The dawn of AI agents promises a shift in how enterprises build and deploy applications. By now, we’ve seen big tech and SaaS giants going all-in on agents. However, other companies have been quietly working on providing AI solutions for enterprises and have also rolled out no-code AI agents. Case in point: Kore.ai.
The eleven-year-old Orlando-based Kore.ai, founded by Raj Koneru, has its second major hub in Hyderabad, which includes an R&D centre. The company helps businesses create AI chatbots and virtual assistants, and its customers span banking, healthcare, and airlines.
Kore.ai is now enabling companies to build and deploy AI agents without extensive coding knowledge.
Conversational AI to AI Agents
“We provide a platform which is like a set of platform core capabilities, services, and a lot of no-code tools for builders as well,” said Prasanna Arikala, CTO of Kore.ai, in an exclusive interaction with AIM.
The platform has evolved from conversational AI to a comprehensive agent development ecosystem. It now includes the ability to build agents, create tools for agents to interact with, and develop sophisticated RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines for multi-agent applications.
“If you have a system of record, you can build pretty much any application with agents. The application development and deployment paradigm is significantly changing, and enterprises have quickly realised that,” explained Arikala, emphasising the paradigm operational shift of enterprises.
On the database front, in an earlier interaction with AIM, Redis VP of AI product management Manvinder Singh confirmed that Kore.ai uses Redis as a data platform to power their virtual AI agents.
Kore.ai’s AI agents are making significant impacts across various industries. The company boasts about 450 customers, including some of the world’s largest banks and healthcare companies.
One of its customers, a major wealth management company, deploys AI agents for its 60,000 employees. Arikala explained how these agents have dramatically reduced the time required for tasks such as creating customer proposals.
“Previously, it would take weeks for them to compile, collect all the information in accordance with the enterprise guidelines, corroborate, build, templatise, and deliver a report. Now, they just upload the data, and it gives the outcome within minutes,” he said.
Arikala claims that the platform’s versatility allows it to be applied across various domains, including customer service, process automation, and enterprise work management.
“One out of the top five banks in the US deploy AI agents for their customer service,” Arikala said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pfizer leveraged Kore.ai’s AI agent platform to deploy a multilingual support system in 17 languages globally. This system assisted healthcare professionals in efficiently accessing critical vaccination-related information.
Challenges Remain
Despite the platform’s success, Kore.ai acknowledges the challenges of deploying AI agents at scale, particularly the governance part when the number of agents keeps growing.
Arikala emphasised the need for oversight in agent development, questioning who built them, how they are being used, and whether they comply with enterprise guidelines and SOPs. Unlike workflows, agents don’t follow a deterministic approach, making safeguards essential.
To address these challenges, Kore.ai is developing solutions, such as a built-in agent evaluation service, as part of its platform. It allows for periodic assessments of AI agents, generating comprehensive reports on their performance and behaviour.
Kore.ai envisions a future where AI agents become ubiquitous in enterprises. “In the future, the enterprise will be all about a network of AI agents, and there will be centralised orchestrators that allow for a hub for the internet sorts, “ predicts Arikala.
As confirmed by Arikala, Kore.ai has been witnessing growth rates of 100% year-over-year for the past three years and continued significant growth for the current fiscal year. With this growth rate and IPO plans in the coming years, it seems that Kore.ai is well-positioned to lead the AI agent revolution.
