The future is AI- ready Forbes India. Abhinav (left) and Raghav Aggarwal see a future where people can’t distinguish whether they are talking to fellow humans or to machines. Image: Mexy Xavier. Abhinav Aggarwal fondly recounts a favourite bit of fiction about a set of scientists who built the first intelligent computer decades ago. The first question they asked the machine was: ‘Is there a God?’ The reply: ‘There is now.’ The lanky, bespectacled twenty- six- year- old flashes a toothy grin as he delivers the punch line. It isn’t difficult to fathom why this tale tickles Abhinav’s funny bone. He is, after all, in the business of creating God- like machines as CEO of Fluid AI, a startup that draws on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer businesses intuitive user experiences and data analytics.

Started in 2. 01. Raghav (2. 9)—Abhinav’s elder brother who is managing director—Fluid AI wants to reshape how machines talk to humans. The combination of recent advances in AI and related areas such as speech and image recognition, and the availability of virtually infinite amounts of computing power and storage has heralded the advent of a world in which machines will take over many human functions (see boxes). Forbes India. Take the case of RBL Bank.

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Walk into their Nepean Sea Road branch in Mumbai and instead of being greeted by a receptionist, a smart- screen says, “Hello, welcome”, as it detects a customer using its motion sensors. Applying for a loan, assessing credit card options or getting the latest rate on various deposits: All these tasks can be done without touching the screen. Gesture with the hand, hover over a virtual button and it’s done. All the while, with a camera mounted on the kiosk, Fluid AI’s software is working away, studying your face to gauge your level of interest. If it senses that you’re keen on a home loan, it’ll suggest options and plans suited to you. Talking back to the screen is also possible.

As is taking a selfie. Gesture over a button on the screen, smile, say cheese, and voila, you have a picture of yourself in the bank.

Call a toll- free number and get the photograph Whats. App- ed to yourself. This is to engage millennials,” says Abhinav, as he picks up a Rubik’s cube lying on the conference table of his Mumbai- based office and plays with it absentmindedly. Watch The Invitation Megavideo.

A customer uses Fluid AI’s AI- powered, gesture- recognition technology at an RBL Bank branch. Image: Mexy Xavier. In the coming months, RBL plans to deploy Fluid AI’s experience- based, smart- screen solutions across other metros in India. Besides engaging customers, the solution also gathers the data gleaned from them, crunches it and presents the analysis to RBL. The bank in turn is better able to woo customers with products most tailored to their preferences.

What started off as an endeavour to build a “hard- core techie product” by two self- taught, code- loving brothers is today a 5. Headquartered in Mumbai, with outposts in Charlotte, North Carolina in the US, the Netherlands and Mauritius, Fluid AI counts heavyweight financial institutions such as Barclays Plc in Britain, Emirates NBD in the Middle East, and one of the largest banks in the US, which the Indian venture isn’t allowed to name, as clients. Other customers include Axis Bank, Vodafone India, chip maker Intel, IT consulting companies Accenture and Capgemini, automakers Rolls Royce, Toyota and Hero Group, as well as Intelenet, a large back- office outsourcing company. If that doesn’t put them in the ranks of the big boys, consider this: The founders pitched just one part of their tech, involving the gesture- driven solution, in a televised Shark Tank- like show called The Vault that aired on television in October last year, but walked away from a funding deal that valued that part of their business at around Rs 1.

Today, the Aggarwal brothers claim to be receiving acquisition offers for the entire company in the $1. Rs 6. 45 crore) valuation range.(Left to right) Sig. Tuple co- founders Apurv Anand, who serves as CTO; Tathagato Rai Dastidar, the chief scientific officer; and Rohit Kumar Pandey, CEO started the company in 2. Back in 2. 00. 8 when Abhinav was still in school and Raghav in college, the two developed an online learning management system for schools and colleges. It was their first entrepreneurial venture. At that time, storing software and data “on premises”, meaning on a computer server located on the premises of whoever used the software and data, was the norm. Even Amazon Web Services, today the world’s largest cloud services vendor, was a nascent business then.

Yet, the brothers built their learning management system, under the name Tru. Watch The Colossus Of Destiny: A Melvins Tale Online (2017) there. Tech, as a cloud- based platform. It allowed students, teachers and parents to access relevant information, including attendance, progress and class notes, from any location.

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The software proved popular with 3. B2. B platform (business- to- business because, typically, the educational institution would buy the system and the students would use it for free). It gave us good profits,” smiles Abhinav, holding on to his now- completed Rubik’s cube. As the boys juggled this work alongside their studies, they realised the software they had built was easily replicable. It was 2. 01. 2 and a chance holiday to New York alerted them to the ensuing Tech. Crunch Disrupt Hackathon—billed the world’s largest coding competition. They signed up for it, coded for 2.

The competition gave them a boost of confidence. They realised they had the capabilities to “build more advanced technologies” which would provide “differentiated services”, explains Abhinav. That’s when we started building AI- based solutions.”Over the next couple of years they immersed themselves in developing the software and started building Fluid AI, under the parent company Tru. Tech. All through, the learning management platform generated healthy profits for them, which the boys invested into Fluid AI. It was like our first funding revenue,” Abhinav says. Today too, the platform chugs along, under the same parent company as Fluid AI, with a 9. As Fluid AI started scaling and customers started taking note, Raghav got admitted into the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM- A), and Abhinav into the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad.

They enrolled in their respective programmes but decided to drop out after a month. They had amassed plenty of business experience, having started out so young, and several of their B- school teachers told them that it didn’t make sense to spend two years pursuing an MBA, and then returning to the same business. Plus, in technology, two years is a long time,” quips Raghav, adjusting his spectacles, “So we dropped out and decided to pursue Fluid AI full time.”Atul Jalan, founder & CEO, Manthan. Fluid AI offers customers two distinct solutions. One is on the experience side, where customers like RBL Bank install a smart- screen based kiosk to better engage and interact with customers. Computer vision built into the technology recognises customers, speaks to them, hears them and understands their gestures. The tech can do a lot more than what RBL is currently using: For instance, the screen prompts the customer to display an identity card.

On doing so, the machine reads the required data off that, creates a passport- size photo and matches the photo in the ID with the customer’s face in real time. With that you can open a bank account in 3.

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