How to achieve more by doing less

One of the best decisions we made at Cogno AI was to focus purely on the Financial Services (BFSI) domain.

Chatbots and Conversational AI are applicable to any kind of B2C business and many B2B businesses. So, the Product we made was sellable across multiple sectors - EdTech, Retail, e-commerce, Travel, Hospitality, Supply Chain, Entertainment, Healthcare, etc.

And we went and did that. We tried selling our Product to every sector, only to realize that it won't work that way. We learned that different industries operate differently. The cost of Customer support, the cost of Customer acquisition, the ease of deployment, and the compliance requirements - all are different for different industries. And so, the value of our Product was different for different industries.

After burning fingers multiple times with customers that asked for dirt low prices, we took a decision to focus purely on Financial Services. The domain is large and complex. The impact of any optimization is relatively high. The regulatory requirements are strict and the technology value is high.

That turned out to be the best decision we took. Today we work with all the leading Financial Institutions - ICICI Group, Kotak Group, HDFC Group, State Bank Group, Aditya Birla Group, Bajaj Group, and many others.

In fact, some people call us a FinTech and have invited me to FinTech forums. We definitely are not a FinTech. But anyway, that's the power of focus in one domain.

With the acquisition by Exotel, we have rapidly expanded to other sectors because of better reach, a stronger brand, and higher capital availability.

While we expand to other sectors, our principles remain the same - 'focus' and 'do less to do more'.