NEW DELHI: Voice AI start-up Vernacular.ai has appointed two new members to its leadership team – Gangadhar Kodandaram has joined as chief revenue officer while Ankit Jain will take over as vice president for product management.
Both Kodandaram and Jain will work directly with Vernacular.ai CEO & co-founder Sourabh Gupta to grow the business and spearhead global expansion starting with the South East Asian markets.
“I am delighted to welcome Gangadhar and Ankit to join Vernacular.ai’s growing team of talented individuals,” shared Gupta. “They are experienced leaders committed to growing the company and delivering value in terms of expanding our customer-base and enhancing our products to suit our clients’ needs. As we continue to make headway towards becoming the world’s most immersive Voice AI platform, we are glad to have new leaders like Gangadhar and Ankit back this dream, bringing to the table their multifunctional expertise in emerging technologies.”
Prior to joining Vernacular.ai, Kodandaram was with Microsoft India building the healthcare vertical and also ran government business for South India driving AI, Cloud and Digital Transformation. With over 17 years of experience in sales and strategic partnerships, he is also an advisor to start-ups and serves as honourable director at Make-A-Wish foundation. At Vernacular.ai, he will be responsible for building a world-class sales team and execute on the sales and marketing priorities in addition to spearheading global expansion plans into APAC, EMEA and US geographies.
Gangadhar commented, “Voice tech is becoming an important weapon in the CX arsenal for B2C organisations focused on delivering a great customer experience, and we are solving this very critical problem for our customers. I am extremely excited by the traction we are seeing across industries and geographies and looking forward to working with partners and customers to build Vernacular.ai into a global brand and the one to reckon with in the Voice AI space. Opportunities are immense, and we need to ride the wave and execute at great speed.”
Meanwhile, Jain will lead a team of product managers and specialists, to drive concept launches and further fine-tune and enhance Vernacular.ai’s product roadmap, while stimulating innovation within the team. An alumnus from Amazon India early product team, he possesses 10 years’ experience in product management and has also been a part of multiple 0 to 1 Enterprise SaaS journeys in Asia and the US.
Jain said, “Cracking voice is 100 times more difficult than cracking chat. The end-user compares their experience of talking to a voice bot with their experience of talking to a human agent, so the bar for CX is very high. Our platform strategy will revolve around improving our ability to handle human-like conversations in multiple Indian and global languages ,where we are building ground-up datasets and capabilities for better speech to text, text to speech and Intent Capture Engine to offer world class CX to end-customers. Furthermore, we are going to have vertical centers of excellence with deep solutions around industries like banking and insurance to cater to their unique needs.”
