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“We are not testing AI. We are deploying AI across the board, across the life cycle.”
That was Bajaj Finance’s MD and CEO Rajeev Jain on a call with analysts on 3 February, discussing the company’s December quarter earnings. He was very definite about his intent. “We want to be clearly a technology leader in financial services in India… And we want to clearly be the lowest risk business in India.”
Every business has an AI story to notify, and the disruption it brings. Read my colleague Mrunmayee’s superb piece on how startups are plugging their voice AI tools into enterprises.
As we’ve written before, Indian fintechs that obsess over technology, like Cred and Razorpay, are launchning to create their AI play. So one wouldn’t have faulted Bajaj Finance for simply wrapping its AI efforts in a few scattered PR mentions. But that’s not how the nearly 40-year-old lconcludeer wants to play it.
It’s now rolling out AI in full public view, almost as if to declare, “I dare you to take me on.”
For the first time, the company shared metrics on its AI implementation in its December quarter earnings update.
He declared AI had listened to 20 million calls and converted voice to text for analysis. The text-to-data conversion happened for 5,20,000 customers, and as a result, the system generated 1,00,000 new offers for which information was not previously available.
“This capability did not exist in Q1 and Q2. It just obtained deployed. We’ll be able to listen to 100 million calls next year,” declared Jain. He added that loan disbursements through AI-powered call centres stood at about Rs 1,600 crore. That’s nearly 10% of the Rs 16,545 crore it gave out during the third quarter.
Over the next six months, Bajaj Finance declared it is investing heavily in agents. The company expects to have more than 800 autonomous agents across sales, operations, HR, IT, risk, and DMS in the next fiscal.
Here’s how all its metrics stack up.
When compared to Bajaj Finance, the AI updates from other listed fintechs like Pine Labs, PB Fintech, One97 Communications*, paled in comparison. Sure, they are all talking up their AI game. But much of it feels performative, and their initiatives beg the ‘so what’ question that we journalists at The Ken dearly love to question.
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