Indian companies are willing to go for continuous expenditure on AI-based solution for customer care, Albert Nel, Senior Vice President (APAC & JAPAN), Genesys, has said. In an interview with businessline, on the sidelines of Xperience, Nel also gave details about strategy for multilingual mechanism to serve various regions of the company.
The March 2026 study report by Genesys and Dun & Bradstreet found that 72% of BFSI leaders say customers now expect instant resolution, however, there are issues about operational readiness. What about other sectors?
We track, and we have got our State of CX (Consumer Experience) report that covers other industries as well, but that was specifically for BFSI. We still see that as one of the largest and most critical industries, where customer experience is important.
The report came out with an alarming number. Customers’ expectations for resolution time is extremely high, and that is where a lot of the banks, especially in India, is struggling in terms of how they meet those expectations. Because India as a country is seeing the impact of AI, as we found through a different report. AI will significantly change how customer service will be delivered, and how companies, especially in a highly regulated space like BFSI, are going to adapt to customer experience while still complying to the regulations as well
How India is contributing to your global business?
India is a very important country for us. It is a top 10 growth country for us. We are continuing to make significant amount of investment in India, not just in people, but also in infrastructure, where we have now Genesys Cloud running in Mumbai to serve our India customers.
Our growth in India last year was over 70 per cent, and we continue to see that growth and that expectation going forward. India has traditionally had a big service economy And in the technology space, where BPOs plays a huge part, we see that sector also growing considerably.
Are Indian companies willing to spend on recurring basis for a AI driven solution?
Yes, and there is adoption. One of the things that we are seeing in India as well is that there’s still a very big demand for one frame but there’s now a move to cloud, which we see a lot of, especially in highly regulated industries. They are now willing to make that move and see the opportunity, the strength and innovation that comes with it.
And now the next step is AI and what the impact of AI is. But I think you’re going to get to a point where AI is required to meet the expectations of your customers. It is not a question of if they’re going to start adopting AI, but when they are going to adopt it.
India, being diversified market, has consumers with multiple languages. Can you share new AI-based solutions, ready to be offered to Indian companies?
We support Hindi, but we also partner with companies that we integrate into the Genesys Cloud platform which supports a wider range of languages in India. We have Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and various other languages through our partners. We have our App Foundry marketplace, and a lot of those partners are part of the marketplace.
Your study report released in July said 94 per cent of surveyed consumers value efficiency as much as empathy, and the inability to reach a human agent remains their top frustration. This brings a debate on AI based virtual agent vs human agent. What solution do you have for this?
That is where it’s when we start looking at virtual agents, and especially the Agentic virtual agents, when you start looking at, for me, that is not putting an agent down and that the virtual agent will handle all queries coming in. It’s really understanding specific processes that you will automate through Agentic. If I call in because I want to change my password. I’ll be fine to speak to an AI agent to help me because it’s you don’t need empathy there. It’s something quick. The quicker you can get it done, the better. But then you get to hire human for complex, more critical. And that’s where we feel human will continue to play an important part. And that is why it is not a AI or human, it is the 2 together. In the same report, they also said that the expectation from customers now is that they’re happy to speak to an AI if there’s an opportunity at any point to exit and speak to a human. It also allows then human agents to focus on more complex, more empathy focused engagements or customer focus.
