Tata-powered Niki.ai: the world's first e-commerce AI chatbot

One of India’s first AI led start up, is backed by Mr Ratan Tata, Unilazer Ventures and SAP.iO among other investors. The start-up developed OnChat bot for HDFC Bank, India's largest private sector banking and financial services company to enable e-commerce transactions such as discovering, searching and paying for movies, events, bus booking or cabs.

The bot also facilitates bill payments for Utility, Postpaid, Prepaid mobile plans. With over 2,10,000 consumers interacting with the chatbot within 12 months of its launch on Facebook, Niki.ai's OnChat bot developed for HDFC Bank has become World's First e-commerce AI Chatbot Success Story on Facebook.

In less than a year from its launch, HDFC Bank's OnChat bot witnessed a chat-to-order conversion ratio of a whopping 12 per cent. The bot, developed by Niki.ai, has powered over 24,000 transactions totaling to more than Rs 16.7 million as a result of 1.28 million interactions. The bank also observed that about 25 per cent of the customers OnChat were non-HDFC Bank customers.

Leveraging the power of natural conversations, the chatbot facilitated easy and convenient communication between HDFC Bank and its target audience. 

"HDFC Bank was looking to offer a unique user experience to its younger target audience through conversational banking via a chat bot. With OnChat, we've assisted HDFC bank achieve a 12 per cent chat-to-order conversion ratio. Out of every 100 people who had interacted with the chatbot, 12 people had carried out a financial transaction,"  says Sachin Jaiswal - CEO, Niki.ai.

With over 55 per cent month-on-month revenue growth, Niki.ai has 50 plus partners on board, with many more in the pipeline. On the customer front, the company has more than 2 million customers using Niki.

The company plans to integrate many more services on its platform including that of a stockbroker and insurance agent, so that for most of the needs that a consumer may have, Niki is the first thing that strikes his mind.

Speech recognition and Multilingual support, which are in the making, will provide users the ability to simply speak to Niki and chat in their regional language, and get tasks done on the go.

"Niki.ai aims to provide a one stop shop for everything e-commerce by leveraging the power of natural conversations, Niki makes the whole journey from discovery to transaction fast, convenient and extremely simple," says Sachin Jaiswal

The company looks to explore more of relevant messaging platforms like Slack, Telegram etc. Niki is already available on iOS, Android, Facebook and Web platform, with more partnerships inline, the company aims to ubiquitous - present everywhere and for everything transactional.