VERSA, the conversational artificial intelligence announced it is expanding to India.

Founded by Australian agency, it strives to capitalize on demanding conversational strategy and design in a market comprising a population of 1.3 plus billion people, and an installed base of almost a billion mobile phones.

As a 50/50 joint venture, between VERSA India (VERSA - Melbourne headquartered with US operations based out of Seattle) and Mogae Consultants, which is owned by Sandeep and Tanya Goyal.

A well-known advertising and media veteran, Dr. Sandeep Goyal is a former president of Rediffusion, ex-group CEO of Zee Telefilms and former founder chairman of Dentsu India, and Tanya Goyal is a six-term member of the Governing Council of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI).

Tanya Goyal will hold VERSA India’s chair-position and industry veteran Ashish Dabral  will serve as the CEO of the Indian venture.

VERSA Asia business director, Adi Sharma will head the business development based out of Delhi.

Sunando Bannerji, formerly of WPP’s GroupM and Star TV, will head revenue out of Mumbai.

VERSA India will utilize VERSA Australia resources. The United States and Singapore will also contribute for enhancement of sales, and P&L capabilities.

“The expansion would create opportunities for the Australian business to build a significant Indian operation and fill a gap for conversational AI and voice expertise in the multilingual country where low cost smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa, and mobile Google Assistants are already very popular,” VERSA CEO Kath Blackham said.

He added, “Many tech companies in India have the experience to build platforms such as websites, chatbots and apps but lack expertise in conversational strategy and design. We will leverage our established relationships with Amazon, Microsoft and Google to improve customer experience and make lives better by giving the Indian community access to information they traditionally would not have had. This partnership will give our Australian operation access to a much bigger market, including the ability to trial projects at scale. We look forward to working with Mogae’s experienced team to support our global clients and partners.”

Tanya Goyal said that the venture reversed the traditional outsourcing paradigm, alongside oursourcing tech development and specialist consulting services to Australia and the United States. She said, “Yet, we will have enough local capabilities to cater to client requirements in the domain of voice ‘skills’ and more. VERSA India will focus on creating conversational experiences that help streamline customer experience teams and developing solutions such as contact centre AI bots, websites and apps that have a foundation of conversational AI built in. We will be working closely with big brands in India to help them realise the potential of conversational AI and voice and how they can best infuse the technology within their organisation. It is an exciting time for voice and conversational AI in India, and we look forward to helping established and well-known Indian brands embrace these emerging technologies for the Indian market.”

VERSA’s India expansion is followed by the successful launch into the United States’ market just a year back.

VERSA USA president Russ Whitman said, “Since we launched VERSA into the US market, we have been experiencing great success working with well-known organisations and brands including American Red Cross and Pampers, both of which recognise the power of conversational AI as part of their overall marketing strategies. Our expansion into India is testament to VERSA’s exceptional capabilities and we couldn’t be more excited about the partnership with the Mogae."

Launched post Diwali, it will commercially be available from early 2021.