Powering conversational AI

Amplify.ai helps companies acquire, engage, educate, communicate, entertain and transact with the billions of consumers around the globe that use popular social networks and messaging applications every day. The conversational engagement platform has helped leading brands drive more than a billion interactions with over 100 million people around the world. Speaking about how he started the company, serial entrepreneur Mahi de Silva, CEO and co-founder, Amplify.ai says, “The inspiration for Amplify.ai came from my travel to China for business in 2015 and 2016, where I saw that a massive shift toward using messaging (rather than apps or website) as the way for consumers to interact with businesses, creating a multi-hundred billion dollar conversational commerce market. My co-founders and I became convinced that this was not something uniquely Chinese, that we would see this UX evolution spread throughout the world.” So in 2016 they started what would become Amplify.ai and began developing the industry’s first enterprise-class conversational AI platform to empower marketing and support teams to deliver conversational engagement at superhuman scale.

“Early on, we realised that India, the largest mobile-first market outside of China, would be a strategically important market for us. Indeed, India has turned out to be a vital proving ground, with early adoption across multiple verticals and the ability to quickly get conversational dataset of sufficient scale for our Machine Learning system,” states de Silva, adding that the platform has now handled over 2.5 billion engagements across over 175 million consumers.

The founders believe that conversational AI will drive better outcomes for all major brands along the entire customer journey. “That said, we are seeing strong early adoption in the following key verticals: publishing/media, political, ecommerce, and telcos,” says de Silva. He points out that for media companies and news publishers, engagement is amplified in ways that lead to higher consumption, greater virality, and, ultimately increased ad revenue. “For political parties and campaigns, we amplify engagement and transform that engagement into action, resulting in more donations, petition signing, and viral sharing. For ecommerce brands, we dramatically increase the ROI of their social ad spend via the power of conversational ads, like Facebook’s Click-to-Messenger, and Google’s AdLingo display unit,” he adds, reminding that for telcos, they can deliver better support at lower cost, while dramatically improving their marketing ROI.

Informing that messaging-based conversational AI is both a huge market opportunity and a difficult problem, de Silva remarks, “Our team and our software are in a constant state of learning. Each new vertical market and each new language and culture present unique challenges in terms of NLP (natural language processing) and UX (user experience).”

Sharing about future plans in terms of new technologies and strategic expansion, he states, “Our current focus is on B2C conversational engagement. Longer term, we see opportunities to expand to B2B, developing essentially a universal conversational “messaging bus,” so to speak.”

According to de Silva, the conversational AI industry, is in the early days of a massive transformation. “Conversational AI will make marketing interactive, personalised, and may more effective, and it will make customer support more convenient at lower cost. There are lots of interesting challenges and opportunities along the way. It is a very exciting space,” he asserts.

In the future, de Silva anticipates that as the market matures, the company will see agencies/consultancies emerge that will use the platform’s build tools to develop branded virtual assistants for their clients, effectively becoming resellers for Amplify.ai.