Health care, generative AI among major bets, in talks with Indian telcos for OpenRAN: Rakuten India CEO

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Rakuten, the Japanese technology conglomerate has been scaling up its presence in India with bets across fintech, content streaming, analytics, healthcare and telecom, CEO Sunil Gopinath says, in a freewheeling chat with ET’s Subhrojit Mallick.

How has your business in India scaled up over time?
We started off primarily building a technology business from here that will support or cater to Rakuten’s businesses globally. We started with 100 employees and have scaled to 2000 now. First, we started with 24/7 support, then we did ecommerce, then we did ID management, which is similar to Aadhaar.

Rakuten itself has a billion users globally. So the identity management system that uniquely identifies people, solves for fraud detection, is highly secure and is able to give an unique identity for all of our users. In fact, we white labelled it for businesses it like FC Barcelona as well.

These were all built out of India.

Then we built our data science and AI business. A lot of our businesses needs deep AI to make recommendations. For example, Rakuten has a horse racing and horse betting business, so the AI team in India built the algorithms to actually recommend which horses to bet on, if you want to have a greater than 50% chance of winning.

That deep AI personalisation business was built from here. Then we added other AI technologies, like conversational AI for places like our call centers where we do not have to have hundreds of employees picking up calls, reducing significant operational calls. We also have our KYC technology which in fact has been licensed to a couple of banks in India.