How conversations can be better with AI for brands - the story of Yellow.ai

Raghu Ravinutala, the co-founder of Yellow.ai, tells us that how he solved a problem from India for the world by making brands understand the relevance of being customer first in the digital age.

Yellow.ai has raised in total a sum of $102 million and is becoming a leading conversational AI platform for brands. But behind that was a story of how it first helped an oil and gas company, in India, and a cinema chain, in the UK, before they scaled up the technology and the business to serve global brands.

Raghu Ravinutala talks about how conversations became so much more over the last six years thanks to technology. Here are the excerpts of the interview.

You started in the semi-conductor world, how did you move to the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)?

I am still excited about the semi-conductor space. Yellow.ai was complete serendipity. It happened over a meeting with a few friends where we were discussing about the future of messaging. Facebook had just acquired WhatsApp and we were talking about how interactions with companies could become much easier with messages. Telecom and internet support, at the time, was so tedious and we were wondering how we could simplify it. That's how it all started.

When we started the shift towards building conversational AI was seamless. It felt like it was the right thing to do and I knew I would not get any jitters because I believed we could solve this.

The co-founders Kishore and Rashid have been an amazing support, all three of us come from different backgrounds.

(For more insights watch the entire podcast)