Aditya Birla Capital brings down generative AI operating costs by 40% with Azure

SimpliFi-ing financial services with generative AI

Aditya Birla Capital Limited, one of India’s leading diversified financial services companies, imagines a world where everything finance is made as simple as ABCD. Through its various subsidiaries and joint venture businesses, it provides a comprehensive suite of financial solutions across loans, investments, insurance, and payments to serve the diverse needs of customers across their life cycles. Powered by more than 55,000 employees, the businesses of Aditya Birla Capital have a nationwide reach with more than 1,470 branches and 200,000 agents and channel partners, along with several bank partners—and these numbers keep growing. It’s not only a customer-first company but a proudly digital-first company, achieving several industry breakthroughs and committing to continuous innovation using emerging and evolving technologies like AI, language models, and chatbots.

Aditya Birla Capital formulated a “One ABC, One P&L” strategy to focus on quality and profitable growth driven by data and technology. The three pillars of this strategic approach are “One Customer, One Experience, One Team.” An unwavering commitment to customer-centricity, prudent risk management, and an omnichannel architecture for distribution form the bedrock of this strategy, which gives customers the complete flexibility to interact seamlessly across mobile app, website, branches, and virtual engagement channels. It incorporated Aditya Birla Capital Digital (ABCD) Limited to build the omnichannel direct-to-consumer mobile app ABCD, which would help the company acquire customers digitally at scale and meet their financial needs through a unified yet comprehensive digital platform.

To take the ABCD app to the next level and further streamline its business model, Aditya Birla Capital sought to introduce hands-on, self-management features through a financial personal digital assistant that combines unified intelligent search and AI. The result is SimpliFi, a customer-facing generative AI chatbot built on the Microsoft Azure purpose-built stack for AI applications including Azure OpenAI Service, cloud-scale databases, and app services. SimpliFi completely transforms how customers access and understand Aditya Birla Capital’s financial services. Through customer research and insights, the company found that its target group of customers 25 to 35 years old appreciated do-it-yourself options for exploring financial solutions independently without having to depend on traditional agents and other methods of engagement. With SimpliFi, Aditya Birla Capital addressed that need using Azure OpenAI to help customers easily navigate and understand its full range of financial solutions and have their queries addressed instantly.

“In our continuous effort to deepen customer engagement, we’re working on leveraging an agentic framework where our bot now proactively leads conversations to understand a customer’s unique needs and then guides them to discover tailored financial solutions, thus creating a more engaging and seamless experience for the customer,” says Pankaj Gadgil, MD and CEO, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Limited, and Head, Digital Platforms and Payments Strategy, Aditya Birla Capital.

In addition to answering customer questions and providing product information across every business line, SimpliFi predicts follow-up actions and displays clickable cards suggesting next steps for customers to take. For example, customers might be shown the top-performing mutual funds based on their search queries or receive a link to buy a mutual fund. When appropriate, SimpliFi seamlessly transitions the conversation to a live representative to close the purchase. This added convenience and personalization of the customer experience has already driven increased engagement and lead generation.

Moving fast to achieve minimum latency, maximum scale, and high concurrency

As Aditya Birla Capital evaluated specific Azure AI infrastructure elements for SimpliFi, it sought minimum latency with maximum scale and a high degree of concurrency. It reduced the amount of latency from 30 seconds to less than a second by anchoring to Azure AI Search and other Azure AI services, as well as Azure API Management. The company can now dynamically scale to handle heavy workloads and further increase concurrency with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). "AKS has significantly reduced our development cycles,” says Sameer Jadhav, Executive Vice President for Innovation, Digital Products, and Partnerships at Aditya Birla Capital. “The automated scaling and built-in monitoring tools ensure that our applications run smoothly, freeing up our developers to innovate and improve our products." Aditya Birla Capital also caches responses so that common and repetitive query responses load faster using Azure Cosmos DB. This is extremely critical when dealing with a customer-facing application.

As it grows with Azure Cosmos DB, Aditya Birla Capital stores and accesses semi-structured data in a highly secure way. Used to enhance the SimpliFi experience, this data includes customers’ conversation history, voice transcriptions, and website data scraped on a recurring basis. The company is working with Microsoft to evolve the data’s use to encompass the signed-in user journey, where this history will be merged with customers’ existing system context to provide them with richer responses every time they use the chatbot. "With Azure Cosmos DB, we are able to store customers’ interaction history and provide the SimpliFi bot with the necessary context for personalization of nudges on subsequent logins and better engagement, thereby increasing our lead generation,” adds Jadhav. "And with Azure Cosmos DB’s autoscale features, our application can seamlessly scale to accommodate our projected customer growth ambitions."

To ensure SimpliFi provides the most accurate responses to Aditya Birla Capital customers now and into the future, the company recently added Azure Database for MySQL to its stack to maintain data refreshed daily, such as the net asset value of mutual funds, which is loaded via scheduled jobs at a set time each day.

Accelerated by the launch of the SimpliFi bot, the ABCD app has supported more than 2.5 million users to date. The company plans to scale up to 30 million customers and up to 300 concurrent users within the next three years. In the event of any excess traffic on its provisioned throughput units, Aditya Birla Capital can seamlessly augment the solution with a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) setup and still handle the large concurrency. For this, its team uses an Azure API Management gateway to intelligently spill overflow traffic to the next available regional PAYG deployment of Azure OpenAI Service.

Unifying cloud capabilities and business functions alike

SimpliFi is embedded in Aditya Birla Capital’s ABCD app, providing a simple, single, 360-degree customer experience. The ABCD app received recognition as the Best in Class User Friendly Interface Fintech App at the 2024 Global Fintech Fest Awards. SimpliFi, however, is only one AI-based use case. The company’s success with the Azure AI platform and the engagement it’s seen with SimpliFi opened the door for Aditya Birla Capital to use the same products to reach across the organization and build more targeted generative AI copilots. These include its Service Assist, Audit Assist, and Marketing Assist platforms.

The company’s Marketing Assist platform helps marketing teams build personalized marketing collateral in seconds instead of days working with agencies, while Audit Assist cuts audit checklist generation from hours to minutes, and Service Assist improves employee productivity in its contact centers by 20%. Its generative AI chatbot also handles about 40% of the inbound calls to the contact center in Aditya Birla Capital’s life insurance business, alleviating pressure on agents.

Unlocking value through cost consolidation and AI-based role play

Within Aditya Birla Capital, the entire approach for AI and innovation using Azure OpenAI Service has been to develop enterprise-level applications that cut across and then connect its nine different business lines. “We have built a common platform for generative AI using Azure OpenAI,” says Gadgil. “This platform is being leveraged across all our lines of business, leading to accelerated time to market, higher productivity, and more than 40% in cost reductions.”

Aditya Birla Capital is also pioneering and championing a Microsoft text-to-speech avatar service to train sales employees and let them practice sales pitches using AI—a move that aligns with the company’s “One ABC, One P&L” philosophy. Leadership believes that even if an employee is dedicated to working in mutual funds or another line of business, they should know about life insurance, lending, and every other product line to provide well-rounded customer service. “Using avatars to build sales capabilities and simulate real-life customer handling experiences for sales teams also enhances frontline sales productivity and staff’s ability to handle customers’ objections,” explains Gadgil. “This two-way role play is going to revolutionize the whole sales function in the financial services sector and unlock revenue from digital customer acquisitions at scale.”

Scaling beyond demand like never before

Less than a year after its launch, SimpliFi has evolved drastically from an informational interface to a platform for enriched customer journeys, with contextual responses, proactive nudges, and other emerging functionalities. “Especially when it comes to generative AI, we’ve been the first movers to leverage many cutting-edge solutions that are available on Azure,” says Gadgil.

Aditya Birla Capital’s confidence moving forward is based on the knowledge that if it suddenly gets more traffic, its platforms have the necessary stability, speed, and scalability using Azure app, data, and AI services to support and serve every financial need of every customer across their different life cycles.