About Raj Koneru
Raj Koneru, CEO and founder of Kore.ai, discussed the company's work in conversational AI and digital user experience during an August 2020 interview on "Innovators with Jane King." He said Kore.ai, founded in 2014, focuses on helping enterprises transform interactions with customers, employees, and partners from UI-based to conversational experiences. Koneru noted that about 60 to 70 percent of customers use the technology to improve customer service for sectors like telecom, banking, and retail, automating tasks such as answering simple questions and providing balance information. He also described a partnership with Blue Prism, where Kore.ai's conversational AI platform integrates with Blue Prism's robotic process automation (RPA) to execute back-end processes.
Koneru stated that natural language processing (NLP) has improved significantly over the past five to seven years, with accuracy levels reaching 95 to 96 percent, which he said is 11 to 27 percent more accurate than traditional NLP models. He highlighted products like Quora, an employee assistant that can manage calendars and book meetings, and SmartAssist.ai, which automates phone calls to 800 numbers. Koneru said the technology enables companies to free workers from mundane tasks by automating routine interactions, and he emphasized that conversational experiences have become more natural and empathetic due to advances in NLP and sentiment analysis.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Raj Koneru's recent appearances.
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Transcript (16 segments)
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Interviewer0:11
Global 2000 companies now provides conversational AI and digital UX rich virtual assistants designed specifically for enterprises for a diverse range of use cases in various verticals. And with me is Raj Koneru, the CEO and founder of Kore.ai. So welcome, Raj, great to have you here today.
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Raj Koneru0:29
Thank you, Gene. Thanks.
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Interviewer0:32
Great. And Blue Prism has honored Kore.ai as a key partner at the Blue Prism World Virtual 2020. So congratulations. Tell me a little bit about that.
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Raj Koneru0:44
Thank you. Yeah, so Blue Prism is a very important partner that we work with with our customers. So they provide an RPA platform. The conversational AI virtual assistants engage with the particular bot, which in turn calls an RPA bot to execute something on the back end.
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Interviewer1:24
Well, and that's the key, right? The conversational experience, because a lot of times these bots, you know, they're a bot, but this is where your technology is a little different.
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Raj Koneru1:35
So conversational experiences have changed over the last five years, but with the advent of multiple NLP technologies to understand what a user is saying, and also the advent of sentiment analysis coming into play, the bot can be more empathetic. It can engage with you in context. The company back in 2014, our focus right from the beginning has been on transforming interactions that enterprises have with their customers, their employees, or their partners, suppliers, any type of stakeholder. Transform that from a UI-based interaction to a conversational experience. Conversational makes it more natural for a human being. I mean, it's easy for you to just speak and have the machine understand what you said. So really, the Amazon Alexa or Amazon Echo products and Google Assistant and Siri did that from a speech standpoint in the consumer world, but in the enterprise world, they have to be more precise in their interactions.
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Interviewer3:10
Okay, so you've kind of answered this a little bit, but what are some specific ways that your customers are using this technology?
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Raj Koneru3:19
I'd say about 60 to 70 percent of the customers focus on improving the experience for their customers. So typically it would be a telecom company, or a bank, or a retailer, or anybody who has a large consumer segment, if you will. So they have to deal with customer service in terms of post-sales service. So their desire is to have that experience be improved with a conversational AI.
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Interviewer4:10
Doing simple transactions. And what kind of feedback have you gotten from your customers about how satisfied they are with the product? Where does it seem to work particularly well?
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Raj Koneru4:21
Well, in general, there are multiple objectives. One is the customer experience, the other one is the automation of that experience. So generally speaking, some of our large customers who are banks or telecom companies are very happy with the automation rate that they're getting from this technology. The customer experience is also substantially improved because you can talk to a machine 24 hours a day.
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Interviewer4:50
So what are some of your key products or solutions?
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Raj Koneru5:11
We have a product called Quora, which is like an employee assistant. So you work for Nasdaq, you may or may not have a personal assistant to help you with your work, but Quora can be a personal assistant, albeit a digital assistant, much like you have Siri on your iPhone, for example. But Quora is an assistant who has access to your calendar, your email. It can book meetings for you, can join you into a meeting like this meeting on Zoom. I joined it by Quora joining me into the meeting. And Quora can be taught more things, so your assistant gets smarter over a period of time.
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Interviewer6:10
Now, this natural language processing technology, that is really the key to making this conversational. How has that improved would you say over the past five years, and where is it kind of going in the near term?
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Raj Koneru6:25
Well, NLP has been an area of AI for many, many decades, and it's really improved with the focus on AI over the last, let's say, five to seven years. We can deliver accuracy levels of about 95 to 96 percent, and it is generally about 11 to 27 percent more accurate than the traditional NLP models that have existed in the past.
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Interviewer6:49
Very interesting. It's amazing to watch this technology evolve over the past few years and how it's being applied.
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Raj Koneru7:12
Thank you so much, Raj, for coming and explaining Kore.ai. Great to see you. Look forward to updates.
