Jio Haptik launches AI agents for small businesses in India

Jio Haptik’s SMB offering deploys intelligent WhatsApp and voice AI agent features to automate business processes  

Following up on its plans to focus on small businesses, Reliance’s Jio arm has announced enterprise-grade AI agents for small and medium businesses (SMBs) at an entry price of just ₹10,000. The cost per conversation ranges from ₹3 to ₹5 — roughly half of what a human agent would cost — while delivering 24/7 support and real-time scalability.

Provided under the Jio Haptik’s SMB offering, Interakt that is used by over 50,000 SMBs, the new capability deploys intelligent WhatsApp and voice AI agent features to automate business processes.

“Early adopters are already seeing up to 80 per cent of their repetitive customer support queries resolved automatically, along with a 20-25 per cent increase in lead-to-sale conversions,” said Ahshad Jussawalla, CEO of Haptik.

The AI agents meet enterprise-grade security and compliance standards, ensuring data privacy and reliability for any use case. They also understand context, respond conversationally, and act autonomously, handling support queries, bookings, follow-up calls and lead qualification without human intervention. The agents also have multilingual fluency across 22 Indian languages useful for critical in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

Jio Haptik envisions these agents to help small clinics without receptionists, educational institutes or real estate firms to guide prospects and book site visits in real time. This is also in line with the company’s earlier announcement during its Annual General Meeting, wherein the Chairman said that Jio’s next growth engine will come from simple, scalable platforms for MSMEs.

Significant savings

“For an entry price of ₹10,000 covering 2,000 AI-powered conversations, SMBs can achieve significant savings compared to employing human agents. The ROI comes from reduced manpower costs, around-the-clock customer support, faster query resolution, and the ability to scale seamlessly as the business grows. In many cases, businesses can save 50 per cent or more on customer support expenses, making the investment highly cost-effective,” the company spokesperson told businessline.

Companies likeRe’equil, Pantheon Development and Aster Hospitals (UAE) already use AI agents. Haptik continues to serve major enterprise clients, with brands such as Jio, Cred, Ola, PVR, Adani, Zepto, Unilever, HP, and Axis Max Life Insurance relying on its conversational AI solutions.

However, not all SMBs are convinced about the efficacy of the service. According to  Falguni Toprani, Founder, Faaya Gifting, there are two key aspects for a small business to consider when using new technology: low pricing and the impact on clients.

Organic conversations

“We work with handicraft workers, and while WhatsApp and such technology is a great enabler, our clients look for organic conversations, not chatbots. I’m still open to the idea of using new technology but for us small businesses, client conversations cannot be emotionless,” she said.

On the other hand, Amol Kulkarni, Director (research) at CUTS International, said, AI agents have a lot of potential to automate consumer facing tasks and reduce cost at SMB level. However, its success is dependent on a cost-benefit analysis, he said.

“It also depends on what is the uptake of this model at the customer side because SMBs will only be interested if they see that the price that they are paying for such an agent is returning them a good amount as an ROI,” he said, adding that AI agents also raise other concerns such as data protection and fraud management.

Published on September 3, 2025