India’s small and medium businesses (SMBs), with a sharper focus on completing business tasks, connecting with enterprise data and delivering measurable revenue gains.
On July 28, Tata Communications announced a partnership with Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) to jointly offer a unified AI platform targeting India’s SMB ecosystem. The companies are combining Tata Communications’ AI infrastructure and voice platform with TTBS’ distribution network to offer modular AI agents that businesses can deploy without managing models, GPUs or token costs.
“What we are bringing to market is not enterprise technology in the same way to be bought by SMB,” Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, MD & CEO of Tata Communications, told The Economic Times in an interview.
“It is like, I am hiring a digital worker as if I will hire any other worker. If we can simplify that procurement of technology, I think SMBs will adopt.”
Not another IVR
Lakshminarayanan repeatedly distanced the offering from traditional IVR systems and even from the first generation of AI call-centre bots.
“If we made the voice agent sound like a bot, you would go for nine,” he said, referring to the familiar “press 9 to speak to a human executive” experience.
“What you saw today is the lowest latency, highest word accuracy. Somebody who sounds like a human, who can handle interruption.” The bigger architectural difference, he said, lies underneath.
“The solution we demonstrated today is not voice-to-text-to-voice. It’s voice-to-voice, which is a big difference when it comes to voice AI communication.”
More importantly, Tata Communications is positioning these AI agents as standalone workers with dedicated phone numbers rather than automated menus.
“You’re just calling someone who’s going to say, ‘I’m so-and-so and I happen to be an AI agent. How can I help you?’ The concept is different from you thinking that I’m going to replace a call-centre agent with an AI.”
Asked whether Tata Communications was effectively productising Google Duplex, Lakshminarayanan said the difference lay in connecting the agent with business systems and measurable outcomes.
“I think it connects to enterprise data. It gets stuff done and it’s connected to outcome of the company and it’s linked to the top line growth of a service,” he said.
The voice agent is powered by Tata Communications’ conversational AI platform Commotion and hosted on the company’s Vayu AI Cloud. TTBS will provide the underlying voice infrastructure and distribute the product through its network of channel partners and its Do Big Cloud Hub platform.
The broader ambition is to use the same infrastructure to offer other types of AI agents to SMBs.
“Tomorrow, there could be multiple AI agents who are not voice based. It could be a bookkeeping agent. It could be an e-commerce agent. It could be an accounting agent,” Lakshminarayanan said.
Selling outcomes, not AI
However, the biggest challenge may not be the underlying technology, but convincing price-sensitive small businesses to pay for it.
Lakshminarayanan said the company intentionally designed the product around business outcomes rather than AI infrastructure. The company says early deployments are already showing measurable business impact.
According to Lakshminarayanan, an automotive customer saw “a 30% increase in lead conversion” after AI agents qualified leads before routing the highest-quality prospects to human sales teams.
In another deployment, Lakshminarayanan claimed that inbound bookings increased by 20% because AI agents answered calls that previously went unanswered.
“The real value for SMBs is about top-line growth, not just cost savings,” he said.
“That is why we are going for a subscription model, not exposing them to GPU cost and token economics and things like that. You pay as per use. You pay for your ROI,” Lakshminarayanan added.
Building the platform business
The partnership also fits into Tata Communications’ broader strategy of increasing the share of platform-led revenues.
The company has spent the past few years investing in what Lakshminarayanan calls its “digital fabric”, spanning subsea connectivity, cloud infrastructure, AI platforms and software assets such as Commotion.
“We have been investing in digital fabric for three to four years,” he said. “We see this as a big leverage to improve our profitability and improve our ROCE (Return on Capital Employed).”
Rather than disclosing revenue targets for the AI business, he said the longer-term objective is to increase revenue from software platforms including Commotion and ThreadSpan while using India’s multilingual environment as a proving ground before expanding globally.
“If we could make it work in the Indian market with all the complexities of multiple languages and scale, we could take it easily global through similar partnerships across the globe.”
The company believes that, unlike earlier automation waves focused on replacing labour, AI’s biggest opportunity lies in helping small businesses operate like much larger organisations.
“You can actually be running a global enterprise being a small SMB… AI has the ability to scale an SMB enterprise as if they are a global company,” Lakshminarayanan said.
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