Kore.ai Eyes Major Expansion; Appoints Neil Barman to lead Growth in Middle East and Asia Pacific

Kore.ai, the world’s leading enterprise conversational AI platform and solutions company, has announced the appointment of Neil Barman as Senior Vice President – Sales and Partnerships, for leading the company’s market expansion in the region.

Based out of Bangalore, India, Neil will head Kore.ai’s growth in the region encompassing the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

“Almost every large enterprise is looking to deploy conversational AI and the emergence of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) has provided a new momentum to this rapid adoption within Asia-Pacific,” said Kore.ai CEO and Founder Raj Koneru. “There are a broad range of countries to cover here, and a great variety of use cases for conversational interfaces that customers are demanding. In Neil, we’ve found the right pivot who can strategize and execute our vision specific to the requirements of Asia-Pacific.”

Neil brings more than two decades of international business experience running enterprise B2B sales in SaaS and direct-to-customer sales and marketing, partnerships and alliances at companies of various sizes. He has a deep understanding of building sales and revenue generation functions in emerging technology start-ups and scaling organizations across industries and regions. Neil is recognised as “40 under 40” by BusinessWorld in 2023 and “Business Leader of the Year” by CXO Club of India in 2022.

“I’m excited to be part of Kore.ai” said Neil. “As we continue to expand our footprint, we want to deliver our customers the best conversational experience possible. Through its technology innovations and strategic initiatives Kore.ai has shown how enterprises can adopt conversational AI technology powered by generative AI in the most optimal way. We are helping clients improve operational efficiency and bringing greater customization with domain-specific large language models, multi-language support, omnichannel experience, seamless enterprise systems integration and simplified pricing. As a true market leader as recognized by leading analysts firms, we will help enterprises that are keen on creating differentiation by improving customer and employee experiences.”

Kore.ai offers enterprise-grade, no-code conversational AI platforms and generative AI-powered solutions enabling global enterprises to improve customer, employee and contact center agent experiences for optimized business outcomes.

With over 350 customers, Kore.ai automates at least a billion interactions every year through its conversational AI platform and solutions and has so far delivered more than $1 Billion in cost savings to global enterprise customers. Around 150 million consumers and a million enterprise users currently leverage Kore.ai’s platform technology and solutions.

“A significant portion of our developer community is based in the Asia-Pacific region and they are integral to our innovations and R&D initiatives globally,” said Kore.ai Chief Technology Officer Prasanna Kumar Arikala. “Through our Product-Led Growth model and innovative GenAI platform capabilities, we have observed large-scale adoption of our no-code platform and AI product suite. With Neil’s onboarding, we expect to see this accelerated across all segments within Asia-Pacific including large enterprises, small and medium businesses, startups, and individual developers.”

The company, which closed in 2022 with over 127% growth, is looking to rapidly increase the share of its customers and revenue in Asia-Pacific.

“We are in the process of rapidly expanding our teams across various geographies. Our new strategic hire will form a new foundation around our Asia Pacific business for years to come and we will continue to look for opportunities like this to strengthen our industry leadership position,” said Koneru.