India’s digital landscape is understood to be seeing an upward trajectory, with over 650 million Indians using social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The report, published by Bain & Company titled ‘Win with Conversations’, written in collaboration with Meta, states that despite this widespread online presence, only about 30% of these users, roughly 200 million, engage in online shopping. Similarly, among the 30 million small businesses registered on the Udyam portal, 15%, or five million, sell online. This is believed to present an untapped market within India’s digital ecosystem.
The report further states that, currently, most apps cater to the reported 200 million digital users. However, app adoption beyond top categories such as social media, messaging, entertainment, UPI, and horizontal marketplaces remains limited. High-frequency app categories such as grocery, banking, and mobility have around 35 million monthly active users. Furthermore, 65% of savvy digital users find downloading apps frustrating and 40% abandon purchases if required to install new apps. For the next 450 million non-savvy digital users, app adoption is hindered by preferences for assisted shopping, limited phone storage, and navigation difficulties. This indicates that the app-led model may plateau, necessitating businesses to explore new methods for customer acquisition and engagement.
Enter chat-based assisted journeys, or conversational journeys, facilitated through highly engaged platforms such as social media and messaging apps. This approach is gaining traction with consumers starting to increasingly interact, informally, with businesses through these channels. Over 50% of surveyed users expressed a strong preference for conducting transactions through conversational journeys, especially for high-frequency tasks such as accessing bank statements, obtaining travel details, paying utility bills, and booking LPG cylinders.
However, scaling these conversational journeys poses challenges. Large enterprises have automated simple tasks using AI chatbots for service requests and order tracking, but complex or urgent interactions still require human intervention. For small businesses, resource constraints and lack of expertise in automation make them cautious about investing in such technologies until they achieve scale, relying instead on manual processes. Thus, there is seemingly a need for democratised, affordable, and intelligent AI solutions to implement end-to-end conversational journeys.
The advent of generative AI-powered assistants, and their integration with conversational platforms, promises a solution. These tools enable contextualised, human-like conversations with reasoning ability, multimodal support, and proficiency in vernacular languages. Investments by leading tech companies, in democratising access to generative AI platforms and fostering an ecosystem of offerings, are set to drive a new era of consumer engagement.
As generative AI continues to evolve, India’s digital engagement model is poised for a transformation. With over 650 million Indians on social media and messaging platforms and a preference for conversation-centric interactions, businesses are likely to shift towards designing more intuitive, multimodal, and human-like user journeys. This shift could unlock the potential within India’s digital funnel, engaging both savvy and non-savvy digital users in more ways.
India stands at a critical juncture, with the future of online shopping and selling already within reach. The implementation of conversational journeys powered by generative AI could redefine consumer engagement, creating personalised relationships at scale and ushering in a new era of digital interaction.