CleverTap launches new CleverAI to drive growth

Customer engagement platform CleverTap on Thursday launched the next version of CleverAI, its AI product, and said it expects it to become a significant driver of the company's growth.

The new version is built around what CleverTap calls 'Live 1:1 Personalization'. The company says most personalisation tools work off a customer's past behaviour, which is often outdated by the time a brand acts on it. CleverAI claims to combine that history with what a user is doing at the moment to decide what each customer should see next.

"CleverAI is not an incremental product bet for us," co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Sunil Thomas said. He said the company had spent more than a decade building the data and engagement infrastructure this required.


Co-founder and chief marketing officer (CMO) Anand Jain said much of what the industry markets as real-time is not. "If the action was decided beforehand, executing it a millisecond after a trigger does not make the decision real-time," he said.

The product runs on two pieces of technology - TesseractDB, a datastore that holds live and historical data on each customer, and a decisioning engine that uses the data to pick an action based on goals and limits the marketer sets. The result of each action is fed back into the next decision.

CleverTap also said CleverAI is designed to focus on uplift rather than propensity by identifying which users will convert because of an intervention, and which intervention will work.

The company shared results from pilots with three clients. Axis Bank reduced drop-off in its conversion funnel by 27%. At Eatigo, a restaurant booking platform in Southeast Asia, diners who got a personalised recommendation converted at twice the rate, according to a controlled experiment. Vietnamese OTT platform VieON saw engagement rise 10%, checkout actions go up 12% and push notification click-through rates double.

CleverTap did not say how long the pilots ran or the number of users they covered.

The platform also includes explainability features, frequency controls, user-level inspection and data clean rooms for companies working with sensitive data.

CleverTap counts Jio, Paytm, Zomato, IKEA and Domino's among its clients, and is backed by Accel, Peak XV Partners, Tiger Global, CDPQ and 360 One.