On Tuesday, Reliance Industries’ subsidiary Haptik said it had acquired Buzzo.ai, a Mumbai-based conversational commerce startup. Haptik is a conversational Artificial Intelligence firm that was acquired by Reliance Jio, the telecom unit of Reliance Industries, earlier this year.

Buzzo.ai, founded in 2016 by Anand Ramachandran and Vivek Arya, is a platform to create an expert advisor-like conversational shopping experience in any retail or e-commerce domain. After adding these capabilities, Haptik will be able to further enhance voice and chat commerce solutions for its customers globally.

“Over the last 18 months, we have been primarily focused on customer service AI solutions,” said Swapan Rajdev, CTO, Haptik. “But, given our mission to enable the paradigm shift from clicks to conversations, commerce was always the next frontier. The Buzzo.ai team has taken a very unique approach to solving this problem, which is totally different from what we have today. This is what attracted us to them” Rajdev said.

The company has processed over two billion interactions and works with brands like Samsung, Coca-Cola, and HDFC, among others.

Haptik will leverage the platform to power multilingual experiences for the next 500 million Indians that come online to shop, following the $100 million strategic transactions with Reliance Jio earlier this year, he said. With the world moving to voice-first experiences, Buzzo.ai enables an AI assistant that can understand a customer's need through natural conversation.

It then comes up with the most relevant recommendations that match specific inputs and explains why that may be the best choice. The idea is to simulate a real-life sales associate as closely as possible. “We have been working in the areas of NLP, text processing, semantic search and information retrieval for more than 10 years,” said Anand Ramachandran, co-founder of Buzzo.ai. His previous venture, Make sense Technologies, was a semantic search engine acquired by Naukri in 2013 for $1.5 million.

Khaitan & Co advised Reliance Industries subsidiary Jio Haptik Technologies Limited led by a team of Partner Vivek Sriram along with Associate Ekta Chandan and associate Ruturaj Jere; Partner Shailendra Bhandare and senior associate Sourav Dan assisted on the intellectual property aspects.

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