India needs an AI creation metric to weigh progress: Kore.ai founder
India needs to start measuring how much artificial intelligence it creates, not just how many data centres it builds or how much AI it consumes, Raj Koneru, founder and CEO of Kore.ai, said on Tuesday.
“If you can enable the masses of India to create using AI, this will become the biggest creation engine in the world,” he told ET at the sidelines of the Impact AI Summit.
Government investment in training, from schools to working professionals, is the single most important lever India could pull right now, Koneru said.
The country’s real edge is its human talent, and that talent is currently under-deployed as builders and creators of AI platforms. Consumption, he argued, would take care of itself.
“Create a metric called AI creation. Measure it every day, every week, every month,” he said.
On what agentic AI means in practice, Koneru said, “A couple of years ago, even understanding the intent of a user was a challenge. Today, you can give a complex instruction, and the AI can create a plan and execute it step by step.”
The most significant shift, he said, is reasoning. AI systems can now apply business rules and world knowledge to reach judgments, much like a human would, as long as the right guardrails are in place.
On why so many enterprise AI projects fail at the pilot stage, he said the problem is not the technology but the absence of prioritisation. “Because models are available to everybody, people try everything. And what they try may not produce ROI.”
He said use cases like customer service automation – which Kore.ai is into – deliver clear returns. Others, particularly in employee productivity, require more careful selection. Enterprises are slowly learning to identify which handful of use cases are worth pursuing.
On investor sentiment, Koneru disregarded the idea of an AI bubble. Investor appetite, he said, remains strong but has grown more discerning. “Money is now flowing toward platforms that show real enterprise adoption,” he said.
He drew a direct comparison to early scepticism around the internet. “Naysayers are going to be proven wrong again. Over the next ten to twenty years, this will look like an under-investment, if anything.”
Kore.ai has raised multiple rounds, including a $150-million strategic growth investment led by FTV Capital with participation from Nvidia and others, and most recently from AllianceBernstein to accelerate global expansion and product innovation.
Koneru noted that the company was born in India and had operated here for 12 years, though it built its early credibility in the US and European markets before expanding back.
Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, Kore.ai has partnered with tech giants such as Microsoft and AWS to scale AI-enabled enterprise workflows and redefine customer and employee experiences across industries. It also works with voice technology companies like ElevenLabs to handle the country’s multilingual demands. It handles over 200 million customer interactions annually in India alone, across large banks, telecoms and retailers.
Looking ahead, Koneru believes the next frontier is deeply personal. “There is an agent just for you, which has access to the data you have access to, with a context of how you do things.”
That shift, from generic enterprise tools to agents built around individual context, is where he sees the most meaningful transformation coming.
“If you can enable the masses of India to create using AI, this will become the biggest creation engine in the world,” he told ET at the sidelines of the Impact AI Summit.
Government investment in training, from schools to working professionals, is the single most important lever India could pull right now, Koneru said.
The country’s real edge is its human talent, and that talent is currently under-deployed as builders and creators of AI platforms. Consumption, he argued, would take care of itself.
“Create a metric called AI creation. Measure it every day, every week, every month,” he said.
On what agentic AI means in practice, Koneru said, “A couple of years ago, even understanding the intent of a user was a challenge. Today, you can give a complex instruction, and the AI can create a plan and execute it step by step.”
The most significant shift, he said, is reasoning. AI systems can now apply business rules and world knowledge to reach judgments, much like a human would, as long as the right guardrails are in place.
On why so many enterprise AI projects fail at the pilot stage, he said the problem is not the technology but the absence of prioritisation. “Because models are available to everybody, people try everything. And what they try may not produce ROI.”
He said use cases like customer service automation – which Kore.ai is into – deliver clear returns. Others, particularly in employee productivity, require more careful selection. Enterprises are slowly learning to identify which handful of use cases are worth pursuing.
On investor sentiment, Koneru disregarded the idea of an AI bubble. Investor appetite, he said, remains strong but has grown more discerning. “Money is now flowing toward platforms that show real enterprise adoption,” he said.
He drew a direct comparison to early scepticism around the internet. “Naysayers are going to be proven wrong again. Over the next ten to twenty years, this will look like an under-investment, if anything.”
Kore.ai has raised multiple rounds, including a $150-million strategic growth investment led by FTV Capital with participation from Nvidia and others, and most recently from AllianceBernstein to accelerate global expansion and product innovation.
Koneru noted that the company was born in India and had operated here for 12 years, though it built its early credibility in the US and European markets before expanding back.
Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, Kore.ai has partnered with tech giants such as Microsoft and AWS to scale AI-enabled enterprise workflows and redefine customer and employee experiences across industries. It also works with voice technology companies like ElevenLabs to handle the country’s multilingual demands. It handles over 200 million customer interactions annually in India alone, across large banks, telecoms and retailers.
Looking ahead, Koneru believes the next frontier is deeply personal. “There is an agent just for you, which has access to the data you have access to, with a context of how you do things.”
That shift, from generic enterprise tools to agents built around individual context, is where he sees the most meaningful transformation coming.
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