Artificial intelligence for real conversations

In a world of automated e-commerce, a couple of entrepreneurs realised that for many potential customers, there was still a lot of comfort in transacting with a bit of conversation, even if over text-based chat. Snehal Dhruve and Bineet Desai, who are brothers-in-law, and had already founded two start-ups: Being Baby, which dealt with baby products, and Go Hero, focussing on travel. Both ventures used conversational e-commerce using AI, or artificial intelligence. In 2016 they decided to put their expertise and learnings to work for other clients, and set up Superfan, a real-time automated customer engagement platform. "Globally, 3 billion users are on messaging apps," Mr. Dhruve says.