“Building ElectionTracker in under four weeks has opened up a new area of opportunity,” says Nair, who now expects to hawk the tool in markets globally. He says their success with ElectionTracker has helped them understand the way the AI technology platform can be adapted for political and corporate campaigns.
“All the products we have designed for political parties, such as SuperCaller, can now be offered to companies,” says Pandey, who is looking to sell the product to companies such as Tata Sky Ltd, the direct-to-home television service provider, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank. “Election work is cyclical but pre-recorded voice calls to subscribers and borrowers offer a more steady revenue model,” says Pandey, who is looking to extend his portfolio beyond the political spectrum for the first time this year.
Similarly, executives at Germinait Solutions say the principles of artificial intelligence can be used for various corporate projects too. “All our products have a little AI in them, be it bots (software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet) that intelligently bid in online auctions, role-allocation software that allocates call centre workers to projects based on their skills or AI programmes that make sense of written text,” says Nair, who has leveraged this platform to build two other products—an analysis of employee engagement in which around 200 companies participated and a tool to manage brand reputation for companies.
Companies are also building partnerships to tap new business opportunities. Viplav Communications, for example, helped process the voter list for Google and Janaagraha. “They used Viplav’s voter databases to make a voter search engine that was hosted on a Google site,” says Pandey.
The road ahead
Some players say that staying in the political and e-governance space will also offer business opportunities because politicians will need to get more personal with voters who are now seeking a direct connect with them. “An MP cannot expect to connect with voters once every five years if we are to energize democracy, we need to help build systems that make the system more effective,” says Tewari, who argues that there is scope for revenue models in this space too. “For the next four-five years, however, we expect to stay with the not-for-profit model.”
Most of these sites are built around the premise that political engagement should not be a once-in-five-years event—the idea is to build a continuous engagement between the political system and citizens, something that is definitely easier to do through digital tools for communication and interaction.
“Ever since (the US President) Barack Obama used the Internet to win an election, it has done more for broadband adoption in the US than any law,” says Jaitly.
“To build products and services for the political system, companies must understand the nuances of the system,” cautions Gowda.
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