This empathetic AI startup's virtual avatars are improving sales experiences, powered by Intel Startup Program

The ever-changing customer expectations throughout the shopping journey are pushing retailers to think out of the box and elevate end-to-end customer experience with meaningful innovations. Focusing on unmet and often unspoken customer wants and delivering at pace is the need of the hour. So, how are retailers looking at these problems and building thoughtful experiences for customers?

Enter sales augmentation startup, DaveAI, that leverages patent pending empathetic AI technology to build digital personas for brands that can interact with customers. DaveAI avatars are able to strike conversations with customers in natural language, understand their preferences and even make personalised recommendations both via speech and text.

“DaveAI is a virtual sales avatar with the ability to mimic a human sales brain. The platform helps enterprises create digital twins of physical sales spaces with visually immersive product discovery experiences coupled with personalised sales conversations that help them sell more and sell better. For example, a virtual car showroom where cars can be discovered in 3D and an AI sales avatar, or an AI-powered micro bank branch on a kiosk with an AI banker avatar,” says Sriram P H, Co-founder and CEO, DaveAI.

“DaveAI’s vision is to democratise AI. While currently the platform is leveraged by enterprises to create sales experiences, the team is creating an ecosystem of partners and developers who with minimal AI know-how can create intelligent applications using the platform,” he adds.

Innovating for the rise of AI in retail customer experiences

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being deployed over traditional customer-led retail experiences. In 2021, 28 percent of retailers have deployed AI solutions, as compared to that of 4 percent in 2016.

“63 percent enterprises lack assistance in online discovery while 82 percent customers expect immediate responses to their queries while looking to buy a product or service, creating a $90 billion opportunity as we start this new paradigm in digital commerce for retail and BFSI,” says Sriram, talking about how customer product discovery for all categories are transitioning to be online first, and the significant difference between an AI-powered and salesperson assisted discovery.

“With DaveAI, we help bridge this gap with digital twins powered by AI avatars. Our patent pending platform powered by online learning genetic algorithms and deep neural networks blends speech and NLP, Computer Vision, 3D visualisation and an AI affinity engine to create unique experiences,” he adds.

Built with empathetic AI technology, DaveAI collects both product data and customer interaction data which it uses to create an affinity graph – nudging the customer to take the right action that benefits both customer as well as the brand. The platform powered by online learning genetic algorithms while being industry-agnostic, once deployed helps create an affinity graph specific to each enterprise.

What’s more, DaveAI’s online learning genetic algorithm can start with minimal data and build an affinity graph as the deployment scales. Thus, making every conversation personalised with recommendations and nudges that would help influence a sale.

“We work with market leaders in automobile, retail and BFSI to create avatar-enabled sales experiences both offline and online. From virtual stores to branch in a box, our customers have seen an average of 18 percent increase in lead qualification rates, 24 percent optimisation in product mix sold, and more than 30 percent increase in customer experience quotient.”

Meet the Dave AI team

DaveAI’s founding team came together while piloting a food tech idea before DaveAI. They bring complementary skill sets to the table – Ananthakrishnan Gopal, a PhD in Machine Learning and AI from KTH Stockholm, was an integral part of the team that built Samsung’s S-Voice. Sriram has worked with enterprises like Wipro, HCL, and IDC, a technology sales and consulting professional with experience in incubating new business units. Ashok Balasundaram launched the brand Safeguard in India which turned out to be a leading name in the home lifestyle industry.

All the founding team members aspired to be entrepreneurs while they were pursuing their careers elsewhere. From leveraging AI to solve complex real-life problems to building a fundamentally strong and scalable business, the founders met common ground with the idea of DaveAI.

How the Intel Startup Program powered DaveAI’s growth journey

“For DaveAI’s deployments at the edge such as AI Micro Branches or Virtual Avatar Concierge kiosks – delivering an optimal experience was a key consideration. The Intel Startup Program has helped us deploy our solution effectively at the edge. With complex AI workloads that require real-time processing, Intel technologies such as Intel Distribution of OpenVINO Toolkitvino, Intel vPro® Platform, and AI accelerators have helped improve the DaveAI experience at the edge in deployments such as AI Micro branches. DaveAI is also now a part of the Intel Partner Alliance and Intel Open Retail Initiative,” says Ananthakrishnan, the co-founder and ‘Primary Technology Ambassador’ at DaveAI, talking about DaveAI’s experience of being in the program.

“Being a part of the Intel Startup Program afforded us two key advantages – leveraging Intel’s R&D ecosystem to improve our products and their vast go-to-market presence. We would highly recommend the Intel Startup Program to any aspiring startup that has a strong edge or IoT story,” he adds.

The Intel Startup Program: enabling startups to scale their game-changing innovations

The Intel Startup Program is Intel India’s flagship program to engage with technology startups who have an IP or innovative solutions that have the potential to create impact on customers and align with Intel's focus areas. The program is at the forefront of engaging with India’s startup ecosystem through high-impact collaborations with the industry, academia, and government and runs multiple initiatives that are either vertically aligned or focused on emerging technologies.

It engages with startups that have a unique global or local value proposition to solve genuine customer problems, enabling them with domain and business expertise from the industry and mentorship from Intel.

For more details visit: https://www.intel.in/startup-program