Reliance Jio is poised to create more ripples in the artificial intelligence sector, with the acquisition of Haptik.

Mumbai-based Haptik, founded in 2013 by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev, deploys state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to perform NLP tasks. Haptik is funded by Times Internet and Kalaari Capital.

Their Conversational AI is built using more than 1 billion interactions, making their chatbots one of the best in the business with clients like Samsung, ICICI Bank and Tata Group, to name a few.

Reliance Jio, on the other hand, is already pouring resources into its AI team for building recommendation systems for its Jio TV and other services. With the acquisition of Haptik, it plans to go big in the natural language processing domain. NLP has garnered a lot of interest of late because of its innumerable applications ranging from speech assistants to sentimental analysis to recommendation engines.

Reliance is leaving no stone unturned as it already eyed e-commerce space. Reliance has been on a shopping spree this year as it already had acquired Mumbai-based hyperlocal delivery platform, Grab.

So far Indian e-commerce and online entertainment space has been dominated by the likes of Amazon and Netflix. Now Reliance plans to grab its own huge chunk of this lucrative market. Since Reliance doesn’t have to bother with the financial/funding hiccups, it is extremely smart of the Jio team to equip their AI arsenal with companies like Haptik. This acquisition means they now can avail the services of a proven talent pool with domain-specific knowledge and they don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

According to Inc42, Reliance and the founders of Haptik have closed on a deal of ₹200 crore and the transaction is expected to be completed by the end of March 2019. With this, Reliance’s plan to reign over India’s digital turf is one step closer now.