Voice AI Is Helping Startups Unlock Trust, Conversions And Retention

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. In a discussion with Pramod Adiddam, CTO, Myntra and Ramakrishna R, the cofounder & CTO of dermatology healthtech Cure, Rajaram highlighted how his organisation is helping sectors like ecommerce and healthcare adopt voice AI at scale.

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

Rajaram said that today ecommerce giants like Meesho are using ElevenLabs’ voice agents and its capabilities to handle thousands of customer queries across languages. This has resulted in significantly improved resolution rates and cost optimisation. 

“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.

Touting voice AI’s use case in the healthcare sector, Ramakrishna of Cure said that today, patients are more comfortable sharing with AI than they were ever with a fellow human (doctor or any healthcare professional). “They can engage with AI without the fear of being judged. Besides, unlike humans, AI can give answers to a customer’s long list of queries without getting frustrated,” he said. 

Rajaram said that voice AI has also emerged as a key enabler in the healthcare space, especially 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.” 

Meanwhile, the experts also talked about how voice AI is helping businesses better understand not just where customers drop off, but why they disengage. They said that beyond analysing user intent, the tech is also helping organisations personalise discovery journeys and improve search relevance. With this, organisations have now started creating more contextual and conversion-focused customer experiences.

Industry executives also believe that voice interfaces have reduced cognitive load for users by eliminating the need for keyword-based searches and complex navigation flows. What’s driving this is India’s linguistic diversity and varying levels of digital literacy.

Meanwhile, as businesses rapidly adopt AI agents, industry leaders stressed that guardrails and governance remain critical. “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,” the panel concluded.

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 Bolna, Ringg and Gnani.ai are among the Indian startups building in this space that have recently attracted interest and capital from investors. 

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