Harappa Education – part of upGrad – will launch an artificial intelligence assistant called thriveBOT on Thursday.
“It’s an AI-powered chatbot finetuned for English, Hindi and Hinglish, and the aim is to upgrade the learning experience of those who come onto Thriversity, our online skills library,” Pramath Raj Sinha, co-founder & chairman, Harappa Education, told FE. “It will be initially available for select Thriversity cohorts, with access opened to other cohorts soon.”
Essentially, thriveBOT is a virtual teaching assistant that addresses challenges learners face while studying online, such as accessing real-time explanations and examples, or concepts, frameworks and principles pertaining to a particular course. “It’s a personalised training assistant at no additional cost,” added Mayank Kumar, co-founder & MD, upGrad. “With the proliferation and high adoption of chatbots, this is no longer science fiction.”
UpGrad had acquired Harappa Education for Rs 300 crore in 2022.
Sinha claimed that in addition to instantaneous support, thriveBOT can distil concepts and videos into easily consumable information, encourage critical thinking by addressing in-depth questions posed by learners, and because it’s finetuned for Hinglish (Hindi plus English), it’s accessible to a wide range of learners.
Founded in 2018 by Shreyasi Singh and Sinha (founding dean of ISB and one of the founders of Ashoka University), Harappa Education provides ‘thrive skills’. “These are a set of cognitive, behavioural and social skills that enable a person to ‘thrive’ at the workplace, at every stage of their career,” Sinha said. “In five years, more than 800,000 paid learners have come on to the Harappa platform.”
Some thrive skills include teamwork, public speaking, effective communication, taking ownership, efficient prioritisation, credibility, resilience, crisis management, etc. “Both corporates and HR departments have started to realise that these thrive skills are as important as technical skills, possibly more,” Sinha said.
Harappa Education has three broad business lines. The first is enterprise business, where it goes to MNCs and other corporates and offers courses for their employees. The second is training individuals and small teams. The third is training managers. It also runs the Accelerated Management Programme, a kind of an online MBA for working professionals that can be completed in six months.
