Bharti Airtel has said it is betting big on its digital segments and has scaled up headcount across its digital verticals by 150 per cent.

“This massive talent ramp up is rooted in Airtel’s strategy of in-sourcing a large part of its digital processes in order to build products with much sharper customer focus,” a company spokesperson told ET.

The digital focus comes at a time when rivals Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) and Vodafone Idea (Vi) are also looking at AI, machine learning, IoT based solutions as the growth drivers. Bharti Airtel is in fact in the process of rejigging its organisational structure to ensure more focus on its digital operations with a view to monetizing them in the future.

 “Over half of Airtel’s India business today flows through its digital channels as customers and partners look for frictionless and intuitive experiences on the go,” said the operator.

The ramp up in its digital portfolio is taking place across hierarchies in the second largest telco. Some of these senior hires include Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer, who joined Airtel after having spent close to two decades in the US with tech companies; and Pradipt Kapoor, Chief Information Officer who joined from Merck UK.

Today, there are about 1600 people working on these digital services and candidates for these profiles are recruited from Silicon Valley, engineering colleges and even NASA.

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Teams of engineers and data scientists (including ex-NASA talent) at Airtel X Labs have built AI enabled chat bots that will talk to customers in over 12 Indian languages and solve their service request, the telco with about 340 million subscribers added.

“Airtel Xlabs is the largest technology startup in India. Our engineering teams have been building using a lot of open source stack, solving problems ranging from distributed computing, high performance mobile apps, voice bot, understanding customer behaviour, building recommendation systems.,” said Head, Digital Customer Experience Engineering for Airtel, Sunil Goyal.

Airtel has built in-house platforms like Wynk Music and Airtel Xstream or Airtel Thanks.

“ We recently launched Airtel IQ – a first of its kind cloud communications suite for India and we have just gotten started,” said senior VP and Head of Product at Airtel Business, Sundi Raman,.