Deploying voice AI agents at scale: Tata Comms, TTBS target India’s SMBs
Follow UsTata Communications, TTBS join forces on agentic AI for SMBs
AI voice agents come with their own phone numbers
A "sachet model" meant to help India leapfrog in AI adoption
“The real value of AI, we believe, is hyper-personalizing services. It’s not replacing human beings,” said Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, MD & CEO of Tata Communications, in terms of what AI should really be doing.
SurveyHyper-personalization across India’s length and breadth starts with voice, according to Lakshminarayanan, and for good reason. Just walk into any kirana store, auto-parts dealer or any one of the crores of family-owned-and-run businesses in the country, and you’ll observe how most of them still run on phone calls. They don’t lack ambition, but access to cutting-edge tech.
“They don’t have the same capacity to hire the best salesperson, best serviceperson that bigger enterprises could do,” Lakshminarayanan explained. “Hence, we wanted to make it as simple as SMBs saying, look, I want to hire 10 salespeople in 10 different markets who can speak 10 different languages. That’s what we launched today.”
Tata Communications and Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) have forged a partnership to push a unified AI stack for India’s small and medium businesses – starting with AI voice agents that come with their own phone numbers. It runs on Tata Communications’ Commotion conversational AI platform and Vayu AI Cloud, while TTBS brings the voice infrastructure and its vast SMB reach.
Harjit Singh, MD of Tata Teleservices, framed it more bluntly. “SMEs, while at the top end, are really technologically inclined, but at the lower end, voice and people is what drives business,” he said.
Also read: Before AI takes over, fix the wiring: Tata Communications’ infrastructure warning
“It’s not just AI and the stack that we talk about. It’s our inherent strengths on the core connectivity side,” Harjit emphasised. “AI then becomes actually a layer on top of it. That really is the promise of this collaboration.”
Their goal is to make a dent on the AI adoption curve in India that goes well beyond customer calls. It’s akin to the internet, which opened up new markets for small businesses, pointed out Ganesh Lakshminaraynanan.
“Imagine a small manufacturer in Punjab or a retailer in Tamil Nadu could serve multiple different states in the country in multiple different languages as if they have their own sales and service folks in every state. That would make them a national chain as opposed to a small SMB,” he said.
And just like India leapfrogged tech – from 4G to UPI – so will history repeat itself with AI, according to Lakshminarayanan. His analogy? A sachet model, the idea that took shampoo to rural India, “which can be absorbed by every retailer, every SMB.”
So who needs whom more in this handshake between Tata Communications and TTBS? “Both of us, actually,” Ganesh said. “If we can make it work in the Indian market, in different languages, different states, and it’s validated by SMBs, it must be simple enough to use, simple enough to build, and simple enough to collect money, then it’s a huge validation of our product which we can take globally as well.”
Harjit summed it up best, “There’s no reason why each and everyone of India’s SMBs not be operating at a larger scale.” If AI voice agents can indeed give a small manufacturer in Punjab or Kerala the reach of a national brand, India’s 60 million-plus SMBs may well become the country’s biggest AI story yet.
Also read: Sovereign infra and sovereign AI not the same, says Tata Communications’ Andrew Winney
