Voice AI Is Critical To Capture Emotional Context In Ecommerce: ElevenLabs’ Karthik Rajaram

Voice AI has emerged as a key enabler for consumer-facing sectors in bridging the gap between customer intent and action. Today, organisations have started to see tangible improvement in business outcomes, thanks to seamless customer interactions with AI. 

This is precisely what the India head of ElevenLabs, Karthik Rajaram, shed light on at Inc42’s AI Summit 2026 during a panel discussion with Pramod Adiddam, CTO of Myntra and Ramakrishna R, cofounder & CTO of healthtech startup Cure.

Rajaram highlighted how his organisation is helping sectors like ecommerce and healthcare adopt voice AI at scale.

“We also work with Cars24, which has deployed about 400 agents for lead qualification and assisted sales. They’ve seen a 35% improvement in sales conversion,” he added.

Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs specialises in developing natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning.

In India, the startup works with ecommerce giants like Meesho, which leverages voice AI to handle thousands of customer queries across languages. This has resulted in significantly improved resolution rates and cost optimisation.

Rajaram said that voice AI has also emerged as a key enabler in many segments, it is especially useful when it comes to capturing intent. “Today, voice AI tech has become so capable that it can understand the emotional context through the entire flow and respond accordingly.” 

Specifically about the healthcare sector, Cure’s Ramakrishna chimed in saying voice AI is helping businesses better understand not just where customers drop off, but why they disengage. Beyond analysing user intent, conversational AI is also helping organisations personalise discovery journeys and improve search relevance. This enables businesses to create more contextual and conversion-focused customer experiences.

The Indian AI market is projected to become a $126 Bn opportunity by 2030 and is expected to contribute up to $1.7 Tn to the country’s GDP by 2035. Voice AI startups like CoRover, Bolna, Ringg and Gnani.ai are among the Indian companies building in this space that have recently raised funds and made inroads as the voice AI opportunity has grown in the past year.

Even as the panel was bullish on voice AI, Ramakrishna stressed that as businesses rapidly adopt AI agents, it will be critical to bring in guardrails and governance. “As companies build systems, they need to build with bounded autonomy, where AI handles routine queries independently but escalates complex or high-risk situations to human experts to ensure reliability, compliance and customer trust,” he concluded. 

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