Reliance Industries launches first AI chatbot to assist shareholders

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is assisting investees in Indian stock markets for the first time. Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has launched the AI-powered chatbot to answer resident shareholders on the Rs531.25 billion Rights Issue, the largest in the history of India Inc.

Replies by the chatbot are in English, except the FAQ videos which are in English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and Bangla. All replies are a faithful replica of FAQs posted by lead managers to the issue on traditional channels.

The RIL chatbot resides on WhatsApp and is developed by Jio Platforms' subsidiary, Haptik Technologies.

As per lead managers, a "Hi" WhatsApp message to the 7977111111 Jio number activates the chatbot service. The relevant among 75 replies is triggered on what the user chooses among the intuitive questions.

Amid the Covid-19 induced lockdown, a chatbot augments services of brokers, sub-brokers and call centres on queries of generic nature, particularly from senior citizens already comfortable with WhatsApp.

The 75-plus replies include important dates, a calculator on rights entitlement and monies therefore to be paid in the initial instalment, the fractional entitlement if any, how to trade the rights entitlement (trades were allowed till Friday, May 29), how to apply, payment methodologies, how to access forms or access the lead managers and the helplines.

Like humans, a chatbot is trained, at scale and 24x7, to refine its responses as it fields more questions. RIL did not respond to the queries on traffic.