Silicon Valley artificial intelligence (AI) startup Two Platforms (TWO) was backed with a $15 million investment from India's Jio Platforms in exchange for a 25% stake in the company on a fully diluted basis, according to a blog post from TWO on Wednesday (Feb. TWO, founded by Pranav Mistry in July, focuses on building interactive and immersive AI experiences. TWO is moving towards what it believes is the next chapter of AI following text and voice -- visual and interactive. A pioneer in the fields of robotics, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), Mistry was most recently the president and CEO of Samsung Technology and Advanced Research. See also: India's Quick Commerce Startup Dunzo Raises $240M Led by Reliance Jio, led by Mukesh Ambani, is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and is striving to transform digital services in India.

Reliance Jio has announced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Video Call Assistant (Bot) at the ongoing India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019. The new service aims to transform customer support and customer communication systems. According to the company, the assistant can be accessed via a 4G phone call, and customers don't need to install any app. The customer engagement video assistant solution has been developed by Jio in partnership with US-based company Radisys, a Reliance Industries Ltd subsidiary that provides open telecom solutions to service providers worldwide. The company says that with this new launch it will addressing the current customer pain points like endless call-hold music or seemingly never-ending IVR wait times.

Jio, the world's largest mobile data network service provider, and Guavus, a Thales company and the leader in AI-powered analytics for communications service providers, announced a partnership today centered on AI-driven analytics. Guavus' AI-based solutions will provide real-time customer experience analytics, predictive analytics to automate network troubleshooting, and key marketing insights to Jio. As a result, Jio will be able to offer superior service to its customers while addressing critical service operations with intelligent automation. Jio is one of the world's largest and fastest growing data service operators with more than 300 million subscribers. The Indian service provider, which has disrupted the market with its affordable data plans and unlimited calling benefits, has created a completely digital experience for its users ranging from data services on smartphones, to gigabit Internet at home, along with a portfolio of media offerings and IoT devices such as smart speakers and switches for the smart home.

Every second of every day, companies are inundated by massive volumes of data from diverse sources: sensor data, clickstream data, location data, social data, video data, and so forth. But the pace at which enterprises can leverage this data to sense and respond intelligently to customers lags well behind the pace at which data is exploding. Fortunately, advances in marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling enterprises to respond to the data challenge. We are at the threshold of a new era in marketing that I call sentient marketing - a vision for customer engagement that is powered by data, scaled with automation, and personalized through AI. Sentient marketing is a set of capabilities and processes that enable enterprises to create personalized customer engagement at scale and in real-time. Sentient marketing originates from the broader vision that my co-author Oliver Ratzesberger and I wrote about in our recent book, The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making.

Reliance has been going all out when it comes to AI and its implications for the future. Under the leadership of Akash Ambani, Reliance is making strides in AI this year. The young leader is hiring the brightest minds in the country to create an area of excellence that can impact the telecom market in a huge way. The team at Reliance is also looking at applications under machine learning and blockchain so that the company can benefit from its potential. The company is taking advantage of the multi-billion-dollar opportunity that lies in the AI space in India.