious way with the initial steps largely focussed on its usage to optimise company operations rather than catering to customers with GenAI-based solutions.

As Avaamo cofounder and CEO Menon told us, “Enterprises tend to be very deliberate right now and they are more focussed on using Gen AI to solve the simple things.”

There are multiple factors that enterprises need to ponder on before jumping in – be it data integrity, data privacy, compliance, or the risk of toxicity where somebody might put in malicious prompts. 

Consequently, GenAI has found its way into enterprises largely via conversational bots in the initial phase, enhancing both customer and employee experience across communication platforms.

On the other hand, Anil Kempanna, CEO of product solutions company Cientra, believes that though many areas offer extensive scope for deployment of GenAI platforms currently, there is a typical challenge in the knowledge of the tools themselves as to how they can be effectively used.

“Contours of its usage or limitations can only arise when both the tool user, orchestrator, and the user of the same can effectively arrive at the phases of growth of the deployment with well-defined objectives,” Kempanna said. 

Hence, let’s first understand the scope for growth enterprise GenAI playbook can unfold in various domains.

GenAI Tools Enhancing Customer Experience

GenAI has found its way into most business sectors via conversational tools like chatbots. For the IT giants, this trend is no different, and one of the lowest-hanging fruits to solve with GenAI-based conversational models is customer support experience.

From offering more contextualised and hyper-personalised responses to customer queries to reducing cost and improving scalability, GenAI models are capable of streamlining customer support across channels – website, mobile app, WhatsApp, email, and others.

For instance, Yellow.ai, which is using GenAI to automate customer service experiences, has built YellowG which claims to automate 90% of queries and helps enterprises go live in seconds with zero setup bot deployment. At the same time, the platform claims to prioritise security through a combination of centralised global large language models (LLMs) and its proprietary LLMs, ensuring data safety and compliance.

Rashid Khan, cofounder and chief product officer of Yellow.ai, said that the company started noticing an increasing interest from enterprises to start experimenting with the GenAI-powered customer support platforms in the second half of 2023. 

Currently, large enterprises are adopting GenAI platforms for customer support faster than in any other use cases, he said.

In a recent example, Khan said that Yellow.ai launched a chatbot with one of India’s leading auto finance companies to automate the entire lead process, where the bot helps with customer queries starting from getting a lead to making them opt for the loans. This GenAI deployment significantly increased the propensity of customers opting for the finance option, the companies found.

Similarly, Avaamo has automated the entire insurance claims processing for Aditya Birla Capital, which is otherwise a complicated process. Menon added that enterprises are more keen on reducing turnaround times for processes and that is exactly what GenAI can solve.

Besides customer support, enterprises today are also looking to reduce cycle time across the employee onboarding process, handling their corporate travel, getting their tax forms, and other such HR and operations activities.

Enterprises As ‘Client Zero’

We must note that when it comes to enhancing employee experience, GenAI can be used in two critical ways – streamlining the workforce management process and educating the employees with GenAI uses and implementation. This client zero approach is one way that enterprises are testing the GenAI waters. 

In simpler terms, a large enterprise adopts GenAI internally to see how it contributes to efficiency and then translates this experience into its own products for external customers. This is a natural extension of the widespread digital transformation that was seen amid the pandemic. 

For instance, Wipro has started doubling down on its GenAI strategy with the launch of ai360 and looking to train more employees on the technology. Currently, over 2 Lakh employees have already received the AI training. 

Similarly, TCS also claims to have over 3.5 Lakh employees trained in foundational skills in GenAI. This is not only crucial for adoption of products internally, but also allows these employees to have the right skills to push GenAI products in the right manner. 

Further, several studies suggest that though there are fears about GenAI affecting human employment, it would be crucial for enterprises to equip their employees with the necessary skills as the adoption starts. 

This is also expected to improve employee productivity at a reduced cost while enhancing employee retention. Of course, on the flip side, many roles would become redundant, and while enterprises are adopting AI cautiously due to this factor, it won’t be long before there is a bigger push for automation, copilots, AI agents and assistants. 

Wipro chief information officer Anup Purohit believes that end customers of enterprises will eventually want very specific use cases, and no IT company can afford to wait and watch.

“We have built very specific use cases for companies in AI and ML. Some of them may not be open to using an off-the-shelf copilot, so we have to develop copilots and bring the bot development inhouse. This need will increase exponentially eventually. As compared to today, when customers ask Wipro for 20 developers, tomorrow, they might want ten developers and three copilots to do the rest of the work,” he said. 

Purohit believes that enterprises will adopt en masse once the benefits of optimisation, quick turnaround and standardised solutions start reflecting in the bottom line. 

AI copilots are expected to play a major role in simplifying work processes that are otherwise heavily time-consuming and can be implemented across departments – sales, marketing, content generation, and HR processes. Microsoft, a major backer of OpenAI, has built in a copilot for its productivity applications and is looking to deeply integrate copilots into Windows in the near future after some early experiments. 

The change in how hardware is used will also dictate enterprise adoption of GenAI. “Besides conversational bots, one of the biggest segments where AI is being adopted is for the generation of content across two major channels – for text-only content and images, videos, and audio clips,” Yellow.ai’s Khan added.

The Future Opportunity In Enterprise GenAI

Cientra, which serves more than 50 companies with its product solutions such as semiconductor design solutions, embedded software, and others, in India, the US, and Germany, claims to be leveraging GenAI to streamline processes such as content generation and creative output.

Kempanna said that this adoption has resulted in significant time and cost savings, especially for understanding complex IPs and integrating them into more complex product solutions.

In order to just understand an IP that was developed earlier in a certain context and readapting the same for a new use case calls for extensive studies of literature on global IP standards, test protocols, conformance criteria, and compatibility needs. GenAI is playing a key role in simplifying this process for the MNCs, he added.

Abhishek Gupta, chief customer officer of all-in-one engagement platform CleverTap, told Inc42 that the startup has launched an emotionally intelligent AI content generator called Scribe, which leverages GenAI models to help brands generate more personalised and emotionally relevant marketing messages. 

CleverTap’s customer engagement platform serves some of the top enterprises in India and globally. For instance, in the fashion industry, companies could potentially derive higher clickthrough rates through the right push notifications, but managing and executing these could be an ordeal for the app’s marketing team. 

Using GenAI, Scribe can edit copies and notification messaging automatically, and this works particularly well within industries that have a high need for messaging, such as fashion or beauty. The tool accounts for emotions such as anticipation, joy, surprise and trust to generate the right content. 

In fact, tech industry leaders think that GenAI shouldn’t be perceived in isolation. The technology, coupled with other products and tools can open up a new operating paradigm for large businesses and enterprises.

The Road Ahead

While the cautiousness remains, the enterprises’ enthusiasm to leverage GenAI for work efficiency and improved business outcomes is at its peak. The market will further mature only with the increasing number of GenAI tools and applications, which is happening at a rapid rate, and their increasing usage.

It’s hard to go by a week these days without a SaaS startup launching its AI-powered product or a new company raising funds for its GenAI product “There are a wide variety of solutions that have come up, but again, a lot of these are more of proof-of-concepts products and they still need to muster the enterprise requirements of innovation and deployment at scale in a secure and organisationally aligned manner,” CleverTap’s Gupta added.

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that enterprises also need to strengthen their data infra to take full advantage of the Gen AI opportunities. 

With the global GenAI-focussed IT services market opportunity is expected to grow at 100% CAGR and reach $86 Bn over the next decade, as suggested by Bloomberg research. Enterprises will undoubtedly be leading the charge in this GenAI world.