New Delhi, July 1 -- Locobuzz, an enterprise software company specialising in digital customer experience (CX) management, leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide brands with insights into customer behaviour, brand performance, and competitive intelligence across digital channels.
Vishal Agarawal, CEO and co-founder of Locobuzz, explained the company's cloud transformation journey with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and how the company leverages AI/ML and other digital technologies more efficiently to enable a stronger customer experience, streamlined interactions, personalised communication, and enhanced customer loyalty.
Locobuzz goes to the cloud
The Mumbai-headquartered company currently serves over 350 brands across telecom, aviation, automobile, FMCG, banking, and retail sectors. Agarwal explained, "We offer a unified customer experience management platform that monitors customer experiences across digital touch-points like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Google reviews, app store reviews, and email, enabling brands to deliver a seamless 'Netflix-like" experience regardless of the channel."
In that sense, Locobuzz helps brands understand customer emotions and sentiments related to their products and services and resolve customer queries and complaints (with a focus on reviews, recommendations, and feedback) in real-time.
Previously, the company used bare metal servers and monolithic code, which presented scaling challenges and required significant engineering effort. Agarawal said, "It was important for us to have a strong cloud strategy to manage the unprecedented scale of conversations, particularly surges related to specific topics such as aviation."
To streamline processes, the company collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support these fluctuating demands. The initial move to the cloud involved a "lift and shift" approach. "To fully leverage the cloud, we re-engineered their code to take advantage of cloud-native structures," he said.
The move to AWS also helped them scale their AI models. While the company initially used in-house models, scaling these models to support 200 languages proved prohibitively expensive.
Agarawal reiterated the global reach and linguistic diversity of their customer base. He emphasised that moving to AWS allowed Locobuzz to shift its focus from infrastructure maintenance to innovation. Amazon Bedrock provides easy access to various AI models, including anthropic models, which facilitates the development of customer-centric systems.
Exploring social conversations with AI
Agarawal cited the scale of their operations, collecting 10 million conversations daily. They use AI to annotate tweets and other conversations for emotion, purchase intent, toxicity, sentiment, and aspect. This annotation process, previously taking 5-6 seconds, now occurs in under one second (800-900 milliseconds) due to AWS. This speed allows them to enrich conversations with numerous attributes, providing agents and marketers with valuable real-time intelligence.
That said, Agarawal clarified that they have been leveraging AI for about 1.5 years across two tracks. The recent improvements in scale and speed are ongoing. The first track involves providing an AI copilot to enhance agent productivity, enabling them to handle multiple languages. The second track focuses on AI-driven analytics, insights, and intelligence, transitioning from a "T minus 1" (retrospective) approach to real-time analysis.
In March, the company launched CMOverse.ai, an AI-powered product to help the marketing community with daily, actionable insights in real time by analysing unstructured social media chatter across platforms. The new platform, Agarawal said, is expected to reduce the turnaround time to less than a minute from days, ranging from social media content performance, competition benchmarking or customer emotions, or even purchase intentions.
On how Locobuzz stays ahead of its competition, Agarawal asserted that Locobuzz leads in technology, particularly in the banking sector, where they serve 70% of clients, followed by telecom, aviation, automobile, FMCG, and retail sectors. He attributed this rapid pace of innovation to a strong technology stack and a strong partner ecosystem.
Locobuzz has grown by 50% year-on-year for the past five years and aims to achieve a revenue target of Rs.100 crore over the next 18 months, with plans to expand its CMOverse.ai tool across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the USA.
The vibrant AI startup ecosystem
AWS India and South Asia's Head of Startups, Kumara Raghavan, highlighted the maturation of the Indian startup ecosystem, fuelled by substantial investments in deeptech and Gen AI, supported by favourable tailwinds. He emphasises the need for skills in generative AI for both developers and business users, an area AWS is actively investing in.
AWS plans to invest $8.3 billion in cloud infrastructure in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region by 2025, expanding cloud computing capacity and having already trained over 5.9 million individuals in India on cloud skills since 2017.
Historically, funding in India has been concentrated in fintech, followed by ISVs and e-commerce, but recent trends show significant investment in deeptech and Gen AI, alongside e-commerce and quick commerce. Raghavan points to the increasing number of IPOs as evidence of the ecosystem's maturity and anticipates a wave of innovation, driven by continued investment.
Raghavan noted that startups are leveraging cloud and AI to move beyond creativity and efficiency, developing actionable solutions and enhancing customer experiences. AWS encourages innovation at scale, enabling startups to rapidly build, test, and deploy solutions, and supports generative AI startups through its global accelerator program.
Going forward, Locobuzz is transitioning to become "AI-first," expanding AI from a co-pilot for customer experience to predictive applications, such as predictive campaign analytics, and agentic use cases, like providing tailored data to different personas. Its products, like Newzverse, use AI to identify potential misinformation for brands.
The global social media analytics market is projected to grow from $17.72 billion in 2024 to $107.02 billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 25.2%. AI's entry into social listening and analytics is transforming the industry. The AI in the social media market is estimated to reach $5.66 billion by 2028.
Key global vendors include FeedHive, Buffer, Flick, Predis.ai, Publer, ContentStudio, Hootsuite, and StoryChief. The Indian market is also active with several other players, with Wizikey introducing an AI-powered news and social media monitoring solution, alongside other tech vendors like Frrole.ai, QuickMetrix, and Debut Infotech.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.