Anjali Rattan, Chairperson, Rattan India noted that manufacturers Revolt electric motorcycles is amongst the very few women leaders in the automotive industry. In an interview with businessline, Rattan shared that AI has helped Revolt’s sales to grow multi-fold over the last few months. Edited excerpts: –
Would auto be leading revenue generator for you?
Our focus is actually now more into the technology businesses. When it comes to e-Commerce, there’s a lot that can happen. I know it’s nothing related to auto, but I just want to say that today’s youth just want online products and we are just in online. We are in apparel, we are in shoes, eye wear, music equipment and books. So the kind of growth we see every year is easy to account – 20-30 per cent – but, for me, most of the time is going in to Revolt because that needs a lot of attention and time. The market is opening up for EVs and now that Delhi has a new Chief Minister, I really see our Prime Minister Modi’s vision being fulfilled towards two things — towards making the Yamuna river clean and addressing the pollution problem. I think EV is the only choice for making Delhi pollution free
You said AI has been a focus area for Revolt and you have one of the best chatbots in the country. Which are the areas that your looking at leveraging AI for your growth and how do you plan to balance impact on jobs?
AI in terms of employment, it will certainly disrupt a lot of things. For example, we use a lot of call centres and our expenditure to a call centre is a certain amount…we can’t afford to have a 24-hour call centre…and all these call centres will go one day. My AI at workshop is talking to at least 150 customers a day instead of 50-60 earlier through the human call centre. And, all she is doing is updating the customers about their due warranty, service, health of the bike and fix up an appointment at the service centre…so the kind of interaction you see with AI, it will disrupt. But, with AI coming in, it also opens next market. Like right now, I’m on a recruiting spree for AI as well. Though people are not available in India, but my son is spearheading a project of AI. He was in the US and he was enthusiast about AI. Before he came in we still had a chatbot on our website which took care of three-four visitors a day, but now after the integration of AI, in just one day I started getting 1,500 interactions and it kept changing day by day and we are getting leads and these leads go to our AI call centre, which is converting into sales.
You already have AI-enabled motorcycle. What more can you do on these motorcycles?
Our next project will be on AI features for the bike. We had a tech team already, but we are learning on a daily basis. So, if you keep building something, it can really convert into quick sales and probably more awareness. We get 30,000-1,00,000 customers as traffic on a daily basis, so it’s important that how much time they are spending on the website. That’s the key thing and I think with AI’s help the kind of time spent on the website is important for us. So, expanding dealership is not a problem for Revolt at all (right now 200 and will go up to 500 by end of this calendar year). So my focus is right now is new product launches and right R&D in place.