How chatbots are changing the digital Indian

3 minutes, 39 seconds read

Published on May 7, 2019

Updated on Aug 4, 2020

Chatbots have come a long way – from a hyped technology under the AI umbrella to a direct-to-consumer product, that has incessantly penetrated the tech-enabled services we use today. While the adoption of chatbots is still in its infancy, the proliferation and mushroomed effect it has had so far is remarkable. Most of us, are perhaps not even aware of how seamless this transition has been – since many now interact with several bots almost everyday!

“Nearly 1 in 4 customers have interacted with a brand via chatbots in the past 12 months, according to a Salesforce study published in late 2018.”

Chatbots have permeated the Indian Landscape

In India, like most countries, both businesses and consumers rely on telephone and email as the most preferred channels to conduct business, yet they are also the slowest for quick resolution. The average time-to-resolution using email interactions was reported at 39 minutes while in India it was reported at 2 hours 17 minutes. In addition, global data shows only 49% of problems are solved on the first interaction.

Most people in India (59%) however, still prefer to talk to an actual person for customer service needs. While this is true, customer service experts believe this trend will reverse in the near term. A majority (61%) of “the Digital Indian” or tech-savvy users see the benefits for chatbots in customer service.

How Chatbots are changing the Digital Indian

AI is already providing benefits to e-commerce businesses in India by improving decision making & recommendation systems using machine learning algorithms, while simplifying the product search journey for the customer. When done well, 43% feel chatbots can be almost as good as interacting with a human, revealed a study titled “Efficacy of AI” conducted by digital marketing solutions firm iCubesWire.

Bots among us

Conversant bots have augmented our ability to quickly access information, services, and support – even taking over some of our day-to-day tasks. The passage deeply signifies an unmistakable shift in our digital communication patterns. Here are some well-known instances of chatbots in use, around us.

GoHero

This AI-enabled personal travel agent assists customers in booking flights, hotels, taxis, buses etc. It integrates with messaging apps to use sophisticated algorithms to understand traveller’s preferences and is available across nine platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram & Skype.

Aisha

A voice assistant (similar to Siri, Google Assistant) by Micromax performs daily tasks like initiating a google search, fetching movie reviews, making calls, reading news articles, view stalk market details and more. The Handset Speech Assistant with AI integrated into its backend is gently becoming an accepted, must-have tool for the average consumer.

Lawbot

A customer facing AI application that automates specific legal tasks that would otherwise require extensive legal research. It analyses and reviews legal documents, like contracts or agreements, and identify problems in them in seconds – saving customers valuable time and money.

FitCircle

This health and fitness chatbot offers its users personalised weight-loss workouts, yoga guides and nutrition guides. The AI empowered fitness companion, called ‘Zi’, helps the Digital Indian achieve fitness goals through custom-fit workouts and diets.

Oheyo

Formerly Prepathon, Oheyo helps students (the digital Indian of the future) prepare for exams, by connecting them to experts anywhere. It messages students the subject of the day, answers queries and additionally sends across motivational messages. They also provide a video Q&A platform through which students can find a lot of their queries answered and archived for later use.

Skedool

Skedool’s ‘Alex’ is a B2B smart assistant, that excels at automating repetitive everyday tasks for business executives, sales and recruiting professionals. It handles B2B scheduling activities and calendar management. The AI assistant uses natural language processing and machine learning supervised by humans to enable customers to communicate with the service via email just as they might with a human assistant.

Hitee

A one-of-a-kind chatbot with voice, video, and multilingual features. It’s custom NLP-powered workflow builder solves a number of purposes like operations, HR, IT, logistics, and more.

While these are just a few highlighted examples, there are many more in use across the country, each with a unique use case and problem it is trying to solve. For example, Aapke Sarkar – a chatbot (developed by Haptik) launched by the Maharashtra Govt. for people to access information regarding public services in the state, in Hindi or Marathi; or the bot introduced by IRCTC called ‘AskDisha’ (Digital Interaction to Seek Help Anytime) that helps railway passengers access customer services support in multiple regional languages and even voice-enabled chat.

Bots and The Digital Indian

The Indian chatbot industry, although still in its nascent form, is a $3.1B market, according to analysts. The market, in the coming years will evolve to a point where interactive and intuitive AI will become the bare standard for customer service across a variety of sectors.

AI in Insurance will value at $36B by 2026. Chatbots will occupy 40% of overall deployment, predominantly within customer service roles.
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Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

How chatbots are changing the digital Indian

Chatbots have permeated the Indian Landscape