Oracle sees increase in reliance on chatbots in India

As its patrons, including Bajaj Electricals Ltd, SRF Ltd, PwC India and Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd (IIFCO), seek to enrich user experience and improve productivity, Oracle Corp. is witnessing a rise in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled digital assistants or chatbots in India. For example, Bajaj Electricals is deploying ‘Bajaj Paddy’, an AI chatbot to transform its customer interactions. Meanwhile, IFFCO is helping farmers obtain fertilizers using an Oracle chatbot that delivers information related to HR, financials, sales, and inventory.

“Oracle is seeing a lot of interest in India across industry sectors like BFSI (banking, financial services & insurance), manufacturing, education, supply chain/logistics and telecom,” stated Suhas Uliyar, vice president of AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. According to industry estimates, the AI-based chatbot market size is expected to grow from US$ 2.6 billion in 2019 to US$ 9.4 billion by 2024 at CAGR of over 29%. Some other eminent companies that have been using chatbots include IBM Watson Assistant, SAP Conversational AI and Amazon Lex.

Oracle’s tryst with chatbots goes back to 2016 when its executive chairman Larry Ellison announced a new chatbot development platform to allow organizations build and run chatbots to process simple requests. The next major milestone was 2018, when it introduced its AI-enabled digital assistant and last year, it launched its AI voice assistant for the enterprise to help customers use voice commands to communicate with their enterprise applications.