Good morning, guys. I hope there is no overdose of AI already. And when I was listening to, you know, standing there, the break music, I was wondering whether we are going to perform a dance performance or going to present on AI. So, well, here we are. Sorry to disappoint you guys. It's not going to be a dance performance. It's going to be yet another sort of new category talking about AI. You know, it's quite amazing to see the excitement in the room in the conference. I was there yesterday for a bit as well, and I was quite excited about it, particularly like the, you know, when Hersh called me and said, 'Why don't you come and, you know, showcase what you guys have been up to.' I was very specifically like the idea that a lot of the focus in the conference was on application, right? You know, there's been so much conversation about AI that we all have been doing it for now a couple of years, although the work, by the way, for many of us actually started many, many years ago, but it just picked up momentum when the generative AI came into the picture, right? But I'm not sure there is a lot that is being talked about on how are we actually going to use it, how is it actually going to change life, how is it going to impact the businesses, how is it going to sort of play out like in many aspects, right? And therefore, I think it's, you know, whoever thought about it, it's fantastic to see the focus bringing into, you know, what's going to happen, the real application of it, we are looking at the use cases, how are we going to just apply all this, you know, the power of technology in different categories. So we will talk about, you know, here's my colleague Ankit, who's the chief product officer. Between the two of us, we'll just in the next 20 minutes talk about two things essentially. One, how are we sort of seeing specific to the travel e-commerce context, and also further specific to the consumer journey, how are we looking at the future of travel, future of online buying experience on travel. And then second, we will talk about it that, you know, how are we trying to, as at MakeMyTrip, trying to solve for it. So let's just get going with this.
So I think it's important to just reflect back a little bit, you know, what has been the past for over two decades, and a lot of it, by the way, there is a significant overlap on online buying behavior from consumer side on not only specifically for travel but all the other categories as well. So you will be able to resonate well with what I'm just showing here in terms of just how were we solving the consumer journey problem in the internet era, right? For the last two decades, think about it, you know, when you go to any of the e-commerce portal and let's say specifically you go for a travel booking. Now, booking could be flight booking, could be bus booking, could be hotel booking, could be, you know, it might be a trip planning start and then eventually trying to stitch everything together, etc. All of it was being in the consumer journey solved as, you know, we are all the product managers and the technology guys doing a good job, including the design, all of them coming together trying to solve for taking consumer insights on one hand and giving the cues literally, right? You know, whether you use the filters or you use the, you know, ranking algo or you use the recommendation engine or you use, you know, another specific feature of late, so much of personalization element that has come into it, but all of it was mostly giving cues to the customers and the customers were picking up and doing the job themselves. So it was a self-service, right? You know, when in the past the world was completely offline, people would talk to people and do their bookings. With the internet, we moved everything to online, which was self-service. You know, I will give you, I'll try and solve behind the scene through the right algos all the problem and give you the cues, and you will then end up just going through the consumer journey and booking, and even just coming back and doing the, you know, looking for an after-sale service again. I will get you to do some work on the portal and you will get your resolution.
So customer was or is being in today's world being made to do a lot of stuff, right? But the moment, let's say, you know, any particular consumer has a different context or I change the context or I'm looking for a complex multi-city itinerary in the travel booking context or, you know, halfway through I want to just change the course, right? I'm going through the consumer journey because consumer journey is, you know, it's following a flow, but halfway through I want to just completely change it. None of that was being addressed appropriately or is being addressed appropriately today because then you have to start maybe ab initio, go back and then I start picking up your intention and then again I start to guide you, you know, through various features that we have on the consumer journey today.
How do we see it evolving tomorrow? I think AI is not necessarily an additional or incremental feature. AI is clearly not going to be just one more additional incremental thing that we will do as we've been doing it over the last two decades. AI is bringing the power to fundamentally do a paradigm shift. And don't miss, and this is the most important point that I'm going to share with you. It's ironic, as I just mentioned, offline world people used to talk, right? Interact, talking to the consumers, talking to whoever was assisting, you know, in our case it was traditional travel agent, and do their bookings, right? The internet changed the game to completely doing online self-service. 'Wish, click, go' in the desktop world used to be our byline. And then when the app world came in, it was all native experience on the mobile phone, right? What do you think we are going back to with AI? It's life full circle, guys. We are going to conversation again. The only difference is the human agent is getting replaced by digital agents. That's what is happening. But it's amazing at some level to see that it is actually completely full circle. Life is moving in terms of just serving the consumer online, right? We used to now everything is being talked about conversational. I want to interact with someone. Now that someone happens to be a digital agent, it doesn't matter. It happens to be a human voice. It's going to be a human voice at the end of the day, right? Because I have the flexibility to ask anything and everything that I want. I have the flexibility to start from wherever I want to start with. I have the flexibility to change the context whenever I want to change it. I will not necessarily be forced, right? In today's world, we were trying to almost condition the behavior in such a way that everybody got used to it and it worked beautifully. By the way, it is still working beautifully, and this new era is also going to be a massive consumer adoption journey as we've seen in the past, right? Whether it's a mobile era or a desktop era, this will also go through the same old journey. But just the paradigm shift that it is bringing is phenomenal because it is now saying that you can come with whatever need, complex need, change of context, whatever you want to do, multi-generational travel, etc., whatever you want to do, I will be able to cater to that because behind the scene there will be knowledge graph and artificial intelligence layer on top of it will be able to give you the right answer exactly the way you want, right? That is what is the paradigm shift that is going to happen, and let's see how it evolves.
How do I see this potential opportunity? At least in our category in India specifically, we all know the gap between India, the internet penetration in India, billion people, but we know how many people are actually doing online buying, depending upon which category that you look at it, anywhere from 75 million to 250 million. See the gap between internet penetration or the mobile penetration and the online buying, right? There's huge gap. And if you combine it with the macros, which is that you have to have money to do buying, the consumption story of India kicking in, etc., etc., at least 200 million people more are coming who, by the way, might not even experience the old way of buying online eventually, right? So that's a huge opportunity. And what are the other aspects in India which are very complex? Because one of the biggest barriers, by the way, in India for the next 200 million is what? Is language. Is because I'm not necessarily an English-speaking person and I'm not as savvy as the other people are on the current consumer journey, and therefore my preference is to fall back. I'm consuming content on internet for sure, but I'm not necessarily buying. I have the mobile device, that's not a problem anymore. There is no, you know, sort of smartphone versus non-smartphone that used to be the issue 5 years ago, 10 years ago. None of that exists. The infrastructure is not a problem. Bandwidth is not a problem. Device is not a problem. Now the barrier remains the language, and therefore the moment you add voice feature and bring in non-English language, you break that barrier. I think that's what's going to happen. And similarly, all the multiple complex sort of itinerary use cases, if you will, will get resolved because you can keep asking the question and I'll keep answering you and eventually bring you to a place where you can do whatever you want to book eventually. I think those are the big, biggest two barriers that it's going to potentially solve. All right. So what's our take? Our take is, as she was announcing it earlier, is Myra. I don't know how many of you have sort of used it. Some of you know we've seen interactions growing, and Ankit is going to talk about it, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but Myra is nothing but a conversational interface, guys. It's basically behind the scene there is a ton of work, as we all know, that happens, but from a consumer point of view, it's a very simple voice, text, English, non-English, text input, hybrid, whichever way you want to do it, whatever place that you want to start, you can do, and Myra should be able to answer as typically a human agent possibly can also answer you, right? So it'll be a true assistant for you. Now, will it completely shift from a consumer behavior standpoint to here to tomorrow? I'm not sure because a lot of people will still be used to, you know, the current way of doing it. And as we know even today, and I don't know in our category this is true, while India is predominantly a mobile-first market, but for our international travel use case, we still have 30% bookings happening on desktop. So it's not that that device has completely gone away. Imagine it's like 20 years of or 15 odd years of mobile penetration now, right? So we'll see how it evolves, but we are trying to solve through Myra all of those conversational cases through the conversation, all the complex cases, and sort of embracing the paradigm shift in MakeMyTrip. All right, I'm going to hand it over to Ankit now to show you the actual good stuff that he's done.
