Airtel strengthens Artificial Intelligence portfolio

Bharti Airtel recently announced an acquihire deal with AuthMe ID Services (“AuthMe”), a Bengaluru based start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence based solutions, to add to its (Airtel’s) initiatives to serve customers with innovative digital products.

As part of the deal, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru. Airtel has set up Airtel X Labs with the aim of driving cutting edge innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR and is building a world-class team for the facility.

In addition, Airtel has acquired the intellectual proprietary rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe.  The first IP is Callup AI – Callup AI has created a chat and voice assistant that uses the power of AI to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries over email, chat and phone calls. Callup AI features include voice integration, unsupervised learning and the application is built for vernacular languages with zero integration time. The solution is used by 10 companies across three countries in banking, finance, payments and housing domains.

Another IP created by the firm is Fintech OCR – an end to end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. The application is designed for processing KYC docs, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets, and can be customised to process known formats of other documents. It can pick up any language with standard fonts.

Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel said, “We are thrilled to bring on board a bunch of highly talented people who share our passion for building exciting digital solutions that benefit our customers. We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 mn plus customers.”